If the US can’t afford to keep China out, can Australia?

When the Albanese government axed a joint venture between ANU and Shandong University in China on “national security grounds”, there was consternation in the university sector. 

Speaking at an annual higher education summit on Tuesday, Brian Schmidt, former vice-chancellor of the Australian National University (ANU) and Nobel Prize-winning professor of astrophysics, said since the collaborative program presented “almost no risk”, he didn’t know why the government felt it necessary. He then warned Australian universities there could be more such cancellations to come.

Responding to the decision by Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong last week, Schmidt said the Joint Science College at the centre of the venture “has no research capability at all” and instead was designed to teach undergraduate students in China for three years before they transferred to ANU in Canberra. He also noted that it felt to him as safe as a joint collaboration could be.

Indeed, only a few years ago, such an arrangement would still have been considered a successful example of what education scholars call a “transnational education” (TNE) model. Like other TNE practices, ANU’s initiative was designed to produce future scientific talent by providing Chinese science graduates with an ANU education and, potentially, ANU postgraduate qualifications.

That was then. But this is now. As a way of justifying the government’s decision to axe the deal, Assistant Minister for International Education Julian Hill cited a recent development in the US, referring to the addition of Shandong University to the US Department of War’s blacklist of foreign institutions “engaging in problematic activities”. 

Here lies the question: if the US had not added Shandong University to its National Defense Authorization Act Section 1286 list in late July, would the Australian government have terminated the ANU partnership? The public evidence at the moment does not answer this, but the timing of the decision, and Hill’s explicit reference to the United States’ “change in assessment status”, make the connection difficult to ignore. After all, the Australian government has largely adopted US threat assessments and response practices in its research governance frameworks in Australia.

The cancellation of the ANU-Shandong deal marks a significant development in the securitisation of higher education in Australia. The important distinction between education and research in risk assessment is being blurred. The implications of this blurring can be wide-ranging: although the main activity under the arrangement is education and talent development, not sensitive scientific research, the institutional affiliations of the Chinese partner itself could become a source of national security concern. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has warned that Shandong University has links to the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics, which in turn has links to the agency responsible for Chinese nuclear weapons research, development and testing.

Another collaborative project that was on Wong’s latest hit list was part of QCAS, a Queensland–China science and technology collaboration between Queensland-based research organisations and institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with funding from both sides. Since its start in 2009, QCAS has focused on environmental science, agricultural biotechnology, food research and food safety, and human health/medical research. Projects funded under the scheme include research on seawater-degradable plastics, nitrogen cycling and climate change, and Asian–Australian monsoon variability.

The specific program that is being axed by Minister Wong is a project based at the University of Queensland (UQ) that aims to develop pain relief medication from the toxins/peptides from the giant Australian stinging tree. But according to Times Higher Education, the fear now is that this pain research has the potential to be weaponised, even though UQ says the proteins involved are not listed on Australia’s Defence and Strategic Goods List. 

In other words, the “dual-use technology” argument is being deployed again. But Chris Cook, emeritus professor of electrical engineering and former executive dean of engineering at the University of Wollongong, believes that excessive use of the dual-use concept can lead to self-defeating outcomes and become ridiculous. He told Crikey:

“I remember earlier in the year a PhD project at QUT was cancelled, even after the student (from China) arrived. The project was using drones and AI to help fight bushfires. Pretty crucial in Australia, and now we can see also after a dreadful northern summer, also in Europe, UK, Canada, USA, etc. Drones and AI are such generic technologies that it’s like saying people can write bad things on a piece of paper so we are going to ban all pens and paper. So from now on nobody should use pen and paper again, on national security grounds.”

Before the concept of dual-use became a chokehold on Australian research, there were some notable success stories showing how Australia-China collaborations have benefited both Australia and the world. Martin Green’s high-efficiency solar-cell research at UNSW, combined with his Chinese PhD student Shi Zhengrong’s commercialisation and manufacturing expertise, helped create a Chinese solar industry that has driven down the cost of photovoltaic technology, making solar power far more affordable and accessible to consumers in Australia and worldwide. 

Equally consequentially, Australian immunologist Ian Frazer and his Chinese virologist colleague Jian Zhou at UQ developed the virus-like-particle technology that underpins the HPV vaccine, providing Australians — and ultimately hundreds of millions of people worldwide — with highly effective protection against the HPV infections that cause most cervical cancers.

National security risks are legitimate concerns, and Australia, like any other country, should remain vigilant. But such beneficial collaborations as those outlined above will no longer be possible if the concept of dual use is applied to the extent that it causes national self-harm. News about ANU and QCAS cancellations follows a series of recent measures aimed at further tightening research governance in Australian universities. Only a week before this, Australian universities were told about new laws that will “give ASIO secret powers to probe university links with authoritarian nations”.

While Australia-China collaborative projects initiated by individual scientists have mostly stopped, academics have assumed that government-funded collaborations or projects negotiated by universities are relatively safe from security scrutiny. But Minister Wong’s latest edict to ANU and UQ has put that assumption to sleep.

In an article published in Foreign Affairsthis week entitled “The Cost of Keeping China Out: How Washington’s Fear of Chinese Investment Hurts American Competitiveness”, the authors — two US professors in technology policy — argue thatthe US should acknowledge that the United States is “already behind in several vital industries and that the barriers Washington has built are costing the United States more than they are protecting it”.

As discussed previously, the fact that Australia is so much smaller than the US in terms of population, domestic market, venture capital and advanced manufacturing base means we have far fewer large companies capable of taking research from laboratory to market. And while the US still ranks third on the Global Innovation Index, Australia has slipped to 22nd place. 

So, if these US technology experts worry that keeping China out is costing the US more than it gains, imagine how many times more costly it could be for Australia. 

And if we are in what Crikey‘s politics editor Bernard Keane calls a “global war for talent”, it seems the Australian government has just inflicted some debilitating wounds on itself before it even heads for the battlefield.