Australian academics have called for tougher rules around university partnerships with foreign corporations and researchers, including a potential list of banned entities with strong military links.

Brendan Thomas-Noone and Danielle Cave, researchers at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University respectively, raised concerns in July about a $20m partnership between the University of Technology and the China Electronics Group Corporation (CETC) – a huge state-owned company that combines commercial activity with military development of bombs, guided missiles, satellites and communications jamming.

The University of New South Wales has also been criticised for a $100m partnership – the Torch Innovation project – with multiple Chinese firms that develop dual-use military technology, including unmanned military vehicles.

On Friday, Clive Hamilton, a professor in public ethics at Charles Sturt University, told the ABC’s AM program he had discovered “hundreds of research projects” that shared information with “senior Chinese military figures”, including Yang Xuejun, a lieutenant general in the People’s Liberation Army.

Thomas-Noone told Guardian Australia he was concerned by “institutional investment” by military-linked corporations in Australian research partnerships.

“Universities need to understand the context into which they enter into these agreements,” he said. “You need to understand how China works. China has these big state-owned enterprises where development in the commercial sector has big implications for the military side.

“One of the clearest examples of this was CETC. One of their roles was building algorithms to expand the Chinese surveillance state. Big data – collecting all the data on your citizens, so you can predict when political protests are happening. The research they were working on with UTS was in big data science.”



Currently, these partnerships are governed by Australia’s defence export controls, which monitor the export of goods and technology to ensure it is in Australia’s national interests.

In 2012, the controls were amended to apply to universities, and intangible sharing of technology and research that could be used for military purposes.

But Thomas-Noone said the safeguards still fell short.

“The export controls are very confusing and aren’t very clear,” he said. “It’s self regulated. It’s not transparent. The way UTS and CETC presented that partnership is that CETC is one of China’s largest commercial entities. That’s true, but it’s also one of China’s largest defence entities as well.

“If you’re part of a foreign military, whether American or Chinese or European, you should probably declare that. There are PLA guys that were here that don’t declare they are a major general. They may not take a piece of technology back with them, a USB with drawings and plans, but they take the knowledge in their head.”

He said the government could look to creating a list of restricted entities – which the United States has – or involve the foreign investment review board in approving partnerships, which would offer more scrutiny.

One of the entities associated with CETC, known as CETC 54, is listed by the US Department of Commerce as a “military end-use” entity, which means that any partnership with it is subject to US governmental review.

“CETC 54 was very heavily involved in the research with UTS,” Thomas-Noone said. “The reason we discovered it was that it was on the US government’s restricted entities list.”

While Australia has a list of restricted individuals, there is no equivalent list for entities or corporations.



“Maybe deals with those institutions should be reviewed. Not banned, but at least reviewed. In the universities’ defence, there’s no list out there telling them what they can and can’t engage in. That’s where the laws can be strengthened.”



However, he said it was a hard to quantify how widespread military links were within the greater partnerships between Australian universities and foreign researchers.



“There is no proof that this technology is going from there directly into the Chinese surveillance state,” he said. “It’s a massive grey area. Some of the defences from the university – that they are doing research on benign technologies like agriculture – is true. But that’s not everything. I believe the universities are doing what they can, but it is not clear to me how you have a partnership with a Chinese company with defence dual-use technology and there not be some exchange of information.”

The defence department told the ABC it was “ultimately the responsibility of each institution to ensure they comply with the law”.