Pearls and Irritations

Australian universities are curtailing collaboration with scientists from or “linked to” China, on pain of having their grant funding rescinded under the Morrison government’s Australia’s Foreign Relations (State and Territory Arrangements) Act 2020.

The law passed on the basis of allegations by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that Chinese academics in the USA had been engaged in industrial espionage and the theft of intellectual property; and a propaganda campaign led by the Australian newspaper and Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) think tank, which purported to uncover a similar operation here. Now, even as the US government’s anti-China witch hunt falters amid a string of failed prosecutions, Australia’s research universities have knuckled under to the government’s and ASPI’s demand that they surrender their academic freedom and devote their energy to research that benefits the Anglo-American empire’s military-industrial complex and intelligence apparatus.

Australians should be aware that the joint FBI/US Department of Justice (DOJ) “China initiative”, launched by the Donald Trump Administration in 2018 to investigate alleged espionage and theft of sensitive research by Chinese academics, is publicly unravelling. After a two-year investigation, the DOJ last month admitted it had no evidence against the program’s highest-profile target, Prof. Gang Chen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has dropped all charges. With many of the hundreds of prosecutions of Chinese and Chinese-American academics being thrown out of court or resulting in acquittal, US Attorney General Merrick Garland has ordered a review to determine whether the China Initiative should be shut down altogether.

In 2020 the China Initiative became the basis for a similar witch hunt in Australia, spurred by a barrage of US government-sponsored propaganda. On 25 August 2020 the Australian newspaper reported that “dozens of leading scientists at major universities across the country have been recruited to … the Thousand Talents Plan”, a well-known Chinese government program to recruit scientific talent to China, “which FBI director Christopher Wray describes as economic espionage and a national security threat.” The Australian published the names and photographs of over 30 mostly Chinese-Australian academics whom it effectively accused of being enemy spies, notwithstanding its disclaimer, buried halfway through the 4,000-word article, that it “[was] not suggesting the academics have acted inappropriately”.

Besides the FBI, the Australian’s main source was the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s (ASPI) report Hunting the Phoenix, published five days earlier, which claimed without evidence that spies seeded via the Thousand Talents Plan had infiltrated Australian academia and were stealing research on behalf of the Chinese military. Founded by the Australian government in 2001 and funded mainly by the Defence Department, ASPI also receives funding from the US and allied governments and military-industrial corporations, to push war propaganda against China. Its Hunting the Phoenix report was funded by a US$145,600 “grant” from the US State Department. The Australian also referred to allegations in a June 2020 paper published by the Wilson Centre, a US government-funded think tank, which smeared New Zealand academics—also without evidence—as Chinese government agents. That paper in turn relied heavily upon ASPI’s November 2019 paper The China Defence Universities Tracker and an accompanying interactive website of the same name, which were also funded by the US State Department.

Universities surrender

The day after the Australian article came out, government agency the Australian Research Council (ARC), despite having approved all the research referenced therein, launched an investigation of so-called “high risk” projects, solely on the basis of ASPI’s report. The Group of Eight (Go8), the peak body for Australia’s biggest universities, was initially defiant, its CEO Vicki Thomson stating on 27 August 2020 that “As the universities that conduct 70 per cent of the nation’s higher education-based research … [we are] already subject to a range of existing government and legislative controls”, including under the Defence Trade Controls Act 2012, the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act 2018, and the Autonomous Sanctions Act 2011. The regime is among the strictest in the world, and there have been zero reported breaches to date.

Now, though, the unis have “got the message”, the 5 February Australian gloated. “Australian universities will work more closely with those in the UK and US after receiving a ‘clear signal’ from the government to diversify and move away from Chinese research partnerships.” Thomson told the Australian, “The government is creating the policy framework and we’re getting the message, I’ll put it that way.” The government had created an “overlay of scrutiny” on research with Chinese partners, she said, whereas “It’s much easier to get security clearance if you’re working on sensitive areas of research if working with partners in Five Eyes countries”, the Anglo-American-controlled global spying alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA.

ASPI is, of course, ecstatic. “What will happen increasingly is the government of the democracies will be saying to their own universities, ‘we’d like you to work only within our defence establishments and protect your intellectual property from theft’,” ASPI Executive Director Peter Jennings told the Australian (emphasis added). “You can choose the West or choose China, that’s the world.” And small wonder, since conscripting Australia’s universities to the US-led New Cold War on China was ASPI’s intention all along. As Jennings and former Chief Defence Scientist Prof. Robert Clark wrote 10 August 2020 in the Australian, the “worrying geopolitical trends in our region” (that ASPI has exacerbated) present “a significant opportunity for universities that are willing to work with Defence across the Five Eyes countries … particularly when their funding base has been hit hard by COVID-19 impacts.”

A further 18 months of border closures and domestic pandemic restrictions has put the universities over a barrel. The collapse of the US China Initiative, however, should prompt a re-evaluation of its Australian offspring.

The author is a researcher, fact-checker, and editor of the Australian Alert Service, the weekly magazine of the Australian Citizens Party, with extensive experience fact-checking and debunking the claims of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

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