The revelation that a clandestine army of Western academics has been secretly stealing and selling sensitive research to the Chinese Communist Party is shocking enough. That Australia’s universities are hosting dozens of these scientific Quislings is even worse.
The Chinese government is actively recruiting leading Australian scientists for a secretive research program that offers lucrative salaries and perks but requires their inventions to be patented in China and obliges them to abide by Chinese law.
“Chinese law” meaning that they must co-operate with the Chinese Communist Party, including in religious affairs. Thousand Talent contracts also specify that China “owns the copyrights of the works, inventions, patents and other intellectual properties produced by Party B during the Contract period”.
Academics targeted globally under the Thousand Talents Plan may have a field of research with a military application, sparking the risk the Chinese government is misusing their inventions and technology for military advancement and even to develop weapons.
Universities are pleading ignorance of what their own academics are up to.
UNSW said that at no time had one of its Thousand Talents Plan recipients, Joe Dong, “sold or relinquished patents to any Chinese power companies”.
When presented with evidence that Professor Dong was named in patents lodged with the National Intellectual Property Administration of China just last year, the UNSW spokeswoman said this was done “without his knowledge” and “was in line with the academic culture in China at the time”.
Thousand Talents Plan contracts usually legally require the copyright for any research or inventions connected with the program to be registered in China — irrespective of whether the research has been done in Australia or includes Australian funding. In return, academics receive a second salary commonly worth more than $150,000 plus lucrative research grants that can stretch into the millions from a Chinese-affiliated university.
There are a suite of other perks including education for their children, housing allowances and jobs for their spouses[…]
The Australian’s revelations show the widespread infiltration of Australia’s universities by the Chinese Communist Party, with almost every major institution complicit through its inaction in allowing China to be the beneficiary of its research and inventions.
The Australian has named dozens of academics in Australia involved. The implications of some of them are truly alarming. Brad Yu is a Curtin University academic who has taken millions of dollars of funding from Australia and the US, yet still went to work at China’s Hangzhou Dianzi University – allied with China’s military, including classified weapons technology.
Professor Yu specialises in drone automation and artificial intelligence, and has been working on an area of intense interest to the Chinese government: aerial warfare and co-ordinating thousands of unmanned aerial vehicles to co-operate in the air.
Other scientists recruited by Thousand Talents include specialists in quantum field theory, laser technology and nanotech.
While the Australian universities involved are denying any knowledge of what their academics have been up to, many of the academics themselves are denying even being party to China’s thievery. But Thousand Talents contracts also state that academics cannot disclose they are a Thousand Talents recipient without permission, which leaves the question of deception open. Many in the US in particular have failed to disclose their second incomes, in breach of most university conflict-of-interest policies.
Chen Yonglin, a Chinese diplomat who defected to Australia sparking diplomatic tensions in 2005, said the Thousand Talents Plan was “totally a theft” and warned that the Australian government and universities should take it more seriously.
“China is particularly interested in some world-leading fields of hi-tech in Australia such as quantum science, biotechnology, nanotechnology and new materials, superconducting materials, medical science and other advanced hi-tech,” Mr Chen said.
“Australia should halt all high-level science and technology collaboration with Communist China”[…]
The Chinese Government has taken the program underground, censoring and wiping records of academic participation online. Mentions of the program have been erased from scientists’ CVs and censored from Chinese government websites.
Charles Sturt University public ethics academic Clive Hamilton said if there were scholars in Australia on the books of the Thousand Talents program, “then they are in effect working for the Chinese government while being paid to work at Australian universities”.
The FBI has launched criminal investigations into Thousand Talents scientists and a Senate Committee has declared it a threat to national security. Australia and other Western nations must do the same.
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