Are European academics helping China's military?

An investigation by DW and partners has found that European researchers have cooperated with China's National University of Defense Technology. The NUDT's purpose is to "Strengthen the Armed Forces and the Nation."

The promotional video for China's elite National University of Defense Technology is set to dramatic music. In quick succession, soldiers run behind tanks, guns blazing, followed by uniformed NUDT professors addressing attentive students.

"We dedicate our lives to the modernization of the national defense army," a narrator intones.

The NUDT is the alma mater of a Chinese student who subsequently did his Ph.D in Germany, conducting research that may have had potential military applications.

Yet the German professor who supervised the student's PhD readily admitted in a recent phone call that he had never given his student's military affiliation much thought.

A note of regret crept into the professor's voice as he recalled the friendly and "outstanding" student, whom he had been proud to host at his institute of computer sciences in a small university town. He said he had been sorry to see the student return to China once his Chinese scholarship ran out.

Upon going back to China, the student took a job with the NUDT.

His former German host knows little about the exact

nature of the man's research. "When you're at NUDT," the professor told DW, "you're not allowed to talk about your work."

Run by the Communist Party's Central Military Commission, the NUDT plays a crucial role in military research, from hypersonic and nuclear weapons to quantum supercomputers, said Alex Joske, an independent researcher who until 2020 tracked military institutes and labs in China as an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Researchers across Europe have forged close ties with scientists from the NUDT, whose mission is written in bold characters on a gargantuan stone slab close to the campus's College of Computer Sciences: "Excel in Virtue and Knowledge; Strengthen the Armed Forces and the Nation."

From AI to robotics to quantum

Under the lead of the Dutch outlet Follow the Money and the German investigative nonprofit CORRECTIV, DW and 10 European newsrooms collaborated for several months on

the China Science Investigation, which found nearly 3,000 scientific publications by researchers affiliated with European universities and their counterparts at military-linked institutions in China — most notably the NUDT.

Though it's possible that some papers may relate to the same research projects, the overall figure gives an estimate of the extent of the cooperation.

The joint publications ranged from artificial intelligence and robotics to quantum research: fields that explore what are often referred to as emerging technologies. These are set to reshape the ways in which we communicate, socialize, drive and, crucially, conduct — and win or lose — wars.

In a future in which the countries with the most powerful algorithms and computers are set to dictate the world order, it shouldn't come as a surprise that China, in its stated quest to establish itself as the global superpower, is actively pursuing this expertise abroad. This includes sponsoring top Chinese researchers to study internationally.

Military personnel are among them, Joske said. "For every couple of papers that are published, you will possibly also see an actual Chinese military officer who's worked and studied at a European university and built a relationship that's led to these collaborations and research papers," he said.

As many Chinese students are funded by lucrative government scholarships, they are particularly attractive to European institutes and research groups, which are often strapped for cash. The joint research, DW and its partners have found, may, in essence, represent a transfer of knowledge from European scientists to the Chinese military.

More than 200 projects in Germany

Nearly half of the studies gathered by DW and its media partners were published by NUDT-affiliated scientists and researchers at universities in the United Kingdom, followed by the Netherlands and Germany. In the latter case, at least 230 papers were published from 2000 through early 2022.

DW and its German partners, CORRECTIV, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Deutschlandfunk, found several problematic publications among those. The studies were conducted with researchers at the University of Bonn and University of Stuttgart and through the prestigious Fraunhofer Institute in fields such as quantum research, artificial intelligence and computer vision.

DW has decided not to name the titles of papers and the

scientists to protect individuals from retribution at home and abroad. And, given the scale of collaboration across Europe, DW does not believe that individuals should be singled out. It is very likely that there are more potentially problematic papers in the data set that have yet to be identified as such.

'Have to make a real effort not to see the dual-use application'

Several independent researchers confirmed that the research described in the papers might indeed have — to varying degrees — potential dualuse applications. In other words: The research could serve civilian as well as defense or security purposes.

One paper was published in 2021, the others within the past five years. In some studies, such as one on tracking groups of people, the application was immediately clear. One would "have to make a real effort not to see the dual-use applications here — you can't rule out that it can be used to track Uyghurs," one researcher said, referring to the Muslim minority that China has submitted to a systematic and forced program of "reeducation" in detention camps and

Thirty journalists from seven European countries partnered for the China Science Investigation

For a long time, Western countries actively courted China. Cooperation on all levels was encouraged