Claws of the Panda

[Editor’s note: The highly successful book, Claws of the Panda, first published in 2019 and recently expanded and updated, tells the story of Canada’s failure to construct a workable policy towards the People’s Republic of China – one that recognizes and confronts efforts by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to infiltrate and influence Canadian institutions and to exert control over Canadians of Chinese heritage. With the kind permission of Cormorant Books, Open Canada is delighted to publish Chapter 3 of Jonathan’s book for its readers. The Chapter focuses on the role Chinese researchers have had in Canada, funnelling Canadian technology back to China in support of the People’s Liberation Army]  

Through naivety and mindless belief in the universal benefits of academic exchange, some of Canada’s leading universities have contributed to the militarisation of the Far East.

From the start of academic exchanges with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the early 1970s, Canada has watched and largely approved of Chinese students focussing almost exclusively on science and technology faculties at Canadian universities. Meanwhile, Canadians going the other way engrossed themselves in Chinese language and culture, and Maoism. For most of the last 50 years Canadian universities and authorities were happy with this exchange. They saw giving Chinese students the benefits of Canadian knowledge and experience in science and technology as a gift towards the economic and industrial development of China. Around the year 2000, however, Beijing and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) realized that here was an opportunity to grab or develop technology for their program of rapid military modernization that had begun a decade before. The PLA calls the program “picking flowers in foreign lands to make honey in China,” and it is not at all as innocent as it sounds. It involves PLA engineers and scientists from the National University of Defence Technology (NUDT) and the other six armed forces universities disguising their military links and presenting themselves as simple scholars in order to engage in post-graduate research at Canadian universities.

What they are after is any science or technology that has military applications, and they have been very successful. It is only in the last five years or so that western governments and their intelligence agencies have cottoned on to the extent of the flowers-to-honey program. And Canada is not the only target. A paper published in 2018 by the International Cyber Policy Centre of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute ranks Canada third after the United States and the United Kingdom in the list of countries targeted by the PLA military scientists. The list of the top ten continued with Australia, German, Sweden, Singapore, Netherlands, Japan, and France. The list was compiled by seeking out the true identities of disguised PLA scientists who published peer reviewed research documents from 2006 to 2017. In that latter year, 84 Chinese researchers at Canadian universities were identified as undercover PLA scientists. In 2016 the number was 106, and in 2015 it was 95. The number had been growing steadily since 2008.Over the years about 300 PLA scientists have attended Canadian universities to steal or use Canadian expertise to develop technology useful for the militarization of the PRC.

Canada also loomed large among the top ten target international universities. The University of Waterloo was fourth after universities in Singapore, Australia, and the UK. Placed ninth and tenth on the list were the University of Toronto and McGill University. That is not the whole story. A more recent study by the US strategic intelligence company Strider Technologies Inc provided to the Globe and Mail newspaper, and published in January 2023, shows that 50 Canadian universities have been successfully targeted by the PLA campaign. Like the Australian report, Strider also found the University of Waterloo top of the list of Canadian collaborators with the PLA. From 2017 to 2022, researchers at the University of Waterloo published 46 papers on work done in collaboration with scientists from the PLA’s NUDT. Also on the Strider list of NUDT partners are the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, the University of Victoria, McMaster University, Concordia University, and the University of Calgary.

The Strider investigation found that all told, in the previous five years, academics at 10 of Canada’s leading universities had published 240 joint papers with Chinese military scientists from the NUDT. Among the NUDT researchers were experts in missile performance and guidance systems, mobile robotics, and automated surveillance. The topics included quantum cryptography, photonics, and space science.

Unlike in the US, where authorities do not hesitate to take action when evidence of security breaches are found, there have been few attempts in Canada to bring legal action against intellectual property espionage by the PRC. One exception has been the firing of Qiu Xiangguo and her husband Cheng Keding from Canada’s high-security infectious diseases laboratory, the National Microbiology Laboratory, in Winnipeg in January, 2021. The couple are alleged to have collaborated with known Chinese military researchers to study and conduct experiments on deadly pathogens such as Ebola, Rift Valley fever, and Lassa fever. It is claimed that in March 2019 they sent samples of the Ebola and Henipah viruses to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology. The couple lost their security clearance two months later and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police started an investigation.     

 Canadian taxpayers have funded some of the joint research with PLA scientists through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council. How much public money is not clear, and in 2021 Ottawa toughed up the lending guidelines for the council, requiring more stringent risk assessments. This followed the blacklisting of the NUDT in 2015 by President Barak Obama’s administration in the US. Why it took Canada seven years to get the message is a mystery. However, the restricting of Canadian government funds for research by PLA scientists has not stopped the collaboration. Beijing is lavish in the money it offers Canadian and other foreign universities for research with military applications, and Canadian researchers remain happy to take the cash.

The US expanded its 2015 blacklisting of NUDT associates in 2020 when it started denying academic visas to people it believed might steal intellectual property with military applications. A CSIS report dated December 21, 2021, and seen by a Globe and Mail reporter, says that since the crackdown PRC scholarship students coming to the US, Canada, and other western target countries like the UK and Australia try to hide their military links, and also disguise the sensitivity of their research. They go to foreign universities to do research on disciplines that don’t ring security alarm bells, but which are equally useful for military applications. The newspaper quoted the CSIS document, which was shared with Canada’s “Five Eyes” intelligence partners, as saying:

“For example, one student majored in remote sensing in the PRC. In Canada, the same student’s major is forestry, which utilizes similar technology to remote sensing.”

Remote sensing uses satellites or airplanes to gather detailed data from great distances. Foresters use it to assess the health and extent of national woodlands. Generals use it to spot enemy locations, capacities, and movements.

In tandem with this new approach by the PRC to grab military technology, said the CSIS report, all graduate students getting state scholarships to do research abroad are required to pledge loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This may be unnecessary as other reports from Australian and US security agencies say that all PLA research scientists are now required to be CCP members. The CSIS report says research scientists from China at Canadian universities and colleges are also receiving training on how to keep a low profile, avoid attracting the attention of CSIS, and how to avoid making friendships with other students and researchers.     

The modernization of the PLA was begun by Deng Xiaoping when he became the PRC’s leader in 1980. The PLA had just taken a drubbing in its invasion of Vietnam in 1979. It was clear that this very large, but ill trained and ill equipped peasant army was not capable of defending China or projecting power in the neighbourhood. The first decade or so of reform focussed on creating the structure of a modern professional military, and reorganizing its relationship with the CCP, the government, and the people of China. In the 1990s the drive to acquire modern weapons and battlefield command-and-control systems began. Central to that drive was using whatever means worked to get military technology from other countries. One of those means was using the then well-established links with foreign universities to steal or co-operate in the development of technologies useful in the manufacture of weapons or for management on the battlefield. The whole military modernization effort over a 40-year period has been very successful. Beijing now has the largest navy in the world, including a fleet of at least 100 submarines and three aircraft carriers. With the growth of its military power and its initial successes at power projection, such as the construction of seven islands garrisoned with military outposts in order to dominate the South China Sea, so too has Beijing’s ambitions. At first the aim was to be able to deter the US and other allies from coming to the aid of Taiwan, should Beijing choose to invade the island nation of 23 million people it claims to own. Now the CCP leaders’ intention is to match or surpass the US as a global military power. To that end, Beijing is already well on the way to ending the hegemony of the US Navy in the Pacific and Indian Ocean too. Global warming and the prospect of regular passage through the Canadian Arctic may soon bring the Atlantic Ocean into play as well.

Whether the sponsorship of research at Canadian universities by Huawei Technologies qualifies as a military incursion is a matter of interpretation. The company’s investment in 2019 of close to $60 million in research in Canadian laboratories was certainly seen as a major security issue. In the previous five years, Huawei had established research relationships with 17 Canadian universities. The money involved in each deal ranged from tens of thousands of dollars to many millions. The University of Waterloo alone took over $15 million from Huawei over the previous five years to fund 16 projects. This relationship made Canada vulnerable to sanctions from the US, where the authorities regarded Huawei as an arm of the CCP’s intelligence agencies. As well as using Canadian laboratories and researchers to develop new technologies, for which the company kept the patents, Huawei had sold a lot of network equipment to wireless carriers like Bell and Telus.

These profitable raids into Canadian academia by the PRC’s military and electronic espionage agents might not have happened if Canadian governments had given clear warnings about the threats to the country’s security. But until the Huawei Affair and the kidnapping of the Two Michaels there remained a large gap between the views on Beijing of CSIS and Canada’s political leadership. CSIS and other security agencies had no doubt about the threat the CCP’s agents represented for Canadian national security, and had been telling their political leaders about it for years. Politicians, with business people and academics, talking loudly at their elbows, continued to argue that any threat was outweighed by the financial advantages of trade with China and the ephemeral benefit of continued “contact” with the regime.    

In the early 2000s CSIS, after years of having its warnings ignored, began to act. It was cautious and acted in a way and on an issue that didn’t easily attract political or business push-back. CSIS agents began talking to the administrators of Canadian universities and colleges that had made agreement for Beijing-funded Confucius Institutes to be set up on their campuses. These appeared to be innocent enough. Beijing offered them as institutes where Canadian students could study Chinese culture and language. It was obviously a piece of cash diplomacy, but colleges and universities that didn’t already have China studies centres saw no harm in taking the gift. But the real purpose of the Confucius Institutes was much more sinister. CSIS investigation showed these institutes were “espionage outposts” of the nearest PRC diplomatic office, and their real purpose was two-fold. One was to spy on the university or college with the aim of stealing technology or recruiting agents of influence. The other was to monitor Chinese students doing under graduate degrees. The students were closely observed in case they showed signs of adopting political or interests, such as religion, unacceptable to the CCP. Any students who didn’t follow the CCP path would be whisked home immediately and their future prospects were not good. The other reason for keeping tight watch, and therefore control over Chinese students was to be able to deploy them as agitators or protesters on behalf of Beijing should that be necessary.

For decades, students from China were the largest contingent among Canada’s ever-burgeoning legions of foreign students. Facing shrinking grants from provincial governments and little help from Ottawa, universities and colleges in the 1990s and 2000s turned to throwing the doors wide open to foreign students, and charging them three times or more the tuition fees of Canadians. A big inducement for foreign students was and is that a place at a Canadian academic institution can easily open the door to permanent resident status, and therefore citizenship not only for the student, but ultimately for his or her immediate family as well. Several universities and colleges went so far down this road that more than half their tuition revenue came from foreign students. This made them vulnerable to events beyond their control, and they were hit hard both by COVID-19 and, in the case of students from China, by the Huawei Affair too.

In truth, Chinese students had already lost their top spot in the league of foreigners enrolled in tertiary education in Canada before the pandemic and the political crisis. In 2019 there were 140,550 Chinese students in Canada, but there were 218,540 from India, which has remained the leading source of foreign students in Canada by far. In 2022, Indian students represented nearly 320,000 out of the 800,000 total, while there were only just over 100,000 students from China. There are several reasons for this decline, but immigration lawyers say the diplomatic stand-off between Ottawa and Beijing is a major one. It had led to Canada being less attractive to Chinese students, and to Canadian authorities being far more stringent in their security screening of applicants.      

Before 2019 and the political and pandemic crises, when CSIS agents set out their concerns about the Confucius Institutes, the administrators of most Canadian universities and colleges  accepted the advice and ended their contracts with Beijing. The intimidation of Chinese undergraduate students and pressuring them to be foot soldiers in political disputes were clear violations of the Canadian concept of what university life is meant to be about. The issue of joint research projects with Chinese graduate students raised different philosophical issues, however. For many academic institutions this raised questions of scholastic freedom. CSIS agents found their reception in the faculty offices was far less open and accepting than it had been with the Confucius Institute question.

The University of Waterloo, top of several lists of Canada’s academic collaborators with the PLA, in February 2023 issued guidelines to graduate researchers about how to respond if approached for information by CSIS officers.

“As a standard part of their work,” says the memo, “security agencies will sometimes reach out to faculty engaged in sensitive areas of research to communicate possible concerns and understand where research areas may be vulnerable to foreign interference.

“This memo was created to help researchers and the Waterloo community understand their rights and to give guidance on how these interactions with security services can be carried out in order to facilitate a transparent process of engagement.”

The guidelines start by pointing out that researchers have no legal obligation to talk to CSIS agents, “furthermore, you do not need to meet them at the time and place with which they contact you.” Researchers are advised to first ask why the CSIS agent wants to talk to them, and reminds them to always be truthful in their answers. The memo also reminds them that they must not consent to any search of the university’s property or to give CSIS agents access to any of the university’s electronic or other equipment.

The defensive mood of universities identified as the targets of PLA researchers has been noted by CSIS. “We are not telling people who they should hire or not hire,” said CSIS director David Vigneault at an unprecedented public gathering of the heads of the security agencies of the “Five Eyes” allies in California in October, 2023. “But we tell them … if you’re working for one of those seven universities in the PRC associated with the People’s Liberation Army, you know it’s probably not a good idea if you’re working in cutting-edge technology in the university.”

“But you also need to understand that, unfortunately, the rules of engagement, the rules of the games have changed. They’ve been so bold about what they’re doing, how they have been stealing intellectual property, how they have interfered in our democratic processes, how they have been engaging on campuses, of all places to interfere,” Vigneault said.

Excerpted from Claws of the Panda: Beijing’s Campaign of Influence and Intimidation in Canada by Jonathan Manthorpe, expanded and updated edition. Copyright © 2019, 2024 Jonathan Manthorpe. Published by Cormorant Books Inc., Toronto. Reproduced with permission of the publisher.