10-27-17 The man at the centre of many exchanges with Australian universities is Lieutenant-General Yang Xuejun, who has been a Communist Party member since the 1980s and was a promoted to the party's powerful Central Committee at this week's 19th Party Congress. Until recently Yang was president of the PLA's National University of Defense Technology (NUDT). One of the PLA's leading supercomputer experts, he is now president of the PLA Academy of Military Science, China's foremost military research centre.
One of Yang's most productive collaborators is Xue Jingling, Scientia Professor of Computing Science and Engineering at the University of NSW. Xue has extensive links with NUDT, having published over two dozen papers with NUDT supercomputer experts. In 2009 he also became a professor at NUDT, an affiliation not mentioned on his UNSW profile. Some of Xue's research with NUDT has been funded by grants from the Australian Research Council (ARC) worth over $2.3 million. Three of Xue's current doctoral students at UNSW are graduates of NUDT and are likely all PLA personnel.
Yang and his team have also been collaborating with former UTS professor Tao Dacheng, an expert in artificial intelligence. Tao's joint research has covered computer vision and speech analysis. Computer vision has many military applications, including automatic target recognition, missile guidance and battlefield assessment and prediction.
Tao now works at the University of Sydney. While he was at UTS, one of his NUDT students visiting UTS, Guan Naiyang, researched technologies used in three of his projects for the PLA's General Armaments Department, including work on a classified web crawler surveillance technology and two projects on cyber-based intelligence-gathering and analysis.
Tao's research in collaboration with NUDT is partially funded by ARC grants worth over $1.8 million. His ARC funding totals $3.2 million and in 2017 he was awarded an ARC Laureate Fellowship. Earlier this year it was reported that ARC grants were being used to fund research with China's leading military aircraft manufacturer AVIC and PLA-linked telco Huawei.
…Between 2007 and 2012, NUDT sent over 700 scientists and students abroad on exchanges or as visiting scholars, including to Australia. China has for decades used such programs to systematically vacuum up overseas technology for domestic use, especially in military fields. At least 14 graduates of the PLA's top technology universities have passed through ANU in the past decade while pursuing their doctorates. Most if not all of those students are PLA cadres who have since returned to Chinese military institutions….
One example is Hu Yonggang, currently investigating acoustics and audio research at the ANU's College of Engineering and Computer Science. PLA records confirm that he is a graduate of the PLA University of Science and Technology (PLAUST) College of Command Communications.
Chang Lei received a PhD in plasma physics at ANU in 2014 after graduating from NUDT. ANU experts are developing a revolutionary plasma engine for use in spacecraft. Building on his studies at ANU, Chang is helping China build its space-based military assets. Since returning to China, he has worked at the PLA Air Force Engineering University and is developing plasma engines for the PLA General Armaments Department.
A third example is Liu Xinwang, a graduate of NUDT who spent some time as a doctoral student at the ANU. His research specialises in machine learning and computer vision and his PhD supervisor at NUDT was a PLA senior colonel.
Wang Yang, a lecturer at the PLA Information Engineering University, where Chinese military hackers are trained, completed a PhD in cryptography at the University of Wollongong after receiving his master's degree from NUDT. (A University of Wollongong spokesman said the university relies on the vetting and visa approval processes of Australian government security agencies.)
In Perth, Curtin University civil engineers are prolific in their work with PLA scientists. Professor Hao Hong heads the Centre for Infrastructural Monitoring and Protection at Curtin University. He is a leading researcher in civil engineering, with a specialisation in blast and impact engineering. From 2013 to 2015, Hao was a member of the ARC College of Experts, which allocates research funds.
Hao has brought at least three PLA scientists to his Curtin University centre, including Li Zhan, who is currently visiting Curtin and studying for a doctorate at PLAUST, where enrolment records show him to be Chinese military personnel. Feng Bin, another visiting student and PLA cadre at Hao's centre, is also from PLAUST, where he researches blasts and vehicle armour and works with warheads experts. As in other research we've mentioned, the work carried out at the Curtin lab involves "dual-use technology" with clear military value. ARC grants worth $530,000 have contributed to Hao's collaboration with the PLA.
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Former senior defence official Peter Jennings has told AM there was a "likelihood" universities were breaking strict export controls on technology that could be used for military purposes. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-15/universities-sharing-military-technology-with-china/9260496
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Court documents also say that “PLA Mjor Xin Wang stated he intentionally made false statements about his military service in his visa application in order to increase the likelihood that he would receive his J1 visa.”
The district court statement added that Wang told customs agents he was ordered by Chinese military personnel to “observe the layout of the UCSF lab and bring back information on how to replicate it in China.” Customs agents confiscated studies from Wang from UC San Francisco. https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iigoesKYRN8J:https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-06-11/chinese-officer-researcher-arrested-at-lax-being-charged-with-visa-fraud+&cd=13&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari
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