The $50 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will fund a research partnership with Tsinghua University, which holds “secret-level security credentials” for classified military research, trains students for China’s nuclear weapons program, and has allegedly carried out cyberattacks for the Chinese government, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. The university, from which Chinese president Xi Jinping graduated in 2002 with a degree in Marxist theory, is also funded by China’s Ministry of Education and maintains a “CCP Committee” that keeps the school “in accordance with President Xi’s hopes.”
Gates’s partnership with Tsinghua is aimed at carrying out drug discovery research, which involves studying potent viruses. The billionaire’s willingness to work with a Chinese government-led entity to conduct such research, however, comes as scientific research integrity in the communist nation emerges as a point of concern for the U.S. government. The U.S. National Institutes of Health in 2019 launched a $300,000 grant to “strengthen research integrity” at China’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and two major Chinese research institutions, citing troubling instances of “research misconduct,” “inadequate ethical review,” and “publication fraud.” Those problems, the agency said, “have had a negative impact on Chinese scientists and their U.S. collaborators” and “highlighted China’s underdeveloped research ethics capacity and infrastructure.”