Taiwan steps up research security as risk from China rises

TAIWAN-CHINA

Concerned that China is stepping up its knowledge transfer and influence activities abroad amid emerging reports of increased collaboration between China’s military-linked universities and Russian institutions, Taiwan has taken action to close China’s influence and research security loopholes.

Last month Taiwan’s Ministry of Education (MoE) told the island’s public and private universities to end academic exchanges with several Chinese universities said to come under the United Front Work Department (UFWD) – a branch of China’s Communist Party (CCP) involved in political influence overseas. It said it will stop recognising qualifications from these universities.

Taiwan’s Education Minister Cheng Ying-yao told media on 20 February that universities affiliated with the UFWD – including Jinan University, a highly rated university in southern Guangdong Province, and Huaqiao University with campuses in Xiamen and Quanzhou in Fujian Province, as well as the Beijing Chinese Language and Culture College – were not “normal academic-orientated” institutions; instead they “serve a political purpose”.

The latter two institutions have about 2,100 Taiwanese students enrolled in them, according to Taiwan’s ministry.

Jinan University is a joint project of China’s Ministry of Education and the Central UFWD in Beijing, according to official Chinese media, and is part of China’s Project 211, which provides extra funding to universities to develop them into “world-class” institutions.

Huaqiao University was originally founded for overseas Chinese students, including those from Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and Taiwan, seeking to study in China. According to the university’s own website it is directly under the CCP’s UFWD.

Seven Sons ban

A week later, on 28 February, Taiwan’s MoE announced a ban on all academic activities and exchanges with seven military-linked Chinese universities known as the “Seven Sons of National Defence”. The aim was to protect technology critical to national security interests, Cheng said.

Cheng said continued cooperation with these institutions posed too much of a risk to Taiwan’s national secrets and key technologies.

The announcement “is based on the [Taiwan] government’s monitoring of the level of threats,” explained Zsuzsa Anna Ferenczy, associate professor at Taiwan’s National Dong Hwa University in Hualien.

“Taiwan has been pushing back,” she told University World News, adding it is “calling on academics to consider the risks that come with travelling and engaging officially with the PRC [People’s Republic of China].”

Ferenczy said Taiwan’s aim was also to “reveal the true intentions of Beijing, not just in Taiwan, but knowing that Taiwan is, in a way, a test case or a lab for CCP influence operations through all kinds of means, education being just one of them.”

The Seven Sons are Beihang University, Beijing Institute of Technology, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, and Harbin Engineering University.

These universities are “heavily involved” in developing Chinese arms, equipment, aviation, telecommunications, chemicals, and material sciences, Cheng said, adding they serve the aims of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and UFWD.

New risks

In 2018 and 2020 the United States Department of Justice and Department of Commerce sanctioned 18 universities in China, including the Seven Sons, to prevent technology theft, and barred students from Seven Sons universities.

A number of European countries, including ETH in Switzerland, have also stepped up the vetting of students who have studied at the Seven Sons and other military-linked universities.

Japanese universities have also changed their protocols for exchanges and collaborations with China.

But new risks have emerged, including China taking advantage of the sudden openness to mobility of some US-based technology researchers after swinging cuts at government research organisations under US President Donald Trump, and the emergence of Chinese universities’ research collaborations with Russian institutions with clear intent to develop military applications.

Simona Grano, head of China-Taiwan Relations (research area) at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, told University World News, the reasons behind the timing of the Cheng’s announcement were unclear, but “you hear a lot of talk about poaching activities by China and Russia.

“So my guess is that probably these kinds of activities have multiplied to a level at which the Taiwanese government has felt it must now put a stop to it because it’s getting dangerous for national security”.

Grano observed a “spike in rules and regulations around the world”, pointing to “more and more damage being done within Europe by espionage cases, by interference”.

More recently laid-off professors, researchers, and others in strategic technology fields have been fertile hunting grounds for China.

“Some of those laid off and seeking new jobs may be disgruntled,” Grano noted, “and normally people who have cause to be unhappy with their former job-giver are more prone to divulge certain things.”

Taiwan has also said recently it wants to restrict China’s contact with its retired and former tech company executives.

Taiwan’s links to China

Taiwan is particularly concerned about China poaching and influence given its proximity to China and its linguistic and cultural affinity, said Grano.

Taiwan is a clear target, in part because of its dominance in semiconductor technologies and its geostrategic location. But it also anticipates pressure from the US to increase its defence budget to reduce reliance on the US, and to reduce its trade surplus by locating semiconductor plants in the US.

“Taiwan wants to play by the rules. We have seen Taiwan in the past two to three weeks going out of its way to promise more investment in semiconductors in the US, and to try to promise that they could increase the defence budget if [Taiwan’s] President Lai Ching-te is able to pass it with a divided [Taiwanese] legislature.

“And maybe this could be the final step in showing the US they are aligning with measures already implemented in the US,” according to Grano.

But concerns about poaching are not new. In 2021 Taiwan’s MoE shut down a China-funded office on the campus of Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu City set up by the Cross-Strait Tsinghua Research Institute, Beijing.

The Taiwan government maintained it was a “cover” to recruit talent from Taiwan for China’s lagging semiconductor industry and was “under the control of the CCP”.

Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturing giant TSMC is located in Hsinchu City.

China poaching drive

With access to sensitive technologies, particularly those with dual civilian-military use, coming under increased scrutiny in the US, Japan, and Europe, China has become intent on poaching researchers and engineers for its own technology self-sufficiency drive, as well as stepping up research cooperation with Russia, experts said.

Grano said Taiwan is “worried about the possibility that these people could poach technology know-how and bring it back to China and continue to enrich Chinese know-how, which was, until 10 years ago, not that good, but is now becoming top-notch, and [could] help the PLA to achieve a certain might that could then be used against the very same country from which they poached the know-how”.

Grano’s comments related to Beijing’s increasingly belligerent manoeuvres tied to its long-term aim to take the island by force, as part of its often-stated claim that Taiwan is a breakaway province of China.

Moves towards Russia and Europe

Ben Forney, a researcher at Seoul National University, South Korea, who specialises in economic security and risk in East Asia, including research security, said: “unchecked research collaboration with the Seven Sons universities presents a real security threat”.

In common with other experts, Forney noted that a move away from Chinese military-linked universities’ research collaborations with the US to collaborations with Russia and Europe had additional implications for security.

“Seven Sons universities have a history of military collaboration, intellectual property theft, and, crucially, growing ties with Russia, as exemplified by President Vladimir Putin’s visit to the Harbin Institute of Technology last May.

“Many of these same Chinese universities are simultaneously working with Russian entities on dual-use technologies,” said Forney in a recently published paper.

While the move away from research partnerships with US universities is ongoing, Forney’s research found that over 20 agreements, partnerships, or newly published research articles were announced between Seven Sons universities and European entities between December 2024 and January 2025 alone.

Forney told University World News: “a lot of these academics aren’t aware of regulations”.

He said when approached by one of the Seven Sons “they’re not aware that there’s anything different about those universities compared to any other university in China. It reveals a critical lack of understanding in academia about the nature of these Seven Sons universities.”

He added that even with the just-announced regulations in Taiwan, he was “concerned that it’s not necessarily going to stop individual scientists or individual academics from pursuing some joint research projects.

“It’s obviously still going on, or Taiwan wouldn’t have needed to put these regulations in place in the first place. I think it’s good that they’ve done it, but I understand that it’s not a failsafe – there are still ways of working around it.”

Out in the open

He pointed to recent delegations from the Seven Sons universities to countries like France, Austria, and Spain.

“What they [Seven Sons] are doing in Europe and what they are doing in Russia is out in the open. They are not trying to hide anything,” Forney said, referring to the universities’ social media sites and press releases that he trawled for his research.

“The kind of research the Seven Sons are doing anywhere in the world, whether it’s with Europeans or with Americans or with Russians, is all fundamental engineering technologies and cutting-edge research. A lot of it, by its nature, will have dual [civilian-military] use,” he noted.

“But it’s very much person-to-person and at professor-to-professor level,” Forney added.

“The Chinese universities will target a specific professor overseas and try to bring them to the Chinese university to teach there, to get their expertise,” he said.