Academic alliances: How western research fuels China’s surveillance state
By willowt // 2025-12-11
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  • A new report reveals extensive research collaborations between elite Western universities and Chinese AI labs embedded in Beijing's security state.
  • The Chinese labs are tied to technologies enabling mass surveillance and human rights abuses, including against Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
  • These partnerships, involving thousands of co-authored papers, have been supported by U.S. and other Western taxpayer funds from agencies like DARPA and the NSF.
  • Analysts warn the issue is not covert espionage but the "normalization" of partnerships with entities legally bound to support state repression.
  • The report calls for new safeguards, human rights due diligence, and greater transparency in international research partnerships.
A landmark study has exposed how some of the most prestigious universities in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, funded by taxpayer dollars, have for years collaborated with Chinese artificial intelligence laboratories that are core components of Beijing’s domestic surveillance apparatus and its campaign of repression in Xinjiang. The report, released this week by risk firm Strategy Risks and the Human Rights Foundation, details a systemic flow of knowledge and technology from open academic science into the hands of China’s security services, raising urgent questions about research ethics, national security, and the unintended consequences of global scientific cooperation.

The Chinese labs: Civilian facades, security functions

The report, titled Shared Labs, Shared Harm, focuses on two Chinese “state-priority” laboratories: Zhejiang Lab and the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (SAIRI). While presented as civilian research centers, both are deeply intertwined with China’s security architecture. SAIRI is led by a senior scientist from the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), a sanctioned defense conglomerate that built the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP). The United Nations and Western governments have concluded that IJOP facilitated the mass surveillance, detention and forced labor of Uyghurs—acts labeled a genocide by the last two U.S. administrations. Zhejiang Lab also partners closely with CETC and military universities.

The scale of Western collaboration

The scale of collaboration is vast. Since 2020, these two labs have published over 11,000 scientific papers, roughly 3,000 of which included foreign co-authors from elite institutions. The list of collaborating universities reads like a global academic honor roll:
  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
  • Stanford, Harvard and Princeton Universities
  • Carnegie Mellon University and Johns Hopkins University
  • University of Oxford and University College London
  • Canada’s McGill University
U.S. public funders acknowledged in these joint papers include the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and defense agencies like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Office of Naval Research.

From campus lab to police state

The research areas under collaboration are not abstract; they directly enhance surveillance capabilities. Joint projects have advanced technologies critical for monitoring populations:
  • Multi-object tracking, which allows cameras and drones to follow multiple people in crowds.
  • Gait recognition, which can identify individuals by their walk.
  • Advanced optical imaging, used in satellite surveillance and biometric scanning.
A Carnegie Mellon project with Zhejiang Lab on multi-object tracking acknowledged funding from the NSF and Office of Naval Research. The report notes that in China, such technology “map[s] naturally onto ‘public security applications such as protest monitoring.’” Similarly, an MIT collaboration on optical phase-shifting, supported by a DARPA grant, contributes to fields central to high-resolution imaging for reconnaissance.

An ethics gap and a call for guardrails

The report criticizes a stark “ethics gap,” noting that leading Western AI ethics institutes at Oxford, Cambridge, MIT and Berkeley have largely remained silent on China’s use of AI for repression from 2020 to 2025, even as their own universities engaged in these collaborations. The core failure, analysts argue, is that existing research security frameworks focus almost exclusively on intellectual property theft and are “almost blind to the human-rights risk.” The problem is not clandestine espionage but the “shocking normalization” of treating labs embedded in China’s security state as ordinary academic partners.

A crossroads for open science

The findings land as Western governments scramble to restrict the export of advanced chips and AI technology to China. This report reveals a parallel, less-guarded channel: the open scientific literature. It concludes that without new safeguards—including mandatory human-rights due diligence for international partnerships and greater transparency—publicly funded Western research will continue to supply technical breakthroughs that “flow seamlessly into China’s apparatus of repression.” The study forces a difficult reckoning for academia and policymakers alike, challenging them to balance the ideals of open scientific inquiry with the imperative to prevent research from directly empowering authoritarianism. Sources for this article include: ZeroHedge.com FoxNews.com NTD.com
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