How accurate are the claims? Examining the letter urging Price to shut down DKU

Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) and Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) sent a letter to President Vincent Price May 14 requesting Duke formally end its joint venture with Wuhan University — Duke Kunshan University.

The Chronicle has reviewed several of the claims made and assessed their accuracy through hearing from DKU students and faculty and conducting outside research.

Claim: “Wuhan University is not an ordinary academic institution. It is a direct extension of the Chinese military and intelligence apparatus.” 

This is mostly true, but the phrasing “direct extension” implies an explicit connection with the People’s Liberation Army — the military of the Chinese Communist Party and the People’s Republic of China — when none was found. It is also important to note the distinction between Wuhan University and DKU.

Wuhan University is jointly supervised by China’s Ministry of Education and the State Administration of Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense (SASTIND). The Ministry of Education sets educational standards and provides funding to the majority of universities in the country. SASTIND is a civilian agency that administers and regulates national defense-related science, technology and industry, and ensures the Chinese military has adequate defense-related provisions, including nuclear power and weapons. In China, at least 68 universities are supervised in some part by SASTIND.

This relationship reflects a policy goal of the People’s Republic of China to promote “military-civilian integration” at prestigious universities like Wuhan University. In particular, the policy encourages the transfer of scientific and technological innovations from the civilian sphere to the military. 

As an affiliate of SASTIND, Wuhan University is known for its defense research. It has four defense-related laboratories and specializes in five research areas with the potential to be applied to national defense, such as computer science, electro-magnetic engineering and cybersecurity. 

However, specialization in defense-related research does not make it a “direct extension” of the PLA. 

The Chronicle spoke with DKU students who pointed out that DKU’s military training is downplayed and less rigorous than those held at other universities in China. 

Yueqi Dou, a DKU rising senior from mainland China, disputed the letter’s claim that students are trained in “hand-to-hand combat and shooting drills.” She recalled that no weapons were involved when she underwent the training. She added that it primarily consisted of physical training that “was more about team building and building morality, instead of actually preparing you well for going to the battlefield.”

According to DKU students, the military training at DKU is less than two weeks, shorter than that at other Chinese universities that typically lasts from two weeks to a month.

DKU rising senior Krishna Thiagarajan, an international student from the U.S., said that DKU holds this mandatory training on campus as opposed to in military facilities. Thiagarajan noted that this shows that DKU is intentionally minimizing the presence of the training and “downplaying [its] importance relative to the way other Chinese universities are required to hold [it].”

The letter also features a DKU webpage displaying a photo of students saluting a flag. Moolenaar and Walberg claimed that this is the CCP flag when in fact it is the PRC flag. 

The law “requiring ideological training” refers to the CCP’s Patriotic Education Act in 2023, which entrusted state organs and local departments the responsibility of carrying out “patriotic education.” Such education entails key teachings of communist leaders, the CCP’s history and Chinese cultural heritage.

At DKU, this is fulfilled through a requirement for only mainland Chinese students to take courses classified under “Chinese Society and Culture.” These 2-credit classes include CHSC 101: Chinese Humanistic Spirit and Institutions, CHSC 102: Social Changes in China, CHSC 104: Trends and Policies and CHSC 105: An Introduction to the Basic Principles of Marxism. 

Claim: “DKU is deeply integrated with Wuhan University’s research and personnel pipeline.” 

This claim is exaggerated. 

Academic freedom and unrestricted access to online information are “two of the foundational principles that Duke wrote into the [Cooperative Education Agreement with Wuhan University].” As of 2018, Duke had not experienced any incursions of these requirements. 

The Chronicle found that currently only one of DKU’s 235 faculty holds a joint appointment at Wuhan University. However, 14 DKU professors hold joint appointments at Duke and six former visiting professors at DKU hold Duke professor appointments.

Alongside members from DKU, members of both Wuhan University and Duke are part of DKU’s Faculty Hearing Committee, the Appointment, Tenure and Promotion committee and the Faculty Appointment Committee. DKU also has members from Wuhan, Duke’s Durham campus and the city of Kunshan sitting on its board of trustees. 

Claim: “Duke’s partnership with Wuhan University has already enabled American taxpayer funded military technology transfer to China.”

This claim is mostly true but lacks some context.

The letter cites David Brady, Michael J. Fitzpatrick distinguished professor emeritus of photonics, as an example of Duke enabling this “taxpayer funded military technology transfer.” However, with U.S. military technology transfer to China widespread across the academic and research landscape, it is likely that such transfers could have occurred even without DKU.

During his time at Duke’s Durham campus, Brady developed a gigapixel camera through a 2011 grant funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a subsidiary of the Department of Defense. The grant intended the camera to be developed for military surveillance, but the Pentagon never picked up the technology. Brady proceeded to commercialize the technology in China under the business Aqueti China Technology Inc.

Through the company, he developed a camera called Mantis that is now installed across cities in China for surveillance of “criminals as well as citizens.” DARPA said its funding for the grant ended in March 2015 and that Aqueti’s commercialization of the technology was independent from the grant’s funding.

According to the Wall Street Journal, a Duke University spokesman had told them that Duke, which owned the patent for the gigapixel camera technology, had obtained State Department clearance that the gigapixel camera developed by Brady was “exportable as commercial technology.” 

“Development of the gigapixel camera using U.S. suppliers failed, the ultimate success of the federal program relied critically on Chinese technology,” Brady wrote in a May 17 email to The Chronicle. 

The letter states that Duke enabled this transfer of technology through establishing a lab to mass produce the surveillance cameras. However, according to a January 2017 press release, it was DKU that set up a computation imaging research lab alongside “local partners in the city of Kunshan.” 

The letter’s claim that the research lab was “backed by the Kunshan county government in China and Chinese investors” is true. According to the 2017 press release, these partners included the Kunshan Industrial Technology Research Institute (KSITRI), a state-owned “high tech incubation base” that provided research space and operational funding and Shanghai-based JiuYou Fund, run by former government officials, who invested 30 million RMB in the lab.

The lab closed in 2019, which Brady attributed to “the changing political climate.” 

Claim: “As part of these programs, many DKU students spend time at Duke University, gaining access to federally funded U.S. research. Given the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) well documented efforts to exploit U.S. academic openness, this partnership creates a direct pipeline between U.S. innovation and China’s military-industrial complex.”

This claim lacks necessary context.   

Sources point to issues beyond DKU as pertinent to what the letter calls “efforts to exploit U.S. academic openness.” There has been bipartisan concern about Chinese espionage on U.S. soil in academia, with researchers based in the U.S. lying about their ties to China and accepting payment from the Chinese government. Each year, around 300,000 Chinese students find themselves studying at U.S. higher education institutions.

DKU’s incoming Class of 2029, however, boasts 385 students from China, and the students may opt to study abroad at Duke for one semester their junior year. 

“If our concern was Chinese nationals taking advantage of American research funding, if it was Chinese nationals having exposure to proprietary U.S. technology that then shipped back to China,” Thiagarajan said, the issue does not lie with the Chinese students at DKU but rather the 300,000 Chinese students pursuing studies in the U.S.

The claim of a “direct pipeline” contradicts the fact that DKU is a relatively young and small liberal arts college. 

For undergraduates, DKU’s curriculum is grounded in liberal arts principles, although several master’s programs focus on STEM fields. DKU opened its doors to master’s programs in 2013 and welcomed its first undergraduate students in 2018.

Claim: “Moreover, Duke Kunshan University researchers have published papers with Chinese defense scientists from firms, including Huawei, Tencent and Lenovo that are at the forefront of Beijing’s military-civil fusion strategy. Many DKU graduates have gone on to work at these companies.”

The first part of the claim is true, but the latter part is inaccurate. 

The letter cited an article from DKU’s website that noted the success of four DKU alumni. The article listed the number of graduates hired by Google, Meta, Amazon as well as other industry leaders. However, nowhere does the article say that DKU graduates are working at Huawei, Tencent or Lenovo. In fact, the only mention of Tencent is when listing job offers of an alumnus who ended up accepting a job at Google. 

Few alumni are active in the workforce, given the university has only recently seen its fourth undergraduate cohort receive their degrees. Data further shows that around 90 percent of DKU graduates from the Class of 2024 went on to pursue graduate studies and less than 8 percent of the cohort entered the workforce, making the notion that alumni are working “at the forefront of Beijing’s military-civil fusion strategy” impractical and unlikely.

Lucas Lin contributed reporting.