Two U.S. House of Representatives committees named  NYU Shanghai as a national security threat that advances the Chinese Communist Party’s military and technological agenda in an annual report for the second year in a row.

The September report reviewed claims that joint U.S.-China academic institutes, including NYU Shanghai, are exploited by the Chinese government to strengthen its military. The two committees that authored the report — the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party and the Committee on Education and Workforce — also claimed that after accepting major funding from the Chinese government, the U.S. institutions caved to CCP restrictions on academic freedom, speech and governance.

NYU Shanghai, which partners with the state-run East China Normal University, was among over 50 joint institutes the committee said pose “serious national security risks.” Despite the committee raising concerns about the CCP’s alleged involvement in the institutes’ military and technological research in last year’s report, NYU Shanghai “failed to act” on the issue. The 2024 report resulted in the closure of eight U.S.-China joint institutes, including the Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute and Georgia Tech Shenzhen Institute, which were commended for doing “the right thing for academic freedom and U.S. national security.”

“NYU and its outside experts are studying its details very carefully,” NYU Shanghai spokesperson Yuhan Xu wrote in a statement to WSN. “It would be premature to draw conclusions, but our work continues unabated and our commitment to our mission is unchanged.”

Last month’s report conveyed specific concern around NYU Shanghai’s joint physics institute with ECNU. It cited that the CCP-controlled university houses the State Key Laboratory of Precision Spectroscopy, a physics research lab that collaborates with the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation — which is sanctioned by a U.S. branch that investigates Chinese military-industrial companies. The report also alleged that “at least one” professor received over one million yuan, around $140,000, from a Chinese program for quantum computing research. 

Founded as China’s first joint U.S. research university in 2012, NYU Shanghai hosts nearly 1,500 students and 200 faculty members. In 2015, NYU Shanghai Vice Chancellor Jeffrey Lehman told a congressional committee the campus was created on the condition that U.S. based-NYU administrators would have “absolute control over the school’s curriculum, faculty, teaching style, and operations.” 

However, Sarah McLaughlin, a senior scholar in global expression at free speech organization Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told WSN that such control is not guaranteed at joint institutes such as NYU Shanghai, and that the host country’s laws precede.  

“There is fundamentally going to be a clash between universities’ free speech commitments and local law in those countries,” McLaughlin said. “You should be up front with the people who attend your campus about what risks they’re going to take if they choose to engage in political expression or research that the local government doesn’t like.”

In a 2020 defense filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, NYU Shanghai argued that it was not subject to U.S. employment protections. The site referenced a Chinese law that “prohibits a foreign entity from having control of a Chinese academic institution,” saying that its chancellor must be a Chinese national and over half of its board members must be appointed by NYU Shanghai itself. Tong Shijun, who was born in China and became NYU Shanghai’s chancellor in 2020, formerly held teaching and administrative positions at ECNU for nearly two decades.

In 2019, NYU Shanghai faculty said they had to “self-censor” their speech amid a slew of protests against the CCP’s interference in Hong Kong autonomy, which has an independent judiciary under the “one country, two systems” framework. Criticism also rose after NYU Shanghai offered a pro-Chinese government unlisted class over winter break of the 2018-2019 academic year.

“Universities need to be clear about how they’re going to stick by their values in challenging political times,” McLaughlin said. “It’s also especially important that they can show that they’re not choosing financial benefit over their communities and their values.”

Contact Chantal Mann at [email protected].