Stanford’s student paper reveals American scientist’s link to entity under Chinese nuclear program

A student-run newspaper at Stanford University has again reported on Chinese influence at the school, this time unveiling research ties between a leading American scientist and an entity affiliated with China’s nuclear program.

According to the investigation, Wendy Mao, who is Stanford’s Earth Sciences Chair and Principal Investigator at Stanford’s Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences at SLAC, has collaborated for at least two decades with the Center for High Pressure Science and Technology (HPSTAR), which was added to the U.S. Commerce Department’s entities list in 2020 and is considered a subsidiary of the “technology complex” leading China’s nuclear weapons program.

Additionally, some collaborative publications appear to have been funded in part by at least seven U.S. government agencies.

The findings mark the second major exposé by the student-run The Stanford Review in its investigative series into Chinese Communist Party influence at the university. In May, the paper reported on purported efforts by the Chinese to acquire sensitive information on the school’s research efforts.

Though the research papers authored by Mao and HPSTAR do not deal directly with nuclear weapons research, the kinds of experimental techniques and theoretical knowledge required in their geological and materials research could be used to study such materials relevant to nuclear weapons, a respected materials scientist and physicist told The Stanford Review.

Indeed, China has a long history of exploiting dual-use technologies and knowledge to boost its own defense programs. For example, China purchased civilian helicopter engines from two French aviation companies in 2012 which were later appropriated for army and navy helicopters.

“It is true that high-pressure experiments are used by scientists working on the domain of nuclear weapons,” UC Berkeley Professor Raymond Jeanloz, mineral physicist and former chair of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on International Security and Arms Control, told The Stanford Review of the kind of research Mao conducts.

“If anyone is using the diamond anvil cell or shock waves to study materials relevant to nuclear weapons, that’s highly sensitive,” said Jeanloz. “If those same methods are then applied to sensitive nuclear materials, the combination of these kinds of experiments with these materials starts raising eyebrows.”

Mao did not respond to a request for comment from Just the News to her faculty email.

Collaboration with a Chinese entity tied to nuclear program 

Wendy Mao, who has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Geophysical Sciences, is a professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Stanford University, a highly ranked, private research university in Silicon Valley. Mao primarily conducts research into “the behavior of materials under compression” with applications for Earth and planetary studies and the development of new materials for “energy related applications like hydrogen fuel storage and advanced batteries,” according to her faculty page.

The Stanford Review reports that Mao has coauthored at least 12 peer-reviewed papers with scientists affiliated with HPSTAR, and coauthored at least 50 over the course of the past two decades. Five coauthors in total have verified emails affiliated with HPSTAR, according to Google Scholar’s database.

The funding acknowledgments in those papers also reportedly show that the research received financing from at least seven U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Energy, the Defense Advanced Research Program Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Army Research Office, and NASA.

Additionally, at least one research project coauthored by Wendy Mao and Jin Liu of HPSTAR and published in 2018 afforded the team access to the Argonne National Laboratory, an Energy Department laboratory that prioritizes research into energy technologies and U.S. energy security. In that paper, Mao and Liu collaborated with Yue Meng of the Argonne laboratory and used its X-Ray diffraction resources.

Commerce Department places HPSTAR on Entity List

Just two years later, in June 2020, the Department of Commerce added the Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research (HPSTAR) to the Entity List, which designates persons or groups that are “reasonably believed” to be “involved […] in activities contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests” of the United States.

HPSTAR, according to the Commerce Department, is “owned by, operated by, or directly affiliated” with the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP) which is the “technology complex responsible for the research, development and testing of China’s nuclear weapons.” CAEP has been listed on the Entity List since 1997.

Founder’s daughter

Not only has Mao conducted research alongside HPSTAR’s scientists, but she also served as a visiting scholar for the center from at least 2016 to 2019, an archive of the HPSTAR’s website shows. As of this writing, HPSTAR’s website is currently inaccessible.

Mao also has a familial connection to HPSTAR. Her father, a Taiwanese-American scientist Ho-Kwang Mao, founded the center in Shanghai in 2013 while he was simultaneously working for the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. His research focuses on the same area of study as his daughter.

When the senior Mao was approached by Chinese officials after 50 years of working in the United States and asked him to help the country “improve fundamental research in terms of quality,” he reportedly replied: “Give me the money, and I’ll give you the scientists.” That was in 2008.

By 2013, the Chinese answered and provided the money to start HPSTAR with offices in Shanghai and Beijing, funded directly by the Chinese Ministry of Finance, Nature reported in 2019, the year before HPSTAR was listed by the U.S. government for ties to China’s nuclear program.

“In China, the system was not very effective for support of fundamental research. I was allowed to try a new system that gives scientists total freedom to pursue transformative science in their own way with minimal supervision, reviews and evaluations,” Ho-Kwang Mao said of the research center. “Of course, the government is keeping an eye on how we progress, but it’s low-key.”

Chinese influence & research infiltration

The concerning overlap between researchers at prestigious U.S. universities and China is not a problem isolated to Stanford.

Just last month, three Chinese scholars working at a University of Michigan laboratory were charged in connection with smuggling biological materials related to roundworms into the United States. This was the third round of charges filed against scientists or researchers connected with the University of Michigan.

In June, two researchers in the university’s plant sciences program, Yunqing Jian and Zunyong Liu, were charged with smuggling a fungus called Fusarium graminearum into the United States in 2024. The fungus is classified in the scientific literature as a “potential agroterrorism weapon” because it affects wheat, barley, maize, and rice by causing “head blight,” according to the Justice Department. Prosecutors noted Yunqing Jian’s electronics contained evidence describing “her membership in and loyalty” to the Chinese Communist Party.

Just the News also reported at the time that records showed that both China-born scientists charged this week were affiliated with a University of Michigan research laboratory led by two senior researchers who are also Chinese citizens and received funding from the National Institutes of Health for studying plant immunity.

In some ways, the school has been a hub for China-related activities in the United States, including repeat incidents of Chinese students from the school photographing military bases in different corners of the country.

In the summer of 2023, National Guard soldiers discovered five Chinese University of Michigan students near Camp Grayling, about 200 miles from the school. The students were later charged by the Justice Department for covering up their real reason for traveling to the area, to take photographs of military vehicles at the base for one of the largest National Guard exercises in the country, Just the News previously reported.

In a similar case in 2020, two University of Michigan students were arrested in Key West, Florida after driving on to the Sigsbee Annex Naval Air Station and photographing the property, including military structures.

After the first round of charges against University of Michigan scientists in June, the Trump administration began secretly probing scientists from ‘countries of concern’ like China, Just the News reported. The review involving intelligence and security agencies began in June over concerns prior administrations did not adequately vet the backgrounds of scientists or their ties to actors like China’s military or its Communist Party.