As Australia and Japan universities guard tech research, could China fears affect competitiveness?
- Amid US-China tensions, Australian and Japanese universities are acting to prevent transfer of sensitive technologies by foreign researchers
- But universities have to balance spying fears with healthy academic collaboration and staying competitive, analysts say
When Wang Ximing (not his real name), a recent Chinese graduate in nano materials and technology, started looking into universities to pursue postgraduate studies some time back, Japan was his top choice.
But the 23-year-old, who asked to use a pseudonym for privacy reasons, is having serious second thoughts amid reports that Japanese institutions are now required to hand over to the government details of foreigners studying in “sensitive” science and technology subjects.
These include areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), quantum cryptography and drone technology, which have both civilian and military applications.
“Even though the Japanese government did not explicitly say so, from what I have read, it is quite obvious that they are targeting Chinese students,” Wang said. “I also read that Chinese students’ visas are recently more heavily screened to prevent us from stealing advanced technology.”
Wang, who comes from the northeastern province of Liaoning, attended Beihang University in Beijing – one of seven Chinese universities dubbed the “Seven Sons of National Defence” which are known for their close ties to China’s military and defence industry.
“Given my background, I am sure I will either be heavily scrutinised or even rejected, so there is really no point in trying,” Wang said.
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The friction is among the reasons Canberra is revising guidelines introduced in 2019 to prevent interference by foreign actors in Australian universities. Some proposed measures include training students to recognise foreign meddling and to report it to the authorities.
“I can’t help but think, both Japan and Australia think that all Chinese students are either spies or engaged in some sort of espionage,” Wang said.
His views echo the mounting concerns that Chinese students are facing in pursuing studies abroad. US-China tensions have heightened suspicions of them as spies and agents of foreign influence, a perception that is also growing in countries such as Australia.
Australia has recorded a 7.5 per cent decline in enrolments from China since 2019, according to Education Minister Alan Tudge.
On January 6, Chinese national Xiang Haitao pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit economic espionage to benefit China, while Gang Chen, a naturalised American nanotechnologist and engineer at MIT, was charged last month for concealing his extensive ties with China.
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Since 2018, the US has prosecuted some two dozen academic scientists it claims abetted Chinese attempts to steal US-funded technology. Nine pleaded guilty, while others were either acquitted or had their charges dropped.
Suspicion has also spilled over to campuses in Japan, boosted by the US asking its allies in Asia to limit Chinese nationals from accessing research in fields such as robotics, aviation, engineering and hi-tech manufacturing.
Of the 703,500 Chinese nationals studying abroad in 2019, 20 per cent or 140,786 were in Australia, 24.5 per cent were in the US, and 17.6 per cent were in Japan, according to figures from China’s education ministry, the Japan Student Services Organisation, and Australia’s federal government.
As for universities elsewhere including those in Singapore, Chinese students’ access to sensitive research technologies had not yet emerged as an issue, said Chong Ja Ian, an associate political-science professor at the National University of Singapore.
“Part of the reason is that Singapore does not yet work as heavily in areas with really high-end technologies that the US and its allies actively regulate,” Chong said, adding that as a non-US ally, Singapore had less access to some of the more sensitive technologies and their security, defence, and military applications.
However, as Singapore develops and collaborates on high-end technology research, the city state’s research facilities could gain “more attention going forward as Washington seeks to close potential loopholes even as Beijing seeks to exploit them,” Chong said.
Analysts and academics said that while the need to reduce foreign interference and ensure national security was essential, it could have a detrimental impact on fostering collaboration and producing innovations such as in AI, and could even slow down the internationalisation of some universities, especially those in Japan.
Australian restrictions
Last November, Australia unveiled a list of 63 “critical technologies” to be promoted and protected, further tightening the lid on information that foreign counterparts could access.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the measures were aimed at “balancing the economic opportunities of critical technologies with their national security risks”, alluding to Canberra’s concerns about the transfer of sensitive technology to foreign countries, especially China, under the guise of academic cooperation.
Shortly afterwards, Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews announced new guidelines for universities to reduce the risk of foreign interference and the transfer of sensitive technology.
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Jennifer Y.J. Hsu, a research fellow at the Lowy Institute, said Australia was worried its commercial advantage could be compromised by unwanted technology transfers, and by researchers not declaring affiliations with militaries or foreign governments where transparency was opaque.
James Laurenceson, director of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney, said that while there was a tightening of procedures within universities, the issue was “still very much in flux”.
Laurenceson, a member of the University Foreign Interference Taskforce set up by Canberra at the end of 2019, said the group was asked to study ways to tighten protection for universities against foreign interference.
“But now, less than two years later, the government is already looking to apply something new and more prescriptive,” he said. “This is despite all universities having vastly strengthened their risk mitigation measures over the last couple of years.”
In an address to the Australian Institute of International Affairs in June, Ross McLennan, executive research services director at Macquarie University, said that universities continued to have systems and checks to ensure compliance with defence-sensitive technologies.
“Feedback from government officials suggests an abundance of caution and over-reporting to government agencies, rather than a dearth,” McLennan said.
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Japan’s rule reset
Last year, Japan announced that universities would have to gain permission from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry before teaching critical technologies to foreign students who remain in Japan for more than six months.
New guidelines to be issued later this year will boost measures even further, such as requiring universities and research institutes to provide greater levels of disclosure and tighter control over the potential outflow of research to continue receiving funding.
The proposed guidelines will also require researchers to report to their universities when they receive funding from external institutions, while universities are expected to be in charge of investigating the relationship between foreign students and foreign governments.
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Ryo Hinata-Yamaguchi, project assistant professor at the University of Tokyo’s Research Centre for Advanced Science and Technology, said the measures were part of Japan’s “long-overdue efforts” to enhance its economic security and prevent the leakage of sensitive technologies that could illegally benefit foreign militaries.
Japan’s concerns are credible, as much of its advanced science and technological research could be used for military purposes, Hinata-Yamaguchi said. “Given the geopolitical tensions, there are strong reasons why Japan would want to avoid such technologies from benefiting states that could use them against Japan’s interests.”
Within Japan, there appears to be a consensus among the media and policymakers that the country’s research and development in areas such as AI, quantum cryptography and drone technology could be used for military and private purposes. Many Japanese universities that work in these areas also accept Chinese students.
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Citing the GPS, or Global Positioning System, Satoru Nagao, a non-resident fellow at the Washington-based Hudson Institute, said it was not easy to distinguish between dual-use technologies.
Japan has for a long time underestimated security and not done much to scrutinise or limit the number of foreign students, he said.
“Recently, escalating US-China competition has demanded that Tokyo recheck the weakness of Japan’s system,” said Nagao, adding that the US had expressed its concerns their shared data would be leaked to Beijing.
“Thus, now is the time for the Japanese government to reset the rule of sensitive technologies”, especially if Tokyo hopes to continue cooperation with the US and its allies, he said.
“Chinese students are a matter of concern,” said Nagao, noting that under existing rules, Chinese students who have accessed sensitive technologies are able to return to China and work on military projects.
According to research carried out by the trade and education ministries in April last year, only 62.5 per cent of universities in Japan pre-screened students before accepting them, while an even lower 39.4 per cent said they warned foreign students not to take home technologies that could be used for military purposes.
In 2019, statistics released by the Japan Student Services Organisation showed that 60 per cent of Japan’s 53,000 international postgraduate students and more than 22 per cent of international faculty were Chinese.
The concerns about the leaking of Japanese technology are real and weighing heavily on the minds of policymakers, said Heng Yee Kuang from the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Public Policy, who pointed to recent concerns over Chinese students in Japan who had been accused of cyber-espionage on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army, especially the alleged cyberattacks on JAXA, Japan’s space agency.
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Last April, Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported that the Chinese military had instructed a hacker group to conduct cyberattacks on JAXA and nearly 200 Japanese research institutions and firms in 2016 and 2017.
“The link between economics and security and technology is highly visible with the recent appointment of a new Minister for Economic Security as well as a new economic division set up within the National Security Secretariat,” Heng said.
In October, Japan created the new cabinet-level minister of economic security to integrate the country’s economic and security interests, with Takayuki Kobayashi appointed to tackle critical issues ranging from shoring up supply chains, to securing critical infrastructure and countering economic espionage.
Michito Tsuruoka, an associate policy management professor at Keio University, said even though the government and university authorities, under pressure from the government, had demanded strict application of the new regulations regarding access to sensitive technologies, professors were uncertain of how to proceed.
Preventing only some students in the same class or laboratory from accessing certain information might not be practical, Tsuruoka said. “Are we really prepared to kick out some existing students due to their nationality? Or do only nationalities matter?”
Impact on collaboration and enrolments
Tsuruoka said it was impossible for universities and professors to know the types of connections and relationships each foreign student had, and to handle the new regulations, more paperwork and more professional support staff at each university would also required.
Others say there will be an adverse impact on research collaboration and in the case of Japan, its already declining international status.
According to Nature Index, a database that tracks the scientific output of institutions and countries, the Asia-Pacific’s share of global international research rose from 27 per cent in 2015 to 34 per cent in 2020 – with 98 per cent of that increase coming from China.
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China also does particularly well in earth and environmental sciences, where it dominates with nine of the top 10 institutions in the region.
China’s success, driven by growing state funding, has made it “the region’s scientific growth engine, supplanting Japan”, according to Catherine Armitage, chief editor of Nature Index.
Laurenceson said that China was by far Australia’s most important research collaborator, especially in AI research. “If this collaboration is seriously crimped, this will have obvious costs for Australia in that it will be harder to remain at the technology frontier.”
In studies published by Laurenceson’s Australia-China Relations Institute in December 2019, China was said to be Australia’s leading AI research partner “by a large margin”.
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In 2018, researchers affiliated with Chinese institutions reportedly featured in 31.3 per cent of all Australian AI publications, triple the share of Australia’s next most important partner, the US.
Even though both China and the US had grown in significance as research partners, the study noted that “China has been the clear stand-out, having increased as a share of the Australian total by 24.3 percentage points over the past decade, compared with 6.8 percentage points for the US”.
In March, a report from the US National Security Commission on AI warned that China was poised to overtake America as the global leader in AI by 2030, while a Harvard Kennedy School report last month noted that China now clearly topped the US in practical AI applications, including facial recognition, voice recognition and fintech.
“China spends around US$500 billion on research and development while Australia spends around US$20-25 billion,” Laurenceson said, adding that Australia’s ability to operate at the frontier of global science and technology was linked to working with international partners.
“China is now a science and technology powerhouse,” he said. “The idea that Australia could significantly scale back collaboration with China without shooting ourselves in the foot is a fantasy.”
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Meanwhile, Hiroshi Nagano, a professor at Tokyo’s National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, said that given the time needed to decide what constituted “critical technologies”, the impact of foreign enrolments was not clear.
“Rules will be introduced, but it is too early to say if the number of students coming to Japan will decrease or increase,” Nagano said.
University of Tokyo’s Heng said much would depend on how broadly the technologies were defined and how sensitive they might be, but concurred that the move might hamper the ability of universities to attract talented overseas researchers, especially at the postgraduate level.
However, “demonstrating an ability to protect sensitive research may also reassure collaboration with cutting-edge researchers especially in the US and Europe”, he added.
Amid the pandemic, Keio University’s Tsuruoka said Covid-related entry restrictions had already heavily affected the international activities of Japanese universities, “undermining their networks and reputation”. And there has been no indication of when the strict regulations, which essentially bar new foreign students from entering Japan, will end.
“This really is the most urgent problem that needs to be addressed,” Tsuruoka said. “Otherwise, Japanese universities will lose competitiveness and become isolated.”
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In a report by University World News in November, analysts said Japanese universities still had some way to go in ensuring greater globalisation, with QS Research Director Ben Sowter noting that Japan’s universities were stagnating and losing ground to its regional peers, China in particular.
Further attempts to restrict the teaching of sensitive technologies to foreign students might further erode the competitiveness of Japanese universities, observers say.
The University of Tokyo’s Hinata-Yamaguchi said the impact on Japanese universities’ internationalisation and competitiveness depended on how strictly the measures were enforced.
But, he conceded: “The consequences of not having more protective measures are far greater.”
