In the UK Chinese funded international masters/phd students have to send back to China reports about their fellow students as a condition of their funding.<p>There's no mandatory spying expected if the position is funded privately or by the host institution.<p>I expect that the spying is just limited to their fellow state funded students although I have heard of significant tension between mainland and Hong Kong students about this. I don't know if Hong Kong students have to spy.
Soon enough anything that is even remotely a security threat (pretty much any non-trivial app) will require clearance and in office work.<p>The North Korean hacks into several companies are an example of how bad it is now, add in some good deep fake technology and soon you will not be able to distinguish who is actually working for your company.
As a non-Chinese and a non-American, I care less about the usual geopolitical games, including spying, and more about how the Chinese government treats its own citizens. No freedom of speech or conscience, no political freedoms: just work and be an obedient small truckle in the mechanism of the Leviathan. Plus the return of the Cult of Personality, which once even the CCP tried to abandon, but ultimately failed. These are not results of American meddling, these are their own internal choices.<p>I don't buy the explanation that being unfree is somehow intrinsic to East Asian cultures. We have had plenty of authoritarian regimes in Europe, too, and several hundred years ago few people could call themselves personally free.<p>I don't want this model of governance to spread around the globe again. It has been tried before, with disastrous results. Unless we abandon the concept of universal morality completely, treating your own people as disposable serfs is wrong.
Can't access the article :/<p>But, perhaps related, I learned of this the other day <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_front_(China)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_front_(China)</a>
What else is new? This was already well known among grad students in the late 90s. We even knew there was some kind of hierarchy, with one of the student acting as «political officer».
Cuba's dictatorship does the same blackmailing its immigrants in U.S to spy for them, and using immigration waves to insert hundreds of its "agents" into the country.
There should be a substantial CIA effort to recruit at every US university with more than 2 Chinese nationals. Student loans forgiven and green cards for the family.
Amazing how this site's comments have been decaying in quality since a few years now. Obvious propaganda article, from a media that doesn't even try to hide that it's mainly a propaganda media, is commented on seriously without any kind of reality filter, and it gets to the top comments...
How does this work? How would you even trust China to not just throw you in jail?
I guess the US government figured it out because he went to China and then came back and they’re like oh yeah that makes no fucking sense<p>Or for the conspiracy minded, they ‘let him’ escape to Taiwan and told him to go set up a pro democracy org in the states and this aling parents thing is all just cover
People's Liberation Army at the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre:<p>六四清場，國外有稱「六四屠殺」，也被中国政府称为是平息反革命暴乱，即在1989年6月3日晚至6月4日早晨，以中国共产党领导人邓小平为首的中央军事委员会命令中国人民解放军戒严部队於中国首都北京市對六四事件示威者進行武力清場的事件。
Don't most countries do this? I am pretty sure the US has lots of spies everywhere and they spy on allies (famously on Angela Merkel's phone) and enemies. Israel spies on other countries including the US. Does China do anything differently?
I’ve been in a meeting where the Chinese professor in USA on a joint country course sends many of their students to a technology conference and I’m not sure how, but most of his students who attended the conference somehow decided to write their reports on US military uses of technology instead of what Facebook or Google demoed. This meeting had students attend from both China and USA.<p>I’m sure he has plausible deniability, but I left that meeting thinking wow that professor is really a spy. This was before the pandemic.