Chinese military researchers exploit western universities

Study shows US and UK scientists aiding high-tech progress for People’s Liberation Army 
By Kathrin Hille in Taipei

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping inspecting forces of the People's Liberation Army. A study shows the PLA's scientists have contributed to the development of Beijing's military technology by collaborating with researchers at western universities 

China has sent thousands of scientists affiliated with its armed forces to western universities — especially in countries that share intelligence with the US — and is building a web of research collaboration that could boost Beijing’s military technology development.
 About 2,500 researchers from Chinese military universities spent time at foreign universities — led by the US and UK — over the past decade, and they hid their military affiliations, according to a new report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), a think-tank partly funded by Australia’s department of defence.
 The research effort focused on members of the so-called “Five Eyes” group of countries with which the US shares an intelligence relationship: the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
Over the past five years, researchers affiliated to the People’s Liberation Army published more joint papers with scientists from the UK and the US than with those of any other country. 
 The findings will fuel the debate raging in some western capitals over how to control the flow of cutting-edge and especially dual-use technology to Beijing — one of the main fronts in their struggle to adapt to a rapidly rising China.
 The PLA’s international research collaboration “focuses on hard sciences, especially emerging and dual-use technologies”, said Alex Joske, author of the report that is being published by ASPI today.
Dual-use technology has civilian and military applications.
 While the US and other western militaries have expanded exchanges with China’s armed forces, the scientists the PLA sends abroad usually have no contact with military officers in their host countries. Instead, the focus is on collecting knowledge to power China’s military technological progress. 
 In 2015, the science publication Shenzhou Xueren wrote about an interdisciplinary project between the PLA’s National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and the University of Cambridge.
The article said the collaboration would produce the next generation of supercomputer experts for China and eventually “greatly enhance our nation’s power in the areas of defence, communications, anti-jamming for imaging and high-precision navigation”.
 Mr Joske found that navigation technology, computer science and artificial intelligence (AI) were the dominant areas of exchanges after reviewing collaborations between Chinese and foreign scientists since 2006 and statistics on Chinese researchers who were sent abroad.
 In one example, several researchers visited UK universities and are continuing joint research on topics such as combustion in scramjet engines, which could power hypersonic aircraft capable of flying at six times the speed of sound.
Wang Zhenguo, deputy chief of the PLA’s scramjet programme and head of the department of postgraduate studies at the NUDT, has co-authored 18 papers with foreign scientists.
 Huang Wei, an NUDT scramjet researcher and aircraft design expert for the PLA’s General Armaments Department, worked on his PhD while visiting the University of Leeds between 2008 and 2010, a researcher at the UK university told the FT.
Luo Wenlei, another NUDT scramjet researcher, wrote his PhD thesis on scramjet engines at Leeds in 2014.
 Both Huang and Luo, as well as Luo’s doctoral thesis supervisors, have published together with  Wang on scramjets.
Derek Ingham, a professor at Leeds and one of Luo’s thesis supervisors, did not respond to a request for comment.
 Qin Ning, a professor at the University of Sheffield involved in some of the exchanges with Chinese scramjet experts, said their joint research was "academic" in nature.
 He added that a number of EU-China collaborative projects strongly encouraged by the university — with the participation of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, which is administered by the State Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence, China’s weapons industry regulator — had produced “fruitful collaboration”.
Scientists working in PLA universities do not mention this affiliation when applying to western universities or publishing in English, but present themselves as members of civilian-sounding academic institutions instead. 
 One of the persistent pushes for international technology collaboration has come from the PLA’s Rocket Force, which includes China’s missile and nuclear weapons programmes. 
Major General Hu Changhua, one of the leading missile experts at Rocket Force Engineering University, spent three months at Germany’s University of Duisburg-Essen in 2008, while Zhou Zhijie, another lecturer at RFEU, was a visiting scholar at the University of Manchester in 2009. Both concealed their affiliation with RFEU and named the Xi’an Research Institute of High Technology, a non-existent institution, instead, the ASPI report said.
They continue to publish in English under this fake affiliation, entries in digital science publication databases show. 
 Yang Jianbo and Xu Dongling, two professors at Manchester, published a book with Maj-Gen Hu and Zhou in 2011, and have continued to collaborate with RFEU researchers, according to entries on ResearchGate, the online database of scientific papers. 
Yang and Xu did not respond to requests for comment.
Zhou did not respond to a request for comment.
Maj-Gen Hu could not be reached for comment.
 Among universities in the US, which hosted about 500 visiting scholars from PLA-affiliated schools over the past decade, Georgia Tech scientists published the highest number of joint papers with PLA researchers, according to Mr Joske.
 Liu Ling, a professor at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing who works on big data and cloud computing, has co-published papers with scientists from the NUDT according to the digital library of IEEE, a scientists’ association.
 She told the FT that her work with NUDT visiting scholars “has been on pure (fundamental) research” and unrelated to military applications, adding: “While I am not familiar with all of Georgia Tech collaborations, I know for sure that I have never worked with PLA directly”.
 However, defence experts cast doubt on such a distinction. 
While many staff of PLA-affiliated universities are so-called civilian cadres who focus on scientific work and are not supposed to be used in combat, they are still members of the PLA.
NUDT is supervised by the Central Military Commission, China’s top military body.
 In 2015, the US government added NUDT to its list of organisations that require case-by-case licensing for the transfer of any item to them, including technology, under the Export Administration Regulations.