Montreal professor's parallel Chinese career

Raises question of appropriate foreign roles for scholars

As an expert in the science of telecommunications, Ke Wu has built a stellar career in Canada.

With hundreds of research papers to his name, the Polytéchnique Montreal professor leads two advanced-research centres in Quebec and holds the prestigious, if somewhat controversial, Huawei-funded chair in future wireless technologies.

To help carry out his work, he’s received at least $17 million in funding from provincial and federal agencies.

What’s not so clear when perusing Wu’s Canadian online presence is that he has achieved formidable academic prowess at the same time in another country, his native China.

He’s been recruited to the faculty of three different universities — with one of the jobs described as “full-time” — has large labs to study much the same topics as he does here, and received millions of dollars in Chinese research funding.

Wu, 57, is part of government advisory bodies there, and was once even a delegate to one of the Chinese Communist Party’s foremost legislative assemblies.

“For a country to develop and grow, rejuvenating the country through science and education is the key,” the China Scholars Abroad magazine quoted him as saying about the land of his birth.

There is no evidence that Wu has broken any rules. But with growing concern about Beijing’s drive to recruit scientific talent from the West, his parallel Chinese career raises questions about what sort of foreign activity is appropriate for Canadian-based scholars.

A new geopolitical order is taking shape. The globe is rapidly realigning under American and Chinese spheres of influence and the pandemic has only raised the stakes. How can Canada finally get serious about its internal stability and external security so it can effectively play a role as a middle power? Part of an ongoing National Post series.

Some politicians and intelligence agencies, especially in the United States, have raised the alarm recently about academic links to China. In some cases, they warn, it can lead to the transfer of valuable technology to a rival infamous for suctioning up foreign intellectual property, legally or otherwise.

Others argue that Beijing’s poaching of scientific knowhow fits into a long-standing academic tradition of international collaboration and exchange. Canadian universities are full of professors lured from other countries.

“To build a strong economy and improve the lives of all Canadians, we need a research environment that is open and collaborative,” said spokeswoman Christine Séguin of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, a major funder of Wu’s work.

“Exchange of faculty, students and knowledge contribute to building the linkages and competencies Canada needs to support scientific insights and innovation.”

She did not answer questions about Wu directly, and the professor himself could not be reached for comment, but Polytéchnique Montreal spokeswoman Annie Touchette said the University of Montreal-affiliated school had no security or other concerns about his Chinese pursuits.

The institution was aware of his “visiting or part-time professor or honorary” positions at three universities in China, and he keeps the institution informed about those commitments, she said via email.

As a world-leading expert in radio frequencies and millimetric waves, Wu collaborates with colleagues in France, Switzerland, Germany, the U.S., Belgium, Italy, Japan and Tunisia, as well as China, she said.

But one observer of Canada’s fraught relations with China voiced some concern, noting that Wu’s area of research — wireless communication — is of great importance to Beijing and its global technology champion, Huawei. Meanwhile, his participation nine years ago in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference suggests China sees him as a leading figure in its “United Front” foreign influence campaign, said Charles Burton, a former diplomat in China and fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

“It’s troubling that he has so many significant honours from China that are not listed on the Polytéchnique’s website,” said Burton. “Obviously, someone like Prof. Wu would want to exercise great care in his interactions with a foreign state.”

A U.S. Senate subcommittee’s report last year was more blunt about the issue, calling aggressive Chinese recruiting efforts a serious threat to American security, citing cases where sensitive technology was spirited to China by recruits.

“China unfairly uses the American research and expertise it obtains for its own economic and military gain,” charged the report.

Meanwhile, respected American academics, including the chair of Harvard University’s chemistry department, have been charged criminally with lying about benefiting from Beijing’s most prominent recruitment effort — the Thousand Talents Program.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) said earlier it has warned universities about “multiple hostile states” using academic poaching to bolster their economic and military standing.

CSIS spokesman John Townsend did not address questions from the National Post about Wu specifically, but said foreign nations constantly seek to acquire sensitive Canadian technologies and expertise by various methods.

That includes “the targeted use of specific academics who consciously act at the behest of a hostile state or who could be compelled to collect through offers of rewards or threat of punishment,” he said.

But there is also a benign interpretation of what China is doing. Many of the scientists recruited by Beijing, for instance, are Chinese natives who left the country in what has been called a brain drain.

And most of the recruitment does not involve theft or security breaches, argues Georgetown University’s Ryan Fedasiuk in a recent Foreign Policy magazine piece. The best way to counter China’s campaign is through more government support for bringing foreign scientists to the U.S, he says.

Wu did his undergraduate studies in Nanjing, but much of his training occurred outside of China. He received a Masters and PhD from France’s Grenoble University, then did a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Victoria. He began working at Polytéchnique Montreal in 1992.

He’s since won multiple awards, headed a branch of the international Institute of electrical and electronics engineers (IEEE) and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the country’s première scientific academy.

Along the way he’s been awarded over $12 million in grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, including NSERC’s annual contribution of about $300,000 to the Huawei chair. In 2018, Quebec and federal agencies contributed almost $5 million to his research.

According to Chinese-language media reports and other articles online, universities and talent-recruitment programs in China seem to have had their eye on him since the early 2000s.

In 2003, according to a lengthy profile in China Scholars Abroad magazine, Wu was hired as a professor by Southeast University, the renamed version of the college where he obtained his bachelor’s degree.

Wu was appointed the inaugural Sir Yue-Kong Pao Chair professor at Ningbo University on China’s east coast in 2007, and became a “full-time” faculty member there in 2014, according to an article in the Communist Party-run People’s Daily.

The university gave his team 1,000 square metres in research space and 20-million yuan, about $4 million, to research fifth-generation wireless technology, the article said.

A 2013 piece by the Xinhua News Agency said Wu had signed a “franchise agreement” with the Nanjing Post and Telecommunications University, apparently the result of efforts by the “Jiangsu (province) Ten Thousand Overseas Highlevel Talents Program.”

“For me, joining Nanjing Post (university) is an important life event, and it is also an important academic event,” the story quoted him as saying. “I will further cooperate and exchange with my colleagues in Nanjing Post, strive to create inventions, and jointly promote research in related disciplines to a higher level.”

Wu’s research team at the Nanjing school would be aided by five-million yuan grant, just under $1 million, said a separate article on the Jiangsu Communication Industry Association website.

The academic’s involvement in China has also drawn him close to government.

In 2011, he was a delegate to a session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a top Communist Party advisory body and overseer of the United Front Work Department, the agency that guides Beijing’s international influence effort.

Wu also served on the Overseas experts advisory committee of the government’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Office, now a branch of the United Front.

None of that is mentioned on the Polytechnique Montreal’s page for Wu, though a biography on the IEEE website notes that he has “visiting/honorary professorships at various universities around the world.”