Elite US Colleges Linked to Chinese Surveillance Labs Driving Uyghur Genocide, Study Warns
A new report by Strategy Risks and the Human Rights Foundation has revealed that prestigious US universities including MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton have partnered with Chinese state-backed labs Zhejiang Lab and SAIRI, co-authoring roughly 3,000 papers with Western researchers since 2020. These Chinese labs reportedly maintain direct connections to CETC, a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) defense conglomerate responsible for developing the surveillance platform used in Xinjiang against Uyghur Muslims.
The collaboration between these elite colleges and Chinese labs has advanced technologies such as multi-object tracking, gait recognition, and infrared detection. These capabilities enable mass surveillance and facilitate the transfer of sensitive US technology to CCP-linked companies. The report highlights concerns that Chinese labs tied to state security are being normalized as ordinary research partners, despite Chinese laws mandating information sharing with state security services.
Amid the crackdown in Xinjiang, where over one million Uyghurs have been detained and subjected to pervasive surveillance tracking faces, voices, movements, and biometric data, the report calls for mandatory human-rights due-diligence in international research partnerships, increased transparency on foreign co-authorships, and restrictions on collaborations with Chinese state-linked labs involved in surveillance and defense.
Furthermore, the report criticizes Western AI ethics institutes at Oxford, Cambridge, MIT, and Berkeley for their general silence concerning China’s use of AI for repression between 2020 and 2025, noting that only two organizations publicly condemned Beijing's practices during that period.
