Sam Cooper

Shared Labs, Shared Harm names MIT, Oxford and McGill among universities working with Beijing-backed AI institutes linked to Uyghur repression and China’s security services.

Over the past five years, some of the world’s most technologically advanced campuses in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom — including MIT, Oxford and McGill — have relied on taxpayer funding while collaborating with artificial-intelligence labs embedded in Beijing’s security state, including one tied to China’s mass detention of Uyghurs and to the Ministry of Public Security, which has been accused of targeting Chinese dissidents abroad.

That is the core finding of Shared Labs, Shared Harm, a new report from New York–based risk firm Strategy Risks and the Human Rights Foundation. After reviewing tens of thousands of scientific papers and grant records, the authors conclude that Western public funds have repeatedly underwritten joint work between elite universities and two Chinese “state-priority” laboratories whose technologies drive China’s domestic surveillance machinery — an apparatus that, a recent U.S. Congressional threat assessment warns, is increasingly being turned outward against critics in democratic states.

The key Chinese collaborators profiled in the study are closely intertwined with China’s security services. One of the two featured labs is led by a senior scientist from China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), the sanctioned conglomerate behind the platform used to flag and detain Uyghurs in Xinjiang; the other has hosted “AI + public security” exchanges with the Ministry of Public Security’s Third Research Institute, the bureau responsible for technical surveillance and digital forensics.

The report’s message is blunt: even as governments scramble to stop technology transfer on the hardware side, open academic science has quietly been supplying Chinese security organs with new tools to track bodies, faces and movements at scale.

It lands just as Washington and its allies move to tighten controls on advanced chips and AI exports to China. In the Netherlands’ Nexperia case, the Dutch government invoked a rarely used Cold War–era emergency law this fall to take temporary control of a Chinese-owned chipmaker and block key production from being shifted to China — prompting a furious response from Beijing, and supply shocks that rippled through European automakers.

Cameras and Drones

The Strategy Risks team focuses on two state-backed institutes: Zhejiang Lab, a vast AI and high-performance computing campus founded by the Zhejiang provincial government with Alibaba and Zhejiang University, and the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (SAIRI), now led by a senior CETC scientist. CETC designed the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, or IJOP — the data system that hoovered up phone records, biometric profiles and checkpoint scans to flag “suspicious” people in Xinjiang.

United Nations investigators and several Western governments have concluded that IJOP and related systems supported mass surveillance, detention and forced-labor campaigns against Uyghurs that amount to crimes against humanity.

Against that backdrop, the scale of Western collaboration is striking.

Since 2020, Zhejiang Lab and SAIRI have published more than 11,000 papers; roughly 3,000 of those had foreign co-authors, many from the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada. About 20 universities are identified as core collaborators, including MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins, UC Berkeley, Oxford, University College London — and Canadian institutions such as McGill University — along with a cluster of leading European technical universities.

Among the major U.S. public funders acknowledged in these joint papers are the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Department of Transportation. For North America, the warning is twofold: U.S. and Canadian universities are far more entangled with China’s security-linked AI labs than most policymakers grasp — and existing “trusted research” frameworks, built around IP theft, are almost blind to the human-rights risk.

In one flagship example, Zhejiang Lab collaborated with MIT on advanced optical phase-shifting — a field central to high-resolution imaging systems used in satellite surveillance, remote sensing and biometric scanning. The paper cited support from a DARPA program, meaning U.S. defense research dollars effectively underwrote joint work with a Chinese lab that partners closely with military universities and the CETC conglomerate behind Xinjiang’s IJOP system.

Carnegie Mellon projects with Zhejiang Lab focused on multi-object tracking and acknowledged funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Office of Naval Research. Multi-object tracking is a backbone technology for modern surveillance — allowing cameras and drones to follow multiple people or vehicles across crowds and city blocks. “In the Chinese context,” the report notes, such capabilities map naturally onto “public security applications such as protest monitoring,” even when the academic papers present them as neutral advances in computer vision.

The report also highlights Zhejiang Lab’s role as an international partner in CAMERA 2.0, a £13-million U.K. initiative on motion capture, gait recognition and “smart cities” anchored at the University of Bath, and its leadership in BioBit, a synthetic-biology and imaging program whose advisory board includes University College London, McGill University, the University of Glasgow and other Western campuses.

Meanwhile, SAIRI has quietly become a hub for AI that blurs public-security, military and commercial lines.

Established in 2018 and run since 2020 by CETC academician Lu Jun — a designer of China’s KJ-2000 airborne early-warning aircraft and a veteran of command-and-control systems — SAIRI specializes in pose estimation, tracking and large-scale imaging.

Under Lu, the institute has deepened ties with firms already sanctioned by Washington for their roles in Xinjiang surveillance. In 2024 it signed cooperation agreements with voice-recognition giant iFlytek and facial-recognition champion SenseTime, as well as CloudWalk and Intellifusion, which market “smart city” policing platforms.

SAIRI also hosted an “AI + public security” exchange with the Ministry of Public Security’s Third Research Institute — the bureau responsible for technical surveillance and digital forensics — and co-developed what Chinese media billed as the country’s first AI-assisted shooting training system. That platform, nominally built for sports, was overseen by a Shanghai government commission that steers AI into defense and public-security applications, raising the prospect of its use in paramilitary or police training.

Outside the lab, MPS officers have been charged in the United States with running online harassment and intimidation schemes targeting Chinese dissidents, and MPS-linked “overseas police service stations” in North America and Europe have been investigated for pressuring exiles and critics to return to China.

Meanwhile, Radio-Canada, drawing on digital records first disclosed to Australian media in 2024 by an alleged Chinese spy, has reported new evidence suggesting that a Chinese dissident who died in a mysterious kayaking accident near Vancouver was being targeted for elimination by MPS officers and agents embedded in a Chinese conglomerate that the U.S. Treasury accuses of running a money-laundering and modern-slavery empire out of Cambodia.

The new reporting focuses on a former undercover agent for Office No. 1 of China’s Ministry of Public Security — the police ministry at the core of so-called “CCP police stations” in global and Canadian cities, and reportedly tasked with hunting dissidents abroad.

Taken together, cases of alleged Chinese “police station” networks operating globally, new U.S. Congressional reports on worldwide threats from the Chinese Communist Party, and the warnings in Shared Labs, Shared Harm suggest that Western universities are not only helping to build China’s domestic repression apparatus with U.S. taxpayer funds, but may also be contributing to global surveillance tools that can be paired with Beijing’s operatives abroad.

To counter this trend, the paper urges a reset in research governance: broaden due diligence to weigh human-rights risk, mandate transparency over all international co-authorships and joint labs, condition partnerships with security-linked institutions on strict safeguards and narrow scopes of work, and strengthen university ethics bodies so they take responsibility for cross-border collaborations.

Sam Cooper

‘Our superiors … want to get rid of him’

Radio-Canada, drawing on digital records first disclosed to Australian media in 2024 by an alleged Chinese spy, has reported new evidence suggesting that a Chinese dissident who died in a mysterious kayaking accident near Vancouver was being targeted for elimination by Chinese secret police and agents embedded in a Chinese conglomerate that the U.S. Treasury now accuses of running a multibillion-dollar organized-crime, money-laundering and modern-slavery empire out of Cambodia.

The new reporting focuses on a man identified only as “Eric,” a former undercover agent for Office No. 1 of China’s Ministry of Public Security — the police ministry at the core of so-called “CCP police stations” in global and Canadian cities, and reportedly tasked with hunting dissidents abroad.

Australia’s Four Corners revealed Eric’s story in May 2024, reporting that he had fled China in 2023 and walked into the headquarters of Australia’s domestic intelligence agency, ASIO, carrying a phone loaded with years of internal messages and records.

It also reported that Eric had been invited to testify in Canada’s Foreign Interference Commission, known as the Hogue Commission, about Beijing’s operations on Canadian soil.

“In an August 2024 report, ABC Investigations wrote: ‘Eric told ABC Investigations he had been invited to testify as a witness in the next round of hearings, scheduled to start in September.’”

But there is no public sign that his evidence was ever examined in open hearings or mentioned in the Commission’s final reports, suggesting that any material he supplied was handled entirely behind closed doors, if at all.

According to Radio-Canada’s Enquête program, reporters travelled to Australia to interview Eric and forensically review the contents of his phone: thousands of text and voice messages between 2016 and 2023, as well as financial records and internal documents that he says came from Office No. 1 and its corporate covers.

The archives reportedly include detailed exchanges with his superiors, evidence of clandestine money transfers and the names of individuals allegedly involved in overseas espionage and repression.

One sequence, labelled “The target,” captures the moment Eric is ordered to focus on a dissident painter named Hua Yong, who had already become notorious in China for blood-marked Tiananmen commemorations and for documenting mass evictions in Beijing.

Citing the exchange, which has not been independently reviewed by The Bureau, Radio-Canada quotes:

Office No. 1: Our future communications must be encrypted.
Eric: What are the orders?
Office No. 1: Listen carefully to my request. It concerns Hua Yong. Our superiors find him troublesome and want to get rid of him.

Those messages set the tone for what follows: a multi-year manhunt that begins in Thailand and ends with Hua dead off Canada’s Sunshine Coast. Eric says Hua was formally designated a high-value target, and the same phone records, as summarized by Enquête and earlier Four Corners reporting, show that a bounty was placed on Hua’s head — roughly the equivalent of US$20,000 if he were captured and repatriated.

To win Hua’s trust, Eric reportedly constructed an elaborate false persona. On social media and encrypted apps, he posed as a radical anti-Communist militant, proposing the creation of a jungle “armed camp” and a band of revolutionaries. He then invented “Brigade V,” a fake guerrilla group he promoted online while appearing in videos in camouflage and a balaclava. Hua, in exile and under pressure, was impressed. “This is brilliant,” he reportedly wrote privately, according to the message logs, and the two men soon met in person in Bangkok, drinking wine and plotting what Hua believed was resistance — all while Eric quietly fed reports back to the political-security police.

It is this kind of mix of covert state targeting and deniable intermediaries that is now worrying Western security officials.

In November, ASIO director-general Mike Burgess used a major speech to warn that some authoritarian regimes are showing a “growing willingness” to mount “high-harm operations” abroad. Without naming specific countries, and not referring to Eric’s alleged evidence, he said his service believes “at least three nations” are willing and capable of carrying out lethal attacks in Australia, and may try to hide their involvement by contracting criminal “cut-outs.”

Canada’s own oversight bodies have been tracking a similar threat pattern.

In a 2024 report, the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP) described a fully redacted 12-paragraph case study of what it called the “most egregious” People’s Republic of China proxy identified by Canadian intelligence. The public summary says CSIS assessed that one aspect of the proxy’s behaviour posed a “high-risk, high-harm” threat to some Canadians and permanent residents, and that CSIS shared information on the proxy with the RCMP.

The same report notes that intelligence from CSIS and the Communications Security Establishment showed foreign states covertly attempting to buy influence with candidates and elected officials — a backdrop that makes the Hua Yong file, and the allegations of lethal targeting orders and corporate covers around Eric, especially sensitive.

Eric’s phone records, as described by Enquête, show that companies tied to his work gave him the freedom and cover to travel across Southeast Asia, build false identities and infiltrate exile networks, while maintaining his status as an MPS officer. One cover in particular stands out: a vast conglomerate in Cambodia that, on paper, dealt in real estate and finance and handled billions of dollars. Enquête identifies it as Prince Group and says Eric worked under its umbrella in 2016–2017 — a claim the company reportedly did not answer when approached by Radio-Canada.

That corporate name now has much wider resonance, and alleged connectivity to China’s United Front Work Department.

In October, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed an indictment charging Prince Group chairman Chen Zhi with orchestrating a forced-labour “pig-butchering” scam empire from compounds in Cambodia, while the U.S. Treasury and its U.K. counterpart simultaneously designated the “Prince Group Transnational Criminal Organization,” sanctioning Chen and 146 linked individuals and entities. Officials allege the network ran industrial-scale cyber-fraud centres staffed by trafficked workers, laundered billions in criminal proceeds and used shell companies and high-end real estate — including London properties — to wash illicit funds.

U.S. material also ties Prince Group into the orbit of Chinese state-aligned figures. Sanctions filings link Chen Zhi to Wan Kuok-koi, the Macau Triad boss known as “Broken Tooth,” whose modern Hongmen association has been described by U.S. officials as directly connected to the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department. They further allege that Prince Group worked with Palau-based businesswoman Rose Wang, a former vice-president of Palau’s Overseas Chinese Federation, who helped broker access and casino licences while acting as a facilitator for the scam network — a role analysts say dovetails with informal diplomacy and influence work on Beijing’s behalf.

Against that background, Eric’s description of Prince Group as one of his covers fits with The Bureau’s source material tying alleged Chinese police-station networks in Canada to underground casino and Chinese mafia structures entangled with United Front-aligned political figures.

In Eric’s interview with Radio-Canada, he portrays the Prince Group conglomerate as part of a broader ecosystem of ostensibly legitimate companies that quietly cooperate with Chinese security services — providing salaries, visas, office space and a glossy façade for officers like him to operate overseas. The digital trail Enquête reconstructed links that ecosystem to the micro-level surveillance of Hua Yong: reports on his movements, photographs of his residence in Canada, and continual updates to superiors who had bluntly said they wanted to “get rid of him.”

By April 2021, Hua had slipped out of Southeast Asia and arrived in Halifax on a humanitarian protection visa. From there, he moved west, eventually settling in the coastal community of Gibsons, British Columbia. Enquête reports that Eric continued to track him remotely, sending situation reports back to Office No. 1 even after Hua appeared to have found a measure of safety in Canada.

In November 2022, Hua reportedly set out alone in a bright yellow kayak and never returned. His body was later found on an island off the Sunshine Coast. The RCMP concluded that he had drowned and said they found no evidence of foul play; officers were not aware, at the time, that he was the subject of a Chinese police operation. According to Radio-Canada, three years later the case is still not fully closed: the British Columbia coroner has yet to issue a final report — an unusually long delay in a province where such inquests typically take around 16 months. In an email cited by Enquête, the Coroners Service said factors such as the complexity of a file and “investigations conducted by other agencies” can prolong a case.

According to Radio-Canada, Eric himself is ambivalent about what happened on the water that day. He told Enquête he had wondered whether Hua was murdered and recalled Hua’s own suspicion, during a severe illness in Canada, that he might have been poisoned. But he also pointed to later online information suggesting the death might have been an accident, and emphasized that he has no definitive proof either way. What he does insist on is that Hua was a live target of a Chinese operation at the time he died — and that, based on standard MPS tradecraft, there were “certainly other teams” beyond him monitoring the dissident in Canada.

Eric also reportedly says he has never been contacted by RCMP about Hua’s death. Instead, he told Enquête that he has provided documents from his phone archive to Canada’s Commission of Inquiry into Foreign Interference in confidential channels. From his vantage point — as the officer who received the “get rid of him” order, posed as Hua’s ally and then watched him restart his life in Canada — he argues there are “strange aspects” to the case that demand further scrutiny.