1% of US Taxpayer-Funded Patents Have Chinese Inventors
Taxpayer-Funded Chinese Inventors #1
On August 29, Reuters published an article about Chinese national researchers being the beneficiaries of US taxpayer R&D funding. The article "Exclusive: US government funding yielded hundreds of patents for China-based researchers" reports that over 1,000 patents with at least one Chinese researcher received at least one taxpayer-funded R&D grant or contract. The source for the article was a report prepared by the USPTO for the House of Select Committee on China. The article states that USPTO’s report shows that "the agency granted 1,020 patents from 2010 through the first quarter of 2024 that were both funded at least in part by the U.S. government and involved at least one China-residing inventor."
FedInvent looked at its portfolio of taxpayer-funded patents for the same period. We dug out all the patents granted between 2010 and Q1 2024 that matched the criteria in the Reuters article — patents with Chinese inventors and taxpayer funding. We included patents with a government interest statement as required by the Bayh-Dole Act or patents assigned to (owned by) a federal government entity.
Here’s what we learned.
FedInvent Found and Analyzed 1084 Patents
Reuters reported it found 1,020 patents from 2010 through Q1 2024. The FedInvent Portfolio has 1,084 patents with inventors from China and taxpayer funding. FedInvent analyzed this portfolio.
We analyzed the patents to identify government funding entities below the Department level. This allowed us to report on funding of specific R&D entities and programs. For example, we analyzed patents with funding from the Department of Energy (DOE) to see how many patents were funded by DOE’s national laboratories and which institutes at the National Institutes of Health funded Chinese inventors.
We found Chinese inventors appearing on patents across the federally funded R&D enterprise, working on projects covering a broad spectrum of science and technology critical to national defense and identified by Congress as priorities to maintain US global innovation leadership. We also found that, like most intellectual property matters, the patents and their funding are much more complicated than they appear on the surface.
Read The Newsletters or The Full Report
We compiled our analysis into a report called US Taxpayer-Funded Chinese Inventors, A FedInvent Analysis. The content is too long for a single newsletter, so over the coming days, we will publish a series of newsletters containing our key findings.
For those of you who would like to see the whole report compiled into a single document, you can download the PDF version here.
We’ll start with the numbers.
One Percent (1%) of Two Percent (2%)
First, let’s start with some important context on the universe of US taxpayer-funded patents and the number of patents with Chinese inventors.
From 2010 through Q1 2024, the timeframe of the report Reuters reviewed, the USPTO granted over 4.3 million patents. During this timeframe, 2.4% or 104,437 patents reported taxpayer funding either through government contracts or grants in the government interest statement or by a patent being assigned to a federal government entity. Patents with Chinese inventors made up 1% of the taxpayer-funded patents. Chinese inventors appeared on 1% of the 2% of US taxpayer-funded patents.
The Funders - Who Funded the R&D
According to the Congressional Research Service, eight federal agencies receive approximately 97% of total federal R&D funding:
Department of Defense (DOD), 45.8%
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), primarily the National Institutes of Health (NIH), 24.3%
Department of Energy (DOE), 11.5%
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 6.7%
National Science Foundation (NSF), 4.4%
Department of Commerce (DOC), 2.1%
Department of Agriculture (USDA), 1.7%
Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), 0.8%
The top four funders of patents with Chinese inventors are HHS, NSF, DOE, and DOD.
The table below shows the number of times each of the top four funders was cited on a patent with a Chinese inventor, followed by the number of grants or contracts cited on those patents.
Patents can cite more than one federal department. DOD includes patents funded by the intelligence community.
The Department of Agriculture (USDA) had 25 patents, and NASA had 13. The remainder of the patents are spread between the Departments of Transportation, Commerce, Interior, Veterans Affairs, and USAID.
A Deeper Look
FedInvent analyzed the patents to see both the department and the sub-departments that funded the inventions. This provides better insight into how widely dispersed the Chinese inventors were in the Federal R&D ecosphere. Following is the breakdown of patents and projects funded by HHS, DOE, NSF, and DOD with Chinese inventors.
Health and Human Services (HHS)
The HHS patents were funded by the institutes at the National Institutes of Health. The 490 HHS patents with Chinese national inventors cited 627 taxpayer-funded projects. The institutes break down as follows:
Department of Energy
The Department of Energy funded 229 patents with Chinese inventors that cite 331 DOE contracts or grants. Following is the breakdown of the DOE entities that funded the patents. We cite patents with valid, findable contract or grant numbers.
DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration Labs — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratory— and the Idaho National Laboratory accounted for 15 patents and 25 Chinese inventors.
Established by Congress in 2000, NNSA is a semi-autonomous agency within the U.S. Department of Energy responsible for enhancing national security through the military application of nuclear science. NNSA maintains and enhances the safety, security, and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile; works to reduce the global danger from weapons of mass destruction; provides the U.S. Navy with safe and militarily effective nuclear propulsion; and responds to nuclear and radiological emergencies in the United States and abroad.
The Office of Science Labs — Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and SLAC, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, accounted for 41 DOE patents. The Office of Science also funded another 100 projects with Chinese Inventors.
Forty-eight (48) of the patents funded by a single National Renewable Energy Lab contract were awarded to one company, Novozymes, Inc.
National Science Foundation (NSF)
The 282 patents that cite NSF as a funding source cite 377 NSF grant or contract numbers, 289 of these contract numbers are unique.
NSF funded 282 patents, citing 377 NSF grant numbers, of which 289 are unique. The MagLab, the largest and highest-powered magnet lab in the world, has been cited four times as the source of funding for six Chinese inventors. Please note that the National MagLab hosts more than a thousand domestic and international visiting scientists a year.
Department of Defense (DOD)
DOD’s Research Offices and DARPA funded most patents funded by DOD. The count above reflects patents where a single DOD research office is cited. FedInvent separates patents funded by a single DOD research office — AFOSR, ARO, and ONR from patents that cite more than one research office. Patents that cite more than one DOD research office are counted separately above, reflecting which pair of offices funded the work that led to the invention. There are no DOD Research Office Trifectas — patents that reflect funding from all three research offices.
The Army Medical Research and Development Command (USAMRDC) funded most of the non-ARO Army patents in this portfolio. USAMRDC is the Army’s medical materiel developer, responsible for medical research, development, and acquisition.
DOD funded 204 patents with Chinese inventors. The entities cited on the chart above represent 215 grant or contract citations. In addition to the DOD organizations cited above, other DOD entities funded projects with Chinese inventors. These include one patent funded by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), four funded by the National Security Agency (NSA) and assigned to IBM, and one patent funded by the Defense Microelectronics Activity (DMEA), Center for Nanoscale Innovation for Defense (CNID). CNID is sponsored by two federal agencies: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Defense MicroElectronics Activity (DMEA). This brings the number of finable contract citations up to 221.
The Inventors
There are 1,574 named Chinese inventors on the 1,084 patents in the FedInvent Portfolio. But what exactly is a "Chinese inventor"?
The residence data that follows an inventor’s name on a patent is used to tell the residence of an inventor. The residence is a proxy for the inventor’s nationality. At present there is no field in a patent application that requires an inventor to declare a nationality.
An inventor name on the actual patent, 9873889, looks like this:
KEWEI ZHANG, ZHEJIANG, (CN)
According to both the Manual of Patent Examination Procedures (MPEP) and the Code of Federal Regulations section on the Inventor’s Oath or Declaration states that the Oath or Declaration needs to identify:
(1) Each inventor by his or her legal name; and
(2) A mailing address where the inventor customarily receives mail, and residence, if an inventor lives at a location which is different from where the inventor customarily receives mail, for each inventor.
That’s all you get.
Chinese First Named Inventors
One hundred forty-seven (147) patents of the 1,084 in the FedInvent Portfolio (13.5%) have a Chinese inventor as the First-Named Inventor. The First-Named Inventor is the primary inventor, the individual who made the major contribution to the invention or who initiated the idea.
The presence of Chinese First-Named Inventors indicates that Chinese nationals probably led 147 projects funded by the Federal government even if their name did not appear as a principal investigator on the grant or contract.
Where Did The Inventors Come From?
The top five inventor residence locations shown on the patents are:
Beijing — 464
Shanghai — 249
Wuhan — 59
Guangzhou — 43
Changchun — 31
158 Inventors from Hong Kong
Accounting for Hong Kong inventors is messy. 158 inventors have some variation of Hong Kong as their residence. 110 inventors show Hong Kong as their city of residence. Ninety-seven (97) inventors show their address as Hong Kong (CN). The other 13 inventors used Hong Kong (HK). The rest of the Hong Kong patents show inventors with residence at other locations in Hong Kong and use (HK) as the country. FedInvent included the Hong Kong inventors in the Chinese Inventor Portfolio is the residence information included (CN) or (HK).
Inventors from Syracuse, China and Tegucigalpa, China
The location data on patents isn’t always accurate. Inventor Huan Gu is a resident of Syracuse (CN). Two patents — 10500370 (2019) and 11406792 (2022) with Dr. Gu as an inventor are assigned to Syracuse University. A search for Dr. Gu, a Research Professor and Post Doctoral Researcher at Syracuse, reveals she received her PhD in Chemical Engineering from Syracuse University and did her undergraduate work at China University of Mining & Technology in Beijing. Your guess on her correct residence for patent purposes is as good as ours. Dr. Gu is either from Syracuse, NY (US) or Beijing (CN). We’ll count her patents as having Chinese inventors for now.
FedInvent removed patent 11932908 from the China portfolio because one of the inventor’s residences was listed as Tegucigalpa (CN). Last time we checked Tegucigalpa is the capital city of Honduras (HN).
Taiwan — Strategic Ambiguity
FedInvent’s review of patents with taxpayer funding and at least one inventor identifying as residing in China did not count inventors from Taiwan. During the time covered by the report reviewed by Reuters, 193 taxpayer-funded patents showed at least one Taiwanese inventor. Under the strategic ambiguity approach, these patents were not included in the FedInvent count of Chinese inventors.
The Owners
Here is the summary of the types of entities that are assignees on the patents with Chinese inventors:
Colleges and Universities (HERD) 858
Companies and Private Entities 187
Federally Funded Research & Development Centers 62
Government Agencies 54
Twenty-three (23) of the patents with Chinese inventors assigned to a college, university or post-graduate research entity are co-owned by a Chinese university.
The next newsletter delves into why just counting Chinese inventors with patents and taxpayer funding doesn’t explain the complexity of the issues.
As always, thank you for reading FedInvent.
The FedInvent Team
FedInvent tells the stories of inventors, investigators, and innovators. Wayfinder Digital's FedInvent Project follows the federal innovation ecosphere, taxpayer money, and the inventions it pays for. FedInvent is a work in progress. Please reach out if you have questions or suggestions. You can reach us at info@wayfinder.digital.