Chinese intelligence officials are reportedly building networks in Australian universities to monitor the ethnic Chinese community to protect Beijing's interests.
Chinese students in the West are closely monitored by the Chinese government back home.
Chinese students sent abroad can be used to gather industrial-intelligence information, but one of their primary tasks is to monitor groups of Chinese who the PRC view as subversive. In the West, Chinese people have freedom of speech and assembly, and this is something that the PRC finds unsettling. They have to keep a close watch on them.
China is reportedly building covert informant networks inside Australia's top universities, prompting Australia to strengthen its counter-intelligence capabilities.
Fairfax Media reports that Chinese intelligence officials say they are building networks to monitor the ethnic Chinese community to protect Beijing's core interests.
Much of the monitoring work takes place in higher education institutions, it reports.
This includes Sydney University and Melbourne University, where more than 90,000 students from mainland China are potentially exposed to ideas and activities not readily available at home.
Allegations of an extensive spy network were raised almost a decade ago when former Chinese diplomat Chen Yonglin defected to Australia in 2005.
In a Senate Report into his request for political asylum, Mr Yonglin stated that there were agents monitoring activities of dissidents in Australian capital cities.
“I got the number of 1000 secret agents and informants from a document and I know that there are two systems operating in the Chinese missions overseas in some important cities like Canberra and Sydney,” he said.
“One is the diplomatic system; the other is the information collection system reporting to the intelligence service of China… These were from certain intelligence services that indicated that they were very active in Australia.”
Mr Yonglin’s claims were also presented to the US House of Representatives Human Rights Committee in 2005.
Speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald, he said Chinese diplomats set up well-funded Chinese student associations at the universities.
“The students are useful for welcoming leaders at airports and blocking protest groups from sight, and also collecting information,” he said.
China Is Setting up Covert Spy Networks in US and Australian Universities
The ever-rising droves of Chinese people studying abroad is generally considered an all-around win. It’s good for Chinese students, who get a coveted credential, as well as for host universities and local communities, which benefit from the spending boost.
It’s also good, it turns out, for China’s Communist Party. The Chinese government is rolling out a sprawling spy network inside Australia’s top universities, reports John Garnaut, a veteran journalist covering China, in the Sydney Morning Herald.
This news comes on the heels of allegations made in February by a dissident Chinese professor about the visiting scholars China dispatches to US universities like Harvard and Stanford. “Every year among those top universities there are some visiting scholars, and among them I can definitely say there are some people who are actually spies,” Xia Yeliang, a former Peking University economics professor, who now works at the Cato Institute in Washington, told Reuters.
According to Garnaut’s report, students are the more likely spies, however. These agents report on the activities of other Chinese citizens—including both professors and Australia’s 150,000-plus (pdf) population of students from the Chinese mainland—helping Chinese intelligence officials police their overseas nationals for openness to ideas that run counter to Party ideology.
For example, one lecturer at a top Australian school said China’s main spy agency interrogated him repeatedly about comments he made at a seminar on democracy. He told the Herald that the agency had shown him the report by a woman who had informed on him.
Australia is now ramping up its counter-intelligence program. But one reason there are so many Chinese spies in Australian universities might be that the schools haven’t created welcoming communities for visiting international students, said the Herald report.
Both the US and Australia have benefited from the appeal of their universities to Chinese students. The US remains the top destination for Chinese students hoping to study overseas, though it’s become less popular recently, while the UK is in second place. Last year, Chinese students contributed $7.2 billion to the US economy. As for Australia, one-quarter of its international students are from China. That’s even though Australia is one of the world’s most expensive places to study:
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