Deutsche Welle (English edition)
Spain: Exiled ex-King Juan Carlos returns for brief visit
The former Spanish monarch has returned to the country after spending nearly two years in self-imposed exile in the UAE. He was set to visit his son, King Felipe VI, in Madrid.
Spain's former King Juan Carlos arrived in the country Thursday after spending nearly two years in exile in the United Arab Emirates.
The Royal Household said Juan Carlos would be visiting family for a brief period between Thursday and Monday.
Spanish media reported that Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's government strongly rejected any suggestion that he be allowed to stay overnight at the royal residence.
Carlos to meet his son King Felipe VI
Juan Carlos had expressed his "desire to visit his family and friends regularly in Spain" in a "private" setting, the palace statement said.
The former king wants to
"facilitate" his son Felipe's exercise of duties in light of the "public consequences of certain past events of (his) private life."
Carlos will head to the northwestern town of Sanxenxo to attend a regatta on Friday.
He will then travel to Madrid on Monday to visit his son King
Felipe VI, his wife, Sofia, and other members of his family before leaving the same day for Abu Dhabi, where Carlos lives permanently.
Carlos abdicates throne in 2014
Once revered for skillfully transitioning the country to a democracy from dictatorship after the death of Spanish General Francisco Franco in 1975, Carlos' reign was later tarnished by a series of scandals.
Corruption investigations into his daughter's husband shed light on the royal family's finances, with his daughter becoming the first Spanish royal to stand trial in 2014. She was accused of committing tax fraud. She was later acquitted, but her husband was sentenced.
In 2012, Carlos drew criticism for spending on a lavish trip to Bostwana when Spaniards were reeling under job cuts and a recession.
In 2014, Carlos abdicated in favor of his son, Prince Felipe.
King Felipe renounced his inheritance and stripped his father of the palace allowance in March 2020 after reports emerged of his father's involvement in a high-speed rail contract in Saudi Arabia that was granted to a group of Spanish companies in 2011.
It also emerged that Carlos gave millions from the contract to a Danish businesswoman, Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, with whom he shared a close relationship.
Spanish and Swiss prosecutors dropped a series of
investigations into alleged fraud in March 2022. Carlos has since been viewed as a liability for King Felipe. rm/sms (Reuters, AFP)
all-encompassing surveillance.
The study was published together with a researcher from the NUDT who had received numerous military awards prior to publication.
Another paper delves into encrypted quantum communication. Several experts agreed that, though this field is at a very early stage, the research may eventually have potential dual-use applications, such as shielding military communication from eavesdropping.
Dual-use application not always easy to foresee
In a paper that aims to estimate the depth of objects, the potential military application was less clear-cut. "We could imagine that an adversary might have low-quality images they want to estimate depth from but can't without this," one expert wrote in an email to DW and its partners.
"At the same time, however, this could be exceedingly useful for, for example, open-source confirmation of covert sites by repressive governments and a range of peaceful activities," he continued. "We have a dual-use issue where the balance of risks and benefits are not clear."
And that leads to the heart of the problem: Military applications are not always easy to see and even less easy to foresee. Drones, for example, can be used to spray fields with fertilizers — or to gun down opponents in a war zone.
Scientific research is like a tower constructed out of a big pile of Lego bricks. Each researcher or institute adds a different colored brick until eventually a structure emerges that becomes clear for all to see. The difficulty in predicting potentially problematic applications is particularly acute in the field of basic research, as opposed to applied research, which is conducted with a certain application in mind.
Alex Joske said the line between basic and applied research could be "gray and unclear: One year you work on AI and algorithms for coordinating groups of objects, and the next year that very same research could be applied to military drone swarms, for example."
And, while scientists may set out with benign applications in mind, they can be co-opted — or coerced — to put their research to a different use.
In China, the omnipotent Communist Party has lifted all boundaries between civilian and military aspects of life: Anything and anybody can be commandeered for military purposes, including scientists.
Dual-use export regulations
In Germany, it's up to individual researchers to determine whether their research does indeed have a dual-use application. If it does, they need to apply for an export license for joint publications with scientists based outside of the European Union or for guest lectures abroad with the Federal Office for Economic Affairs and Export Control (BAFA).
Universities need to provide an end-use certificate that attests to a purely civilian use. But, one export control officer told DW, whether that certificate amounts to much "is another matter."
DW and its partners sent the list of potentially problematic publications to BAFA and the involved universities to determine if they had been granted export licenses. BAFA declined to comment on individual papers.
The NUDT also did not respond to questions.
In a written response to another inquiry, one German institute stressed that it was aware of its responsibility when it came to "academic freedom and risks." Though officials declined to comment on individual papers, the university asserted that each case was given careful consideration, particularly when it came to "sensitive topics of cooperation."
A spokesman for another university wrote that officials were not aware of any "contractually agreed research cooperation" with the NUDT. He added that the university had abided by German laws and regulations and pointed to "written information and offers of consultation" to raise awareness among faculty and students.
Agreements with foreign partners were given careful consideration, the spokesman wrote. However, he added, the university had "not seen any reason" to apply for an export license, given that the paper was the result of basic research.
A different university stressed that the paper in question was written without "direct involvement by the NUDT" and that it, too, was based on basic research that did not meet any "dual-use concerns."
'The hand that bites you'
When it comes to basic research, there are no restrictions whatsoever. "Anything goes," another export officer said.
The logic is that placing too many restrictions on basic research and collaborations would stifle scientific advancement. But lift all controls and you may risk feeding "the hand that bites you," Didi Kirsten Tatlow, a journalist and the co-author of "China's Quest for Foreign Technology: Beyond Espionage," told DW and its partners.
Tatlow cautions against working with China in certain fields, but she also concedes that all such scientific cooperation could not — and should not — be capped. Rather than treating all Chinese researchers with suspicion, Tatlow and others call for more stringent controls when it comes to research into potential dual-use technologies, and background checks for Chinese researchers along the lines of those already conducted for Iranian nationals.
For now, Tatlow said, "China feels that it can operate very freely in open societies such as Germany or the United States, and indeed it can, because we're not stopping most of these behaviors." The current situation for China, she said, is "a little bit like being a kid in a sweet shop: You can go in and take a lot of stuff."
Western courting of China
For a long time, Western countries actively courted China. Cooperation on all levels was encouraged, with China seen as a vast economic market to be tapped into.
The idea was that strong economic, scientific and cultural ties would automatically lead to more liberalization and democratization. They didn't.
It took a while for the warning signs to trickle into the public consciousness through reports of the unlawful and arbitrary internment of Uyghurs in camps, China's active courting of authoritarian regimes, and the quashing of the last pockets of opposition on the mainland and in Hong Kong. You could warn policymakers "until you were blue in the face," one security official sighed.
It was only in the past couple of years that politicians seemingly began to heed the warnings from German security agencies that the strategy of mutual entanglement might indeed be flawed. In 2020, the German Foreign Ministry started to screen visa applications from visiting Chinese researchers more closely, DW and its partners learned from security sources. Yet universities, which one security official called "naive and obsequious" when it comes to China, seemed to see little reason to change course.
The German computer scientist readily admits that he never really gave the student's affiliation with the NUTD a second thought — at least until recently. When pressed, he conceded that his former star pupil's research might have defense applications down the line.
But, he said, sounding genuinely surprised about the line of questioning, he had never met any foreign researchers "who behaved strangely: I just don't believe they are evil people." The international scientists he has met, he said, have been purely motivated by their quest for knowledge. They are, he stressed, essentially "good people."
Even now, he does not seem overly perturbed by his former student's NUTD affiliation, though he also does not think that they could collaborate on a project at this stage, given that his Chinese colleague was not allowed to even talk about his work, let alone share specific details.
But, the computer scientist said, should his former student be employed by a different university at some point in the future, "then I could well imagine working together again."