Through naïveté and mindless belief in the universal benefits of academic exchange, some of Canada’s leading universities have contributed to the militarization of the Far East.

From the start of academic exchanges with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the early 1970s, the government of Canada has watched and largely approved of Chinese students focusing almost exclusively on science and technology faculties at Canadian universities. Meanwhile, Canadians going to study in China have engrossed themselves in Chinese language and culture and Maoism. For most of the past fifty years, Canadian universities and authorities were satisfied with this exchange. They saw giving Chinese students the benefits of Canadian knowledge and experience in science and technology as a gift toward the economic and industrial development of China.

Around the year 2000, however, Beijing and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) realized that here was an opportunity to grab or develop technology for their program of rapid military modernization that had begun a decade before. The PLA calls the program “picking flowers in foreign lands to make honey in China,” and it is not at all as innocent as it sounds. It involves PLA engineers and scientists from the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) and six other armed-forces universities disguising their military links and presenting themselves as simple scholars in order to engage in postgraduate research at Canadian universities.