Big Ten school joined forces with Chinese university on car-tracking tech, report finds

(Daily Caller News Foundation) – A major American public university teamed up with a Chinese military-linked school on traffic technology that Beijing uses as a surveillance tool, a report found.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison and China’s Southeast University (SEU) set up a joint research institute in 2017 whose work fed into China’s connected-car rulebook, which the country’s police agency helped write, according to a Strategy Risks report shared exclusively with the Daily Caller News Foundation. Washington is already moving to wall off Chinese connected-car technology, with a Senate committee advancing a bill in July to clamp down on Chinese automakers.

UW-Madison and SEU signed an agreement creating the Joint Research Institute (JRI) in Oct. 2017, and senior engineering staff from the Wisconsin university attended its unveiling ceremony in Nanjing, China in Dec. 2017, the report stated.

Five UW-Madison researchers were among 46 contributors to a 2019 Chinese report on connected-car technology, which listed the JRI first among its authors, the report found. A research institute run by China’s police agency, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), was listed seventh. The Chinese university helped write China’s 2023 connected-car rules with an MPS traffic safety center.

SEU is overseen by both China’s education ministry and its defense industry agency, runs two designated defense labs and holds secret-level credentials for security, the report found.

SEU and a PLA unit opened the National Defense Education Base on campus in 2020 that handles military recruitment and mobilization.

UW-Madison and Southeast University did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

The House Select Committee identified SEU as a school with direct ties to the PLA and China’s defense industrial base in Sept. 2025.

In Jan. 2025, the Commerce Department pushed to finalize the barring Chinese-linked connected-vehicle technology.

“This is a targeted approach to ensure we keep PRC and Russian-manufactured technologies off American roads and protect our nation’s connected vehicle supply chains,” Biden-era Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo said in a Jan. 2025 press release.

A lawyer representing a UW-Madison professor disputed the claims in the report and argued the university never funded or operated it, according to the report. However, Strategy Risks said it has not yet resolved the dispute and noted that an SEU faculty profile listed a professor in a JRI leadership role in 2024.

The report “identifies no evidence of espionage or intellectual property theft,” and did not allege the university violated Commerce’s vehicle rule.

The National Science Foundation granted nearly $900,000 to UW-Madison for its participation in the Tianlai radio telescope project in Xinjiang, China between 2016 and 2022, the report claims. The project’s research network included CETC 54, a Chinese defense institute that the Commerce Department keeps on its Entity List.