SYDNEY, Australia — The Chinese military is expanding its collaborations with foreign universities, sometimes concealing its scientists’ military ties, according to an Australian report published Tuesday. The report raises questions about whether countries wary of China’s rising power are in fact directly contributing to its military advancement.

In the past decade, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army has sent 2,500 military scientists, researchers and engineers abroad, according to the report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research institution in Canberra, the capital.

While they work with academics and scientists at institutions around the world, they are especially concentrated in the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, the so-called Five Eyes nations that broadly share intelligence.

The number of peer-reviewed papers jointly published by Chinese scientists and their Western counterparts has increased more than sevenfold in that time, according to the report, to 734 last year from 95 in 2007. The research they conduct is sometimes in areas with strategic military applications like navigation technology, quantum physics and cryptography.