Thank you, Chairman.
Thank you for a second opportunity to appear before the committee. Today I will focus on Canadian universities, their importance as the foundation of engagement between Canada and China, and their responses to rising concerns about new national security and safety threats.
I speak as an individual professor, not as a representative of the University of British Columbia.
The involvement of Canadian universities in and with China has expanded dramatically in the past 40 years. It is now a huge enterprise with multiple layers. Roughly 140,000 students from the PRC are registered at post-secondary institutions across Canada. Canadian universities have hundreds of MOUs with Chinese partners for faculty and student exchanges and training programs.
There are hundreds of research collaborations funded from a combination of Canadian and Chinese sources. These have shifted from capacity building to, in many cases, advanced collaborations doing cutting-edge research and work. At UBC, for example, there are about 6,500 People's Republic of China students. More than 300 professors have a significant professional interest in China. Faculty have partnerships with more than 100 different Chinese institutions.
Beyond economic impact, China connections are widely valued as integral to the global mission of our institutions, enriching the learning environment for our students, facilitating advanced research and training, and providing a meeting place for exchange.
These connections are under increasing scrutiny in Canada but in even more intense ways in the United States and Australia, as geopolitical competition and confrontation with China have intensified. Security and intelligence agencies in Ottawa have identified concerns related to cybersecurity, leakage of intellectual property, and transfer of technology and ideas that are seen as benefiting the Chinese military and other state institutions involved in violation of human rights. The media have identified risks to academic integrity and freedom generated by too heavy a reliance on Chinese tuition revenues and Chinese funding from sources, including Huawei.
Other concerns focus on instances of improper surveillance and harassment of individuals and on confrontations between student groups on contentious issues such as Hong Kong, Xianjiang and Tibet that affect student well-being and our general academic atmosphere.
Ottawa, our universities and funding agencies have established collaborative mechanisms, as Mr. Houlden just stated, that focus on sensitizing universities to risks that they face, particularly in the domains of cybersecurity and protection of intellectual property. They have produced guidelines on research hygiene and safeguarding scientific integrity that are now being rolled out across the country.
What action is needed? What we have just mentioned are necessary first steps, but much more is needed at the level of individual institutions and at the national level. For the universities, key priorities are improving awareness of risks, building mechanisms for vigilance and instituting proactive measures to monitor and maintain a respectful atmosphere on our campuses. We need to revisit and revise many existing agreements with Chinese partners, when warranted, to maximize transparency and our academic values.
One of the biggest challenges is how we make these adjustments without fanning anti-Chinese racism and stigmatizing professors and students of Chinese descent who already feel targeted by anti-China sentiment and unwarranted suspicion about their connections with China.
Nationally, the key issues are defining exactly what areas of research are considered sensitive and exactly the criteria for determining what partners are sensitive or inappropriate, which is very difficult indeed. More broadly, we need a policy statement from the government on how and why academic, business and other people-to-people engagements matter.
Academic connections with China are valued and deeply rooted, but to keep the doors open to a dynamic range of interactions and collaborations with China, we need to install some new screens and close some windows.