European Scientists Empowering China's Military
by Judith Bergman • July 8, 2022 at 5:00 am
"Western universities need to understand that Chinese military scientists have only one client, and that is the People's Liberation Army." — Meia Nouwens, researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), Politiken, May 19, 2022.
"[T]here is an attempt to take as much knowledge as possible from our research communities back to China. In my home country, the Netherlands, there are researchers who have been working on artificial intelligence with Huawei instead of with NATO. It's the world turned upside down." — David van Weel, NATO's Assistant Secretary General for Emerging Security Challenges, Politiken, May 23, 2022
In one Danish case... a Chinese military engineer, saying that he came from a Chinese research institute that turned out to not exist, collaborated with Aalborg University in Denmark on advanced radar technology. The engineer was, instead, from the People's Liberation Army Information Engineering University.... [T]he university did not take steps to vet the Chinese engineer's credentials. — Politiken, November 30, 2021
"If you look at... 40 years ago, [the CCP] had zero satellites... They had no ICBMs... They had no nuclear weapons... They had no navy.... Look at what they have today.... We're witnessing one of the largest shifts in global geostrategic power that the world has witnessed." — General Mark Milley, Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, breakingdefense.com, November 4, 2021.
British universities have accepted £240 million from Chinese institutions, many with links to the military, including £60 million from institutions sanctioned by the US government for supplying the Chinese military with fighter jets, communications technology and missiles. In... just six years, the number of research collaborations between scientists in the UK and Chinese institutes with deep connections to the country's defense forces tripled to more than 1,000. — The Times, February 4, 2022.
[O]ne of the UK's "foremost" high-tech weapons experts, Professor Clive Woodley at Imperial College London – one of the British universities that has received the most funding from China -- had been freely working with China for years.... Most of Woodley's research has been funded by the Ministry of Defence.... He has advised the MoD about many of its key lethal systems." — David Rose, investigative journalist, Unherd, May 21, 2022.
"Adapting to a world affected by the rise of China is the single greatest priority for MI6" — Richard Moore, UK's spy chief, head of MI6, Sky News, November 30, 2021.
New research done by Follow the Money, a Dutch platform for investigative journalism, and ten other European media outlets, found that European scientists have "shared militarily sensitive knowledge with the Chinese army on a large scale."
The project, known as the China Science Investigation, collected a staggering 353,000 scientific collaborations between Europe and China and found that, of these, 2,994 have taken place with the Chinese military, defined as, "studies where scientists from Western European universities collaborated with Chinese colleagues directly linked to an institute that is part of the Chinese army."
