Huawei and Optica began building a relationship years before agreeing on plans for Huawei to anonymously sponsor the research competition. At the March 2022 board meeting when Optica Foundation directors approved that arrangement, Rogan said Optica and Huawei had worked together for “decades” and that Huawei employees participate in peer reviews for Optica’s scientific journals and in planning a major conference managed by the group, according to meeting minutes.

When asked to provide additional information about the origins of the Huawei partnership, the Optica spokesman said Rogan and staff visited the company’s headquarters in 2007 and that Rogan got to know the Huawei executive who was a judge for the research competition through their work together on conferences over the years.

Rogan’s earlier trip to China would have been five years before the 2012 publication of a seminal report by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence alleging that Huawei posed significant national security threats.

Huawei has also “provided financial sponsorship for several events,” the minutes say, including an environmental initiative co-founded by Optica that has as its co-chair a U.S. government chemist with the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The program, called the Global Environmental Measurement and Monitoring Initiative, or GEMM, doesn’t mention Huawei on its website.

A spokesman for NIST said its scientist “has not received funding from GEMM beyond meeting travel expenses and was unaware of any connection between GEMM and Huawei.”

The Optica spokesman said Huawei “made a one-time donation to Optica in 2019 but had no decision-making involvement in how those funds were applied.” He said Optica “chose to use the funds for a start-up program to address pervasive environmental and climate challenges.” He declined to answer questions about the value of Huawei’s 2019 donation.

At the board meeting, the Optica Foundation’s executive director said Huawei had “offered” to fund the research competition in late 2021 and that it was “not seeking to design the program, determine selection criteria or choose the winners,” according to the minutes. Members then voted unanimously to approve the Huawei donation, the document says.

Huawei’s role in contest

Ultimately, however, Huawei did play a role in choosing the contest’s winners, and it secured contractual opportunities to engage with them while they conducted their research, documents show.

Huawei participated in deliberations over who would comprise the competition’s selection committee, according to a spreadsheet reviewed by Bloomberg. The document assessed credentials of 32 potential candidates and included a column labeled “Huawei recommendation.”

Huawei recommended eight of the 32 listed candidates, according to the document. Several, including a Huawei executive, went on to join the competition’s 10-person selection committee. Huawei’s representation on the panel was ended after Bloomberg’s report revealing the company’s role as the competition’s sole funder.

Huawei’s representative was able to maintain contact with the winners, who were obligated to participate in at least two review meetings with the selection committee to “provide updates on progress and receive advice/guidance,” according to an agreement reviewed by Bloomberg that awardees were required to sign. The document, which listed the terms and conditions of accepting the prize money, specifies that the meetings “could occur” at three industry conferences in the U.S.

An internal Optica budget document shows that winners also had the option of delivering their final report at an event in China called the Asia Communications and Photonics Conference, known as ACP.

A later budget document describes a plan to send five of the competition’s ten winners to ACP in Beijing in 2024. The event is co-organized by Huawei and China’s State Key Lab of Information Photonics and Optical Communications.

Glenn Tiffert, a research security specialist at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, said that the obfuscated origins of the funding, the consistency of the supported research with the Chinese government’s priorities, and the dissemination activities in China supported by the program such as the ACP conference, reflect the evolution of China’s efforts to target overseas talent.

The Optica spokesman said Huawei played no part in the final selection of competition judges and that the document Bloomberg cited with the column labeled “Huawei recommendation” was “an initial list of volunteers for consideration.” He said Optica followed the standard process for scoring applicants by randomly assigning proposals to judges.

He said “winners are expected to have review meetings with members of the Selection Committee, but at no point was there any expectation or requirement for winners to meet directly with Huawei.” He called the Huawei- and Chinese state-sponsored conference “an opportunity for our winners to interact at a gathering of like minds.”

USC scientist

One of the scientists Huawei wanted on the Optica competition’s selection committee was a University of Southern California engineering professor it had funded nearly a decade ago: Alan Willner. In 2016, prior to many universities deciding to ban their researchers from working with Huawei, the Chinese telecom and its U.S. unit Futurewei funded Willner through two separate research contracts valued at a total of $338,000, according to an internal Huawei document reviewed by Bloomberg.

Willner, who became chairman of the competition’s selection committee, has been a member of the U.S. Army Science Board and of the Defense Sciences Research Council, which provided reports to the DARPA director, according to his USC bio.

Two junior scientists from Willner’s engineering department at USC have won research funding from Huawei through the Optica competition since it began in 2022. Both of them are on a team that USC in April announced had received the DARPA grant to develop light-based computing chips as part of a four-year Pentagon-funded effort.

USC said in a statement it “places the utmost importance on complying with the letter and spirit of our obligations related to the acceptance and reporting of funding.” The statement added the university is “undertaking a thorough review of the awards made to USC researchers from the Optica Foundation.”

Willner didn’t respond to requests for comment.

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