Thank you, Mr. Chairman and honourable members of the committee. Thank you for the invitation to participate in today's hearing.
Some of my comments are based on my experience in the U.S. government working on China and research security issues, so much of this is U.S.-centric. However, after leaving federal service, I started an NGO that focuses on assisting allied democracies with safeguarding research. I have learned that many of the challenges and obstacles facing the U.S. are shared among key allies, particularly G7 nations.
European and Five Eyes nations have been putting forth recommendations and policies that call for more robust efforts by research institutions and universities to conduct due diligence or screening for national security risks, usually with respect to government-funded research. While this seems like a sensible approach, I question its effectiveness for several reasons.
First, academic institutions typically lack the resources, subject matter knowledge or incentives to conduct robust due diligence on PRC research partners and sources of funding.
Second, China's increasingly restrictive information environment, including denial of access to some published academic literature, along with its efforts to obfuscate the missions, activities and associations of some institutions, are making conducting robust due diligence and risk assessments too difficult and complex for individual research institutions to do themselves.
Third, and key to some of the larger issues this committee seeks to study, yawning knowledge gaps on the PRC persist. Neither governments nor academia are making sufficient efforts to address them. Several examples include a lack of understanding of the magnitude and complexity of China's state-driven knowledge transfer apparatus and a myopic focus on criminal activity such as intellectual property theft or espionage, which misrepresents the larger threats to the security and integrity of research. In other words, much of the risks and threats posed by China on our research institutions do not involve outright theft.
There is an unknown scale and scope of PRC talent programs that recruit overseas experts and incentivize or task selectees to engage in activities that violate norms of transparency and integrity in addition to the national and economic security threats these programs often pose.
Here are a few examples. In a faculty you have part-time appointments with PRC institutions and they are tasked with placing specific PRC nationals into advanced degree or post-doctoral programs in their overseas institutions, which undermines merit-based selection processes, or exploiting overseas facilities and resources to support undisclosed shadow labs or research projects in China and other related activities.
Academia lacks awareness or incentives to curb research strictly intended for China's benefit. Testimony from a previous hearing noted that Huawei has partnered with many Canadian research institutions, resulting in hundreds of patents generated for Huawei's sole benefit.
What about patent filing outside of formal agreements?
Anecdotally, some U.S. academics have filed patents in China first or in place of filing in the U.S., despite receiving federal funding for that research. In other cases, PRC donors blur the lines between gifts, contracts or grants, i.e., a gift that is supposed to be unconditional actually requires the receiving institution to undertake specific research conducted by specific individuals. I do not know if Canadian institutions are also affected in this way, but I recommend inquiring into these issues given the consistency in China's methods to exploit R and D across the developed world.
There are hundreds, possibly thousands, of subdivisions and laboratories at PRC civilian universities and Chinese Academy of Sciences institutes that conduct defence research, yet they receive little scrutiny if those entities lack a primary mission of supporting China's defence research and industrial base. This has a direct bearing on the key technology areas that this committee is looking into, such as AI, quantum physics, biotech, etc. I am not aware of any efforts to systematically examine which PRC institutions are research leaders in these disciplines and, of them, which ones also appear to seek defence applications to that research.
The U.S. government and national security community, to my knowledge, have made few if any efforts to address this. I presume that other allied governments face even more resource constraints that limit knowledge building in this area.
Similar knowledge gaps exist on PRC state-owned defence conglomerates. These firms control hundreds of subsidiaries at research institutes that act like academic institutions and collaborate on research globally. Overseas-based researchers may be focusing on the commercial or civilian uses, but the PRC entities directly support defence industries.
These are just some of the blind spots that allied democracies have that constrain our collective ability to safeguard the security and integrity of our research. My organization's mission is to raise awareness in these areas and close some of these knowledge deficiencies through public and private partnerships.
Thank you, and I look forward to your questions.