Montana Is Writing the Playbook on How To Deal With China

Montana just took an important step to protect its citizens from authoritarian regimes. By now everyone has heard that the state banned TikTok—and of course TikTok has sued to block the measure. That was two weeks ago. The very same day, Governor Greg Gianforte signed another measure that deserves some national attention. Montana House Bill 946 requires full disclosure of any relationships between Montana’s public universities and entities affiliated with China. The provision fills significant gaps in longstanding federal reporting requirements, but Montana isn’t just improving upon a flawed federal statute. The move also fills a gap at the state level, where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has walked unimpeded into American universities and K-12 schools.

The legislation has two key features. First, it requires disclosure of all relationships an educational institution has with China. This requirement is necessarily broad. More narrowly tailored data disclosure requirements would provide universities a road map to steer clear of disclosure altogether.

Second, while the statute’s disclosure requirements are broad, its application is narrow. Universities only have to disclose relationships with “countries of concern” as defined in a federal statute. Those countries are Russia, Iran, North Korea and China—though only China has much in the way of working relationships with America’s universities (and indeed with Montana’s). Universities will certainly feel the reporting burden of the new law, but that burden only applies to relationships with world’s worst authoritarian regimes. Schools will finally be required to think critically about the true origins and connections of their research and educational partners—and reassess whether those relationships are appropriate. In any event, the reporting burden is only as heavy as universities’ relationships with China make it.

For the CCP, Western universities are diamond mines of intellectual property and, at the same time, convenient venues for suppressing criticism of Beijing. Fortunately for the party, funding STEM research naturally helps to suppress critical speech, since a university receiving support from China is reluctant to bite the hand that feeds it.

Do U.S. universities hide their relationships with China? One recent story is fairly representative. Last week it was revealed that U.C. Berkeley chose not to disclose to federal authorities a $220 million joint research relationship funded by the city of Shenzhen, China. Berkeley appears to have believed that the partnership’s structure meant that it didn’t have to be disclosed under federal law. Even if technically true, nothing prevented Berkeley from disclosing the money anyway. In any event, the Montana statute clearly requires full disclosure of this kind of collaboration.

But doesn’t our constitutional system give the federal government responsibility for foreign relations? Why should states be passing laws related to these things?

China’s carefully designed system of global foreign influence exploits domestic entities like schools, media outlets, and political parties. The presence of these foreign players inside our domestic institutions has highlighted gaps in our system. If representatives of China’s Confucius Institute program had traveled to Washington, D.C., to seek permission to operate in American schools, they would have searched in vain for an agency with the power to grant or deny that permission. In our federal system, education is rightly local. The U.S. Department of Education provides funding and enforces civil rights laws, but it has no curricular authority. The Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs touches education, but its focus is on foreign matters. As a result, CCP proxies deal directly with the states and their schools. Those states have generally been willing partners, perhaps because they don’t think national security or international relations are their problem. It’s an understandable assumption—but it’s not quite right.

All universities and K-12 schools are chartered and regulated by the states in which they operate, and public schools are a product of state budgets and state laws. States manage education, and they need to update their approach to account for contemporary risks. These days, that means pursuing transparency in foreign influence and interference operations so they can collaborate with federal authorities when problems arise. Montana took an important step in the right direction; other states should follow suit.

Dan Currell is a Fellow at the National Security Institute at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law and a former Senior Advisor at the U.S. Department of Education.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.