STEGGLES

Australia has cancelled a joint research project with the Chinese Academy of Sciences on supposed national security grounds. The project aimed to develop a pain-relief treatment from a native Australian plant. Also cancelled is the Australian National University’s teaching partnership with Shandong University, which ran undergraduate programmes in biology, chemistry, mathematics and physics. Chinese students studied three years in China and two in Canberra. ANU has complied with Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s termination order, saying it takes “risks associated with foreign interference, national security and international engagement seriously”. SCMP’s report explicitly states the chain of command: “Canberra’s directive came after the Pentagon added Shandong University to its list of foreign institutions deemed to pose national security threats”. That in turn followed a Pentagon instruction to 30 US universities to scrutinise their Chinese research partners. In summary, the US defines a list of Chinese institutions that pose a risk, and Australia enforces it. The article cites Chen Hong, director of the Australian Studies Centre at East China Normal University in Shanghai, saying that the axed deals suggested Canberra was starting to move in lockstep with Washington on research security. “The US defines which Chinese institutions pose a risk and Australia re-examines its own partnerships through the lens of allied security. It signals a shift towards replacing project-level risk assessments with institutional blacklisting, and replacing academic judgment with political discretion.” Everyone accepts that the projects in question are “relatively low risk”, meaning that there is no actual national security concern whatsoever. But Wong’s directive is a political signal designed to make universities and researchers “proactively steer away from collaborations with China”. Australia is the clear loser here. If anyone in Washington thinks they can slow China down by cutting off its research collaboration with Australia, they must be smoking something real strong. China is already a top-tier power in scientific research; it doesn’t need Western partners to advance. It tops the Nature Index for research output in the natural sciences, produces more science and engineering graduates than the US and EU combined, runs over 3,000 universities, and is at the cutting edge of AI, renewable energy, telecommunications, space research, robotics, advanced industry, and more. James Laurenceson, director of the Australia-China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney, observes: “If we deliberately cut ourselves off from China, the inevitable consequence will be that in a growing field Australia will be locking itself into a second-rate scientific research ecosystem.” The cost falls on Australian students who lose a degree pathway, Australian researchers who lose their collaborators, and Australian patients who might otherwise have had a new painkiller. In recent years, Australia has signed up to AUKUS, allowed the expansion of US military presence in the country, and is now allowing the Pentagon to vet its universities’ academic partners. Australians would do well to choose science over obedience.