Scientists at U.S. institutions continue to co-author thousands of papers with Chinese military researchers and China’s defense-industrial base, despite growing efforts by the U.S. government to stop the loss of its innovation ecosystem to China, according to exclusive data obtained by Newsweek. The collaborations include those with researchers at China’s nuclear weapons development complex and two elite groups of military-affiliated schools known as the "Seven Sons of National Defense" and the "Seven Sons of Ordnance Industry," as well as other People's Liberation Army institutions including medical ones and state-owned defense companies, the new data that tracks activity between January 2025 and the present shows. U.S. and Chinese researchers published a total of 3,763 such co-authored papers over the last year and a half, according to Jeffrey Stoff, a leading research security investigator and the founder of the Center for Research Security and Integrity, who compiled the up-to-date figures.
The numbers do not include papers by U.S. scientists and Chinese military researchers that involved researchers from third countries, meaning they present a highly focused picture of U.S.-China collaboration. Adding third parties took the total to 5,750. The data was raw so there were non-military applications to some of the research, especially in the medical field.
Yet, "the vast majority of this is knowledge and technology transfer to enable the PLA to dominate in critical technologies," Stoff said. Ninety-nine papers were published over the last year and a half with researchers from the China Academy for Engineering Physics (CAEP,) China’s nuclear weapons research and development institute that is a conglomerate of a dozen institutes headquartered in Mianyang in Sichuan Province, with lesser-known branches elsewhere in the country including in Beijing. Stoff, a veteran researcher and Chinese linguist, drew on nearly two decades of experience analyzing China’s science and technology enterprise for the U.S. government including at the Department of War to construct a granular picture of the current situation.
Institutional affiliations can be opaque in China due to state information control that sharply reduces visibility. But Stoff has been able to identify lesser-known institutes that are subdivisions of major outward-facing institutes to build a fuller picture. One example is the Beijing Computational Science Research Center, a subdivision of CAEP.
The bibliographic data was drawn from the science publications database Dimensions. A total of 2,620 papers were published bilaterally between the U.S. and Chinese researchers at the two "Seven Sons" school networks, a total of 12 universities that includes Beihang University in Beijing and the Harbin Institute of Technology in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang. Two universities appear on both lists.
The schools are important contributors to China’s military buildup, spanning fields where civilian research can also have military applications or so-called "dual-use technologies" including engineering, advanced materials, robotics, aerospace and semiconductors. There were 777 bilateral papers published over the same time frame at other PLA-affiliated entities such as military hospitals, medical academies, and army research institutes. Key examples include the PLA General Hospital and the Academy of Military Medical Sciences.
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