Western universities urged to rethink Chinese military ties

Academics debate how to respond to increasing influence of People’s Liberation Army

November 8, 2018
Chinese PLA
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Who’s in control? Western universities ‘cannot be naive’ about collaborating with People’s Liberation Army scientists, says scholar

Universities have been urged to develop a “mature understanding of the Chinese state” and in particular to realise that working with its military scientists means supporting the Chinese Communist Party “to enhance its capacity to stay in power in China indefinitely”.

A report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute last week looked at research collaborations and exchanges between universities outside China and “People’s Liberation Army scientists”, suggesting that some Western institutions are unwittingly helping a “rival military” to “develop its expertise and technology”.

The report – which says that the US, UK, Canada, Australia and Germany are the top countries for research collaboration with the PLA and that the number of peer-reviewed articles published as a result of such links has grown sevenfold in a decade – comes in a broader context of rising sensitivity and anxiety around West-China academic links.

Last month, Nature reported that China’s programme to attract leading researchers back to Chinese universities from Western institutions, the Thousand Talents Plan, had “gone underground” amid participants’ fears that they are being targeted by FBI scrutiny.

In Australia, a number of high-profile incidents involving teaching about politically sensitive issues have raised concerns about the financial clout wielded by thousands of Chinese students putting academic integrity in Australian institutions at risk.

Donald Trump is reported to have described Chinese students as “spies” and discussed plans to stop providing student visas for Chinese citizens.

Alex Joske, the ASPI researcher who wrote the report on research collaborations and the Chinese military, told Times Higher Education: “Many universities have been greatly increasing their engagement with China without also developing a mature understanding of the Chinese state.

“They don’t understand China’s efforts to blur the lines between civilian and military research through military-civil fusion and aren’t cognisant of the strategic implications of the Chinese military’s modernisation. Additionally, many [universities] appear to have been unaware of collaboration by their researchers and the PLA, as well as of PLA scientists training on their campuses.”

Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at Soas, University of London, described the PLA as “the military wing of the Chinese Communist Party”, with a “primary mission” to “defend and protect the security and integrity of the political system in China, which means the Leninist party-state”.

He added: “Conducting research for the sake of advancing science does not fall within the remit of PLA research scientists.”

British universities “that welcome or accept scientists from PLA institutions should bear [this] in mind”, Professor Tsang continued. “They should continue to do so without restrictions if they feel that it is within their remit and morally right to support the Chinese Communist Party to enhance its capacity to stay in power in China indefinitely.

“As an academic, I do not think it is right and proper for me to be part of any project or arrangement that is intended to sustain a human rights-abusing authoritarian government in power in any part of the world.”

Marijk van der Wende, distinguished professor of higher education at Utrecht University, who is leading a major international project on China’s impact on global higher education, said that wider geopolitical issues have “always affected [academic] cooperation, for better or for worse” so, in that sense, recent developments affecting Western-China academic collaborations are “nothing new”.

She added that higher education and scientific collaborations, like cultural ties, are “very important components of diplomatic relations between countries…probably even more so when there is a political problem”.

Professor van der Wende said that universities could benefit from clearer guidance on sensitive academic areas from national authorities and “cannot be naive”. But she argued that the experience of the United Nations’ “knowledge embargo” against Iran’s nuclear research – successfully challenged by Iranian students in the Netherlands – showed that any restrictive measures should only be applied to specified research facilities or technologies and to specific individuals, not to entire groups on the basis of their nationality.

Universities should never be put in a position of being forced to “look at every Chinese student or [academic] colleague as a spy”, she said.

The universities of Southampton and Manchester were the UK institutions ranked by the ASPI report as being among the world’s top 10 universities for PLA collaborations.

In a blog, Mr Joske says that a Chinese PhD student who worked on graphene at Manchester is “now a researcher at the PLA’s National University of Defence Technology (NUDT), which originally sent him abroad”, citing a Chinese newspaper report that states that “the goal towards which he strives is opening up graphene’s applications in fields like military [artificial] intelligence and electromagnetic shielding”.

A Manchester spokesman said: “The university complies with all legislation and rules set out by the government when processing applications for staff and students from overseas.”

john.morgan@timeshighereducation.com

POSTSCRIPT:

Print headline: Scientists urged to rethink China links

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Reader's comments (1)

Too late. Chinese researchers have been keeping Western science afloat for years. 55% of America's peer-reviewed STEM papers have Chinese authors or co-authors. According to the Japan Science and Technology Agency, China now ranks as the most influential country in four of eight core scientific fields, tying with the U.S. The agency took the top 10% of the most referenced studies in each field, and determined the number of authors who were affiliated with the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France, China or Japan. China ranked first in computer science, mathematics, materials science and engineering. The U.S., on the other hand, led the way in physics, environmental and earth sciences, basic life science and clinical medicine. China is also rapidly catching up in physics, where the U.S. has long dominated. It is spending more than $6 billion to build the world's largest particle accelerator, which could put it at the forefront of particle physics. https://tinyurl.com/ydeqeqnb. Chinese technology (and deployment) leads the world all fields of civil engineering, all fields of sustainable and renewable energy, manufacturing, supercomputing, speech recognition, graphenics, thorium power, pebble bed reactors, genomics, thermal power generation, quantum communication networks, ASW missiles, in-orbit satellite refueling, passive array radar, metamaterials, hyperspectral imaging, nanotechnology, UHV electricity transmission, HSR, radiotelescopy, hypersonic weapons, satellite quantum communications and quantum secure direct communications.. “Approximately 72% of the academic patent families published in QIT since 2012 have been from Chinese universities. US universities are a distant second with 12%.” (Patintformatics. https://patinformatics.com/quantum-computing-report/). China has overtaken the US to become the world’s largest producer of scientific research papers, making up almost a fifth of the total global output, according to a major new report. https://www.stm-assoc.org/document-library/

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