The chairman of a U.S. House committee created to track economic and security competition with China is asking the University of New Haven to withdraw from a cooperative program with a Chinese school because of concern the agreement and accompanying research exchange puts American secrets at risk.
U.S. Rep. John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican and chairman of the Select Committee on China, laid out in a comprehensive letter what he claims are risks associated with the UNH decision last year to open a common campus in China with the Xi’an University of Posts and Telecommunications (XUPT), a school aligned with China’s military, security and industrial establishments.
“The specific institution UNH has chosen as its partner presents too great a risk for the exploitation and diversion of American human and intellectual capital,” Moolenaar wrote. “U.S. universities should not support, conduct research with, or use federal research dollars to sustain institutional partnerships with foreign universities that maintain extensive relationships with Chinese military and defense entities.”
Asked about the security concerns, a UNH spokesman said Friday, “The University has received Chairman Moolenaar’s letter. University leaders are carefully reviewing its contents.”
The 8-page letter to UNH president Jens Frederiksen, dated Thursday, is signed by Moolenaar rather than the full committee.
The Select Committee on China was created with bipartisan support in 2023 to develop policy based on economic and security competition with China and the Chinese Communist Party. Last year, the committee published a report making a case that “Joint Institutes” such as that involving UNH — China-based partnerships that pair American and Chinese universities — are controlled and substantially funded by China as part of a broader Chinese effort to exploit U.S. security and commercial capital.
The committee said the institutes are governed by Chinese law, are directed by Chinese-majority boards and are aligned with Chinese Communist Party security goals.
“Chinese government funding dominates these joint institutes, and the use of funds is restricted by law to align with CCP goals,” the committee said. “Curriculum and research prioritize CCP-defined goals — especially in military-relevant science and technology fields. Finally, U.S. institutions agree to People’s Republic of China-imposed limits on academic freedom, speech, and governance independence.”
The committee said eight major U.S. universities withdrew from joint institutes following publication of the report in 2025.
A committee spokesman said Friday that UNH was not a subject of the report, but that Moolenaar’s letter is based on information that subsequently came to the committee’s attention.
Moolenaar said in the letter that the UNH joint institute in Xi’an, China, offers undergraduate tech majors in communications engineering, data science and big data technology, and intelligence science and technology. A third of the courses are drawn from the UNH curriculum and are taught by UNH faculty.
The letter lists several specific areas of security concern, among them Chinese government and school pronouncements suggesting that UNH’s partner institution, XUPT, is a component of China’s “military-civil fusion” strategy. It says the school promotes its relationship with the People’s Liberation Army and, among other things, has access to military technology for teaching purposes.
The Chinese university also is, according to the Moolenaar letter, involved in a longstanding partnership with the Chinese ZTE Corp, a partially state-owned tech company that has been fined about $1.3 billion by a variety of U.S. government agencies for illegally shipping U.S. products to Iran.
ZTE has a substantial presence on the Chinese campus.
“Among other activities, XUPT and ZTE agreed to jointly develop laboratories and courses, share 5G-related laboratory resources, conduct regular joint teaching and research activities, provide technical training to XUPT faculty, and establish what XUPT described as a ‘stable, win-win long-term mechanism’ for university-enterprise cooperation,” the letter says.
Moolenaar wrote that that the connection between XUPT and the Chinese military industrial complex can been seen in faculty research that, in some cases, has been published jointly with Chinese government agencies and companies that are on U.S. government restricted lists for security reasons.
The publications include research on “sensitive and dual-use technologies, including communications jamming and anti-jamming; unmanned aerial vehicle targeting; secure aerial communications; eavesdropping and covert communications; algorithms for missile and target tracking; power grid security; Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) spoofing; and malware traffic classification for detecting network intrusions,” according to the Moolenaar letter.
Moolenaar wrote that the academic partnership is “particularly concerning” because of the role UNH has played in “supporting U.S. cybersecurity education and workforce development.” For at least seven years, UNH has been recognized by the National Security Agency for its academic programs in cyber operations and its training programs for careers in artificial intelligence, cyber security and cyber threat analysis, he wrote.
“Against the backdrop of XUPT’s College of Communications and Information Engineering’s documented relationships with the (People’s Liberation Army), China’s defense research and industrial base, and military-civil fusion initiatives, the joint school creates a potential pathway for U.S.- supported human and intellectual capital, expertise, and technical knowledge to benefit (China’s) strategic and technological priorities,” he wrote.
“This partnership puts the national security interests of the United States at risk,” Moolenaar wrote. “I therefore urge you to shut down UNH’s joint program with XUPT expeditiously.”
