Chinese Money Has American Universities in a Bind

The arrest Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, in Canada at the request of the U.S. has further ramped up the tension and rancor between Washington and Beijing. It is also forcing a reckoning about the role of Chinese money in America.

Members of the Twitterverse have begun to point out that certain U.S. think tanks have accepted money from Huawei, which the U.S. government considers to be linked to China’s intelligence apparatus. Yet they are not the only academic and research institutions that need to think seriously about their relationship with China these days — American universities have their own dilemmas to consider. The trick in addressing these dilemmas — as in handling U.S.-China relations more broadly — will be to hedge against real dangers without adopting knee-jerk anti-China policies that actually weaken America’s ability to compete.