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Posted Jun 5, 2024, 10:22 AM
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Join Date: May 2017
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Quote:
Canada’s Universities Are a Pipeline for Chinese Military Technology
THROUGH NAÏVETÉ and mindless belief in the universal benefits of academic exchange, some of Canada’s leading universities have contributed to the militarization of the Far East.
From the start of academic exchanges with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the early 1970s, the government of Canada has watched and largely approved of Chinese students focusing almost exclusively on science and technology faculties at Canadian universities. Meanwhile, Canadians going to study in China have engrossed themselves in Chinese language and culture and Maoism. For most of the past fifty years, Canadian universities and authorities were satisfied with this exchange. They saw giving Chinese students the benefits of Canadian knowledge and experience in science and technology as a gift toward the economic and industrial development of China.
Around the year 2000, however, Beijing and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) realized that here was an opportunity to grab or develop technology for their program of rapid military modernization that had begun a decade before. The PLA calls the program “picking flowers in foreign lands to make honey in China,” and it is not at all as innocent as it sounds. It involves PLA engineers and scientists from the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and six other armed-forces universities disguising their military links and presenting themselves as simple scholars in order to engage in postgraduate research at Canadian universities.
What they are after is any science or technology that has military applications, and they have been very successful. It is only in the past five years or so that Western governments and their intelligence agencies have cottoned on to the extent of the flowers-to-honey program. And Canada is not the only target. A paper published in 2018 by the International Cyber Policy Centre of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute ranks Canada third after the United States and the United Kingdom in the list of countries targeted by PLA military scientists. The list of the top ten rounds out with Australia, Germany, Sweden, Singapore, the Netherlands, Japan, and France. It was compiled by seeking out the true identities of the disguised PLA scientists who published peer-reviewed research documents from 2006 to 2017. In that latter year, eighty-four Chinese researchers at Canadian universities were identified as undercover PLA scientists. In 2016, the number was 106, and in 2015, it was ninety-five. The number had been growing steadily since 2008.
Canada also loomed large in the list of the top ten target international universities. The University of Waterloo was fourth after universities in Singapore, Australia, and the UK. Placed ninth and tenth on the list were the University of Toronto and McGill University. That is not the whole story. A more recent study by the US strategic intelligence company Strider Technologies Inc., provided to the Globe and Mail and published in January 2023, shows that fifty Canadian universities have been successfully targeted by the PLA campaign. Like the Australian report, Strider also found the University of Waterloo top of the list of Canadian collaborators, witting or not. Also on the Strider list of NUDT partners are the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, the University of Victoria, McMaster University, Concordia University, and the University of Calgary.
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The Strider investigation found that, all told, in the previous five years, academics at ten of Canada’s leading universities had published 240 joint papers with Chinese military scientists from the NUDT. Among the NUDT researchers were experts in missile performance and guidance systems, mobile robotics, and automated surveillance. The topics included quantum cryptography, photonics, and space science.
Unlike in the US, where authorities do not hesitate to take action when evidence of security breaches are found, there have been few attempts in Canada to bring legal action against intellectual property espionage by China. One exception has been the firing of Qiu Xiangguo and her husband, Cheng Keding, from Canada’s high-security infectious diseases laboratory, the National Microbiology Laboratory, in Winnipeg in January 2021. The couple were alleged to have collaborated with known Chinese military researchers to study and conduct experiments on deadly pathogens. It is claimed that, in March 2019, they sent samples of the Ebola and Henipah viruses to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. The couple lost their security clearance two months later, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police started an investigation.
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The US expanded its 2015 blacklisting of NUDT associates in 2020, when it started denying academic visas to people it believed might steal intellectual property with military applications. A Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) report dated December 21, 2021, and seen by a Globe and Mail reporter, says that since the crackdown, PRC scholarship students coming to the US, Canada, and other Western target countries like the UK and Australia try to hide their military links and disguise the sensitivity of their research. They go to foreign universities to do research on disciplines that don’t ring security alarm bells but which are equally useful for military applications. The newspaper quoted the CSIS document, which was shared with Canada’s Five Eyes intelligence partners: “For example, one student majored in remote sensing in the PRC. In Canada, the same student’s major is forestry, which utilizes similar technology to remote sensing.”
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https://thewalrus.ca/canadas-univers...ry-technology/
Lots more in the article.
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