Natalie Winters' recent reporting on this exact beat is clear and consistent: American defense expertise and taxpayer money are flowing into China's military-industrial complex, with DARPA and other U.S. agencies implicated as funders of research at blacklisted Chinese institutions.
The most recent piece (August 17, 2026) centers on Brian Cantwell, a former Stanford aerospace chairman who spent 14 years on an Executive Independent Review Team overseeing the F119, F135, and F136 engine programs tied to the F-22 and F-35.
The key findings:
Cantwell spent May 9 – June 3, 2025 at Beihang University, one of China's most sensitive defense-linked schools
The visit ran under a Chinese "expertise introduction" (引智计划) program — a state apparatus explicitly designed to recruit foreign technical specialists
He delivered six technical lectures, met with Chinese research teams, advised graduate students, toured labs and an aeroacoustic wind tunnel
His host school, Beihang's School of Aeronautic Science and Engineering, operates an Advanced Long-Endurance UAV Technology Research Center
Washington has spent 25 years restricting tech transfer to Beihang over missile and UAV concerns
The punchline Winters drives home: Stanford never publicized any of this. Americans only learned about it from Chinese-language university webpages. Beijing was proud; Stanford was silent.
A separate piece (August 13, 2026) reveals a private nuclear war backchannel between former U.S. military chiefs and CAEP — the China Academy of Engineering Physics, blacklisted since 1997 for developing Beijing's nuclear weapons.
Americans involved included:
Adm. Mike Mullen (former JCS Chairman)
Adm. James Ellis (former STRATCOM commander)
Ernest Moniz (former Energy Secretary)
Sam Nunn (former Senate Armed Services Chairman)
Rose Gottemoeller (former NATO Deputy Secretary General)
The channel was financed by the China-United States Exchange Foundation (CUSEF), which congressional investigators have called an "instrument of the CCP's approach to political warfare." The meetings were not U.S. government diplomacy — they were a privately financed CCP influence operation, documented in Chinese-language materials that have since been scrubbed.
Winters' November 2025 reporting connects this directly to DARPA. Her investigation found that research at China's top semiconductor lab — an institution targeting America's chip dominance — was funded by:
DARPA
Office of Naval Research
Army Research Office / Army Research Laboratory
National Institutes of Health
NSF and DOE
Her framing: American tax dollars are underwriting the very CCP research designed to close the technology gap. Beijing treats chip supremacy as a national survival project, and Washington has been sleepwalking into subsidizing it.
The through-line across all three investigations is the same: the revolving door between American academia, defense funding agencies, and China's military-industrial complex is wide open. Ex-generals, former cabinet officials, and Stanford aerospace chairs are lending credibility and technical know-how to blacklisted Chinese institutions — while U.S. agencies like DARPA quietly fund the underlying research.
The transparency asymmetry is the tell: China publicizes these relationships as strategic victories, while American institutions bury them.
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