(DailyVantage.com) – While many Americans feel China’s involvement with the United States has dramatically increased over the past few years, others remain skeptical.
Despite the skepticism, China secretly supports tech research at various colleges throughout the United States by using the Chinese tech company Huawei as a proxy and interacting with an American nonprofit, the Optica Foundation. Huawei has already encountered controversy in the past due to its connections to the Chinese Communist Party, prompting some countries to blacklist the tech company. China’s Huawei has been funding research at various United States colleges, including research into fiber optics and laser technologies.
Huawei’s involvement with the Optica Foundation stems from a research competition hosted by the nonprofit, which saw Huawei as the only organization to donate funding for the project. The project focuses on the aforementioned technologies and has hundreds of participants throughout the United States. The competition provides a massive reward to those participating in the research effort, totaling around one million dollars. Despite Huawei acting as the only donor to the project, many college officials who’ve facilitated their campuses’ involvement in the competition lacked any knowledge about the participation of the China-based tech company.
According to various university administration officials, they did not know about Huawei’s involvement in the research competition. Private documents regarding Huawei and the Optica Foundation’s collaboration were discovered, which specifically discourages the nonprofit’s members from discussing the cooperation between Huawei and the Optica Foundation. Members of the competition’s judge panel weren’t even told about Huawei’s involvement, which the document described as “confidential.”
The private document also featured information about when Huawei first became involved in the Optica Foundation’s research competition, as it outlined an agreement created in 2021. The agreement between Huawei and the Optica Foundation states that Huawei would provide around $10 million for the research project over the next ten years. While the deal doesn’t indicate any illegality between Huawei and the Optica Foundation, it raises concerns about American national security interests.
James Mulvenon, an American defense contractor who wrote about China’s efforts to spy on other countries, claims that the agreement between Huawei and the Optica Foundation should concern American citizens. School officials from Texas A&M echoed Mulvenon’s claims and said they wouldn’t have participated in the competition if they had known about Huawei’s involvement in the research project.
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