[The number of peer-reviewed papers jointly published by Chinese scientists and their Western counterparts has increased more than sevenfold in that time, according to the report, to 734 last year from 95 in 2007. The research they conduct is sometimes in areas with strategic military applications like navigation technology, quantum physics and cryptography.]
By
Jamie Tarabay
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President
Xi Jinping of China, second from right, touring the National Graphene
Institute at
the University of Manchester in England in 2015. A Chinese student
there who
studied graphene,
described as a wonder material, now works at a
military university in China,
an Australian researcher said.
Credit Richard
Stonehouse/WPA Pool,
via
Getty Images
|
SYDNEY,
Australia — The Chinese
military is expanding its collaborations with foreign universities, sometimes
concealing its scientists’ military ties, according to an Australian report
published Tuesday. The report raises questions about whether countries wary of
China’s rising power are in fact directly contributing to its military
advancement.
In the past decade, the Chinese People’s
Liberation Army has sent 2,500 military scientists, researchers and engineers
abroad, according to the report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute,
a nonpartisan research institution in Canberra, the capital.
While they work with academics and scientists
at institutions around the world, they are especially concentrated in the
United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the so-called Five
Eyes nations that broadly share intelligence.
The number of peer-reviewed papers jointly
published by Chinese scientists and their Western counterparts has increased
more than sevenfold in that time, according to the report, to 734 last year
from 95 in 2007. The research they conduct is sometimes in areas with strategic
military applications like navigation technology, quantum physics and
cryptography.
The report’s author, Alex Joske, said that
Western countries risk inadvertently giving an edge to a rival military.
“China is not an ally; it’s increasingly a
competitor in the Pacific,” he said in an interview. “We shouldn’t be helping
them improve their military technology by helping their scientists train to get
military advantage.”
In his report, Mr. Joske also notes that
while most of the scientists sent by the People’s Liberation Army are open
about the institutions they come from, some appear to hide their military
affiliations by using “misleading historical names for their institutions” or
even naming ones that do not exist.
Adam Ni, a China researcher at the Australian
National University who was not involved in the report, said, “You often see
people who are dual-hatted, a P.L.A. organization that is under a certain
department that is presented to the civilian world as a civilian organization,
and their researchers would go overseas in their civilian capacity or name in
order to study and do research.”
“The P.L.A. have been doing this for a long
time in a fairly deliberate way,” he added, “to obtain or learn expertise and
bring that back into China to advance China’s economic development and its
military modernization efforts.”
In a separate article published Tuesday, Mr.
Joske cited the case of a Chinese student named Huang Xianjun, who in 2016
completed a Ph.D. at the University of Manchester in England. While there he
worked with the discoverers of graphene, which some researchers describe as a
wonder material 100 times stronger than steel that has enormous technological
potential.
According to a Chinese military newspaper,
Mr. Joske wrote, Dr. Huang now works as a researcher at the army’s National
University of Defense Technology, which had originally sent him overseas. Mr.
Joske quotes the newspaper as saying that Dr. Huang aims to open up graphene’s
possibilities in fields like artificial intelligence and develop a team to work
on them, “while sticking close to the needs of the military.”
The top universities outside China for
collaboration with the Chinese military, as measured by the number of
peer-reviewed publications that P.L.A. scientists wrote with foreign
colleagues, were Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, followed by the
University of New South Wales in Australia, the University of Southampton in
England and the University of Waterloo in Canada, Mr. Joske reported.
The top three American ones he cited are
Georgia Tech, the Illinois Institute of Technology and the United States Naval
Academy.
Mr. Joske said that universities had been
mostly muted in their responses when he raised his concerns with them.
“Their responses were basically, ‘We haven’t
breached any laws; this is civilian research and doesn’t represent a security
risk,’” he said.
Prof. John Fitzgerald, a China specialist at
Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, welcomed the report
and said it should prompt universities to reconsider their policies.
“The evidence is now out there,” he said. “A
lot of the universities claimed they had no knowledge before; this is what they
need to make a judgment.”
“The other aspect of this is, which
institutions in the Five Eyes countries are collaborating with Chinese
institutions that have military affiliations?” he continued. “Why are Western
universities supporting research with universities that are waging cyberwarfare
and apparently preparing for war?”
In a statement to The Times, Prof. Ian
Jacobs, president and vice chancellor at the University of New South Wales,
defended collaborations with institutions like China’s National University of
Defense Technology “as part of our work as a globally engaged university.”
“This research has been published in
internationally peer-reviewed academic journals which are in the public
domain,” he said, adding that the university “conducts rigorous assessments” to
ensure collaborations do not end up exporting military expertise.
But Mr. Joske questioned the ability of
Australia’s export control laws to limit the flow of secret technology
overseas, in part because much of it involves the “intangible transfer of
technology” rather than physical goods.
“In Australia we need responses in the form
of the defense laws and better scrutiny of their applications on foreign
military personnel,” he said. “We don’t have any controls over any technology
transfer. So for any P.L.A. member in Australia, it’s totally legal to transfer
technology to that person, even if it were illegal to do it across the border.”
Despite concerns about Chinese influence on
academic freedom and even national politics, Australian universities have been
bolstered by Chinese money flowing in, as have Australian businesses. At
universities, it has often taken the form of student enrollment. Some have
major partnerships with China like the Torch Innovation Project, which supports
science and technology research at the University of New South Wales with up to
100 million Australian dollars, or about $71 million, in Chinese investment in
exchange for sharing the findings.
“Universities are in the business of
research,” said Professor Fitzgerald of Swinburne University. “This isn’t about
recruiting students or student numbers, it’s really about being at the cutting
edge of technology and the reputational advantages of being in on breakthroughs,
and China at the present time is at the forefront.”
“The institutions see opportunities to fund
research and to push themselves up the competitive ladder and to enjoy any
potential commercial spinoffs of that research,” he said.
But if Australian universities do not
scrutinize Chinese applicants more carefully, the government may start doing it
for them, Professor Fitzgerald said.
“It’s a risky argument for a university to
make, saying there’s no law against it,” he said. “Are they inviting greater
legislation? Wouldn’t it be better to act on the knowledge in their possession
and behave like responsible autonomous institutions?”
The Australian government has signaled it may
step in to protect against foreign threats if large organizations do not.
In a speech on Monday, Mike Burgess, the head
of the Australian Signals Directorate, the government’s cybersecurity agency,
noted that “strategic and economic power is shifting east, as are the centers
of expertise for technology, research and development.”
While not naming China, Mr. Burgess elaborated
on the government’s recent decision to bar the Chinese technology giants Huawei
and ZTE from providing equipment to support Australia’s new fifth-generation,
or 5G, telecommunications networks.
“5G technology will underpin the
communications that Australians rely on every day,” Mr. Burgess said at a
national security dinner in Canberra. “This is about more than just protecting
the confidentiality of our information. It is also about integrity and
availability of the data and systems on which we depend. Getting security right
for our critical infrastructure is paramount.”
He also said that the agency’s mandate was
changing and that it now had “an important role in advising government how best
to navigate major technology and strategic shifts.”
He added, “Our work is informed by us
mastering technology.”
