How Elite Universities Normalize Chinese Espionage and Racist Persecution

​Now more than ever, be careful about choosing collaboration partners. That’s the lesson Strategy Risks and the Human Rights Foundation are drawing in a new report. Their findings are a jaw-dropping wake-up call about China manipulating Western institutions into giving up cutting-edge AI knowledge to serve its dictatorship.

Here’s the play-by-play:
​

1. Beginning in 2000, the U.S. and UK governments, along with other Western sources, funded numerous research projects at various academic institutions, including at MIT, Stanford, and Oxford.  
   
   
2. Using that money, the researchers partnered with two state-backed Chinese AI labs (this is where you should say, “Uh-oh!”) and co-authored roughly 3,000 papers.
   
   
3. This was applied research, a branch of academia that over the past 20 years has come to dominate high-dollar research grants, especially in the areas of security and technology. These papers were tasked with finding answers to real-world questions.
   
   
4. And while such pragmatic endeavors are not problematic in principle, these particular real-world questions weren’t about polar ice cap tenacity or the migration patterns of Central American bees. Instead, they’re straight out of Voldemort’s dark-arts agenda: How to track multiple “objects” (e.g., people) simultaneously. How to recognize the gait patterns of individuals (it turns out such patterns can be as unique as fingerprints), and how to see in the dark (because who doesn’t want to be able to do that?).
   
   
5. Why on earth would the Chinese be interested in obtaining the answers to such curious questions? The Chinese Communist Party’s technocratic authoritarian superstate requires certain capabilities: Mass surveillance, gathering intel on Western corporations, and exploring the intersections of AI, mathematics, and physics.

It gets worse. U.S. Department of Defense agencies were also involved in the funding process, and their specialized involvement helped drive research into national security questions: Optical-phase-shifting tech and biometric monitoring, to cite two examples. The Chinese military is keen on tracking people using drones and facial recognition algorithms. Or more to the point: it is keen on surveilling, detaining, and persecuting more than one million Uyghur Muslims. 

The report found that ethics watchdogs on the Western side lost their bark. Only two bothered to call out the troubling connection between Western institutions and their Chinese collaborators in the five years since 2020. “A staggering lack of interest,” is how the Human Rights Foundation characterized it to Fox News Digital. Still, in defense of what may have simply been an appalling level of naiveté on the part of Western researchers, the report concludes:

“Chinese laboratories are rarely listed as direct grant recipients, allowing them to bypass due-diligence checks while benefiting directly through co-authorship and knowledge transfer. Taxpayer resources generate knowledge that flows into institutions embedded in China’s apparatus of repression.”

The report then calls for the following guardrails: Mandatory due diligence on human rights, full disclosure of international partnerships, and expanded ethics mandates for AI institutes. It’s a lesson the FBI itself still needs to learn. We would add that this revelation cries out for congressional oversight and hearings – and if the facts warrant it – threats to cut off federal funding.

Of course, those guardrails will have no effect on China’s institutions, where security and technology firms are required to share their findings with the Chinese Communist Party.
​
But at least such reforms will give us a fighting chance to stymie these covert spycraft efforts, as well as to disabuse ourselves of the Faustian illusion that such collaborations were ever, or will ever be, business as usual.

DONATE & HELP US DEFEND YOUR FOURTH AMENDMENT RIGHTS