American universities are failing to disclose millions of dollars in funding from China, a report released Wednesday found.
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) has received $87.5 million from China since 2013 in addition to a separately reported $59.4 million from Hong Kong and $57.5 million from Taiwan, while the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) accepted $162.8 from foreign sources, at least $32.3 million of which is from China, within the same time frame, according to a new report from OpenTheBooks.
While accepting the funds, both universities demonstrated “significant failures in the reporting of foreign funding,” according to a 2024 House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party investigation, which also predicted there to be “likely hundreds of millions, if not billions in total” of Chinese dollars flowing into American universities that are not reported.
Both universities held a partnership with the Chinese Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI), a program through Tsinghua University that has campuses in Shenzhen, China and near both U.S. universities, OpenTheBooks found.