>*A Chinese student spied on French laboratories Between April 2018 and September 2021, the PhD student spent several nights in sensitive laboratories in Metz and Strasbourg, allowing one of her compatriots to penetrate them. The DGSI is concerned about the vulnerabilities of French research institutions.*
>
>*A conscientious and diligent PhD student, Xuan Wu is also a an absent-minded young woman. On several occasions, this Chinese national has let herself be locked in at night in the laboratories where she conducts her work on cyber-physical systems.*
>
>*First in the laboratory of design, manufacture and control (LCFC) of the Arts et Métiers campus in Metz. Spotted by members of the establishment and called to order, the young woman disciplined herself and no longer fell asleep on the Metz site.*
>
>*But a few weeks later, she did it again, this time in the ICube research laboratory of the Insa Strasbourg. Xuan Wu stayed there all weekend. No doubt in order not to suffer too much from the solitude, she opened the doors several times to a compatriot, who had nothing to do there. This does not prevent him, according to the DGSI, which will be interested in these intrusions, from using certain materials of the laboratory.*
>
>*Xuan Wu is an easily distracted young woman, but also discreet. On the Internet, her presence remains superficial. The few photos on her Facebook account, created when she arrived in France and inactive since her departure in 2021, show a student with black hair and fine features, living in Strasbourg. Most of her 50 friends are Chinese expatriates, fellow students from Arts et Métiers, the University of Strasbourg or an engineering school in Saclay (Essonne).*
>
>*”I met Xuan Wu at the end of 2018, at the Metz town hall, during the ”gourmet exchanges”, organized by the Crous, recalls one of his friends. The principle is to receive a foreign student at your table and then welcome her at home. I remember a rather discreet student who didn’t speak French and who came with a fellow LEA student to do the translation. I remember she had a habit of always taking pictures of everything.*
>
>*”She joined France in April 2018 thanks to a scholarship issued by the China Scolarship Council, an agency of the Chinese Ministry of Education. As soon as she arrived, her behavior challenged the staff at the Arts et Métiers campus in Metz, where she was doing her thesis under cotutelle with Insa Strasbourg. At issue: an annoying habit of logging on to the laboratory’s computers with the identifiers of other doctoral students.*
>
>*An indelicate practice and especially contrary to the computer charter. The teaching staff reminded her several times of the school’s rules. But these warnings did not have the desired effect. The Chinese doctoral student argued that she did not understand French.*
>
>*The management of the laboratories in the Grand Est region probably did not have the precedent in mind, but Xuan Wu’s line of defense is reminiscent of that used by another Chinese student, Huang Lili.*
>
>*While attending the University of Technology in Compiègne, Lili, a young woman of 22, was awarded an internship in 2005 in the Research & Development department of the automotive supplier Valeo. She was arrested and incarcerated because she had copied about forty files unrelated to her internship. In court, she was sentenced to one year in prison, ten months of which were suspended, for breach of trust. Huang Lili apologized for not having paid attention to the confidentiality agreement presented at the beginning of her internship: “I read it quickly without paying attention. She had also ignored the warnings of Valeo staff who always saw her with her laptop equipped with a 40-gig hard drive.*
>
>*Seventeen years later, history is repeating itself. Xuan Wu ignores the warnings of the teaching staff and reoffends. She even became more and more daring. At the beginning of 2020, she was no longer content to log on to the computer system with the logins of other researchers; she spent her nights in the laboratories and, in the spring of 2020, she invited a compatriot to join her.*
>
>*The matter was reported to the DGSI, which investigated and eventually recommended that the Arts et Métiers and the Insa Strasbourg forbid access to their buildings to the doctoral student. The two schools complied. Xuan Wu’s studies were interrupted and the Ministry of Higher Education organized her return to China last fall. Xuan Wu is currently writing her thesis and will complete it in her home country. She should defend it in the next few weeks. The Chinese embassy did not answer our questions sent by e-mail on Wednesday, February 9.*
>
>*Studies within one of the Chinese “seven sons of national defense” What was Xuan Wu looking for? What was there to spy on in these laboratories? The colleagues who worked with her, those who supervised her thesis and the management of Arts et Métiers and Insa Strasbourg did not wish to comment. Or they are trying to be reassuring. Like Laurent Champaney, director general of Arts et Métiers in Metz. Contacted, he explains that the young woman “only had access to offices and shared spaces for doctoral students,” sensitive data being protected by a “digital lock. She could not, according to the elements in his knowledge, engage in espionage.*
>
>*To be seen. An expert on these issues at the European level is more concerned: “Just by logging on to the schools’ computers, she can understand the dynamics of the research projects that the European Union is funding with the school: who is collaborating with whom, on what topics.”*
>
>*Xuan Wu’s thesis focuses on cyber-physical systems, technologies boosted with artificial intelligence that allow autonomous vehicles to navigate in space, as well as automate, analyze and adjust the output of a production line live. While research on these systems in the United States is mainly focused on the military sector, they are opening the doors to “industry 4.0”, where machines are monitored and controlled in real time.*
>
>*These processes are at the heart of the research conducted by the LCFC at Arts et Métiers, which “has demonstrated exceptional influence in the research landscape at the regional and national levels,” according to the report on its latest evaluation by the Haut Conseil de l’évaluation de la recherche et de l’enseignement supérieur. Strategic for France, this research is just as strategic for China. Developed in 2015 by Premier Li Keqiang, the “Made in China 2025” program aims to shift the country’s industrial sector towards this Industry 4.0.*
>
>*And just before arriving in France, Xuan Wu earned a master’s degree in industrial and manufacturing systems engineering at Beihang University, a Beijing university specializing in aerospace and aeronautics, with which Arts et Métiers has had a partnership since 1987.*
>
>*A school on which French intelligence keeps a close eye. It is one of China’s “seven sons of national defense”, the name given to universities close to the army. “It is here that some of the Chinese arms engineers are trained,” explains Antoine Bondaz, a researcher at the Foundation for Strategic Research, a specialist in China.*
>
>*The DGSI points out the risk of “unbalanced partnerships” between universities Particularly vigilant in the face of attempts to interfere in universities, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) assesses the level of potential danger of partnerships with Chinese universities. An agreement with Beihang University is presented as “very high risk”. Despite these doubts, Beihang University maintains partnerships with other French schools, notably ISAE-Supaero and Estaca, and since 2005 has been home to the campus of École Centrale Beijing.*
>
>*A senior French intelligence official, who described the Xuan Wu affair to us as a “fairly aggressive” example of espionage, sounds the alarm: “We were lucky that the laboratories had the right reflex and alerted the DGSI. But many schools are financed with Chinese funds. In return, they welcome researchers from that country and when they catch these students, they do not dare to denounce them for fear that Chinese investors will cut off the money.”*
>
>*In an October 2021 DGSI document, which Mediapart accessed, French counterintelligence identifies various cases of vulnerability in higher education and research institutions. Xuan Wu’s “particularly intrusive behavior” tops the list.*
>
>*Among the other cases mentioned, that of a student, whose nationality Mediapart did not identify, suspected of having facilitated the commission of cyberattacks targeting a French university. However, over the years, the student’s home institution has multiplied “unbalanced partnerships” with the French faculty, which is now “in a situation of critical dependence” on foreign funding. Also, the DGSI deplores, “despite the proven facts, likely to have compromised its computer network, the French institution did not want to take the risk of exposing itself to retaliatory measures from the foreign university and therefore did not file a complaint against the student.*
This precedent should encourage EU to protect its research facilities, laboratories and intellectual property.
Greed, blindness and naivety toward China has been embarrassing for decades.
This is absolutely nothing new. In our research group there was an open secret that any collaboration with Chinese partners would result in a similar publication coming out months later, with some superficial changes.
Sadly, a large percentage of Chinese researchers have no shame or respect for other’s research. I’ve routinely seen conference participants take photos of poster and presentations where there is a strict “no cameras” rule, and then feign ignorance when caught.
Most research that comes out of China is garbage quality with very little originality or scientific rigour. A personal experience again showed me that when sending students to a partner research group in Shanghai, to repeat their fantastic results (from 1 experimental replicate) of a particular method, the students were absolutely not able to reproduce them. Their group leader claims we sent crap students, when the reality was that they were never properly shown techniques or methods, everything was chaotic and obfuscated intentionally by the language barrier.
Chinese universities are paper mills, they do not provide any meaningful contribution to the scientific community because the research is usually tainted with bullshit claims and unsubstantiated methodology. Chinese universities, and in turn researchers, are massively pressured and coerced to do this as they are **owned by the Communist Party**, and in order to look good on the world stage, they dangle grants and bursaries above their heads.
Disclaimer: Before I get the claims of “racism”, please be aware that I am attacking the scientific culture of China, and not the people. **I have met many, many diligent, highly intelligent, hard-working and brilliant researchers from China**, who have luckily relocated and escaped the dystopic hell-scape, and actually allowed to think freely. I hope many more do the same, because there is a untapped well of talent.
What a shocker. Let us bend even more then.
Same thing is happening in Canada and probably most countries where there are lots of Chinese students.
In the Munich university there was arcade of which I have heard. Where Chinese students would use specially prepared shoes to collect metal abrasives from the laboratories. To reverse engender the alloys.
The way I see it.
Everyone believed better life and mutual dependency would change people’s minds about communism, it worked so well in EX soviet countries that most of these people are now willing to fight for the newfound life…
There was a reason to believe this would work, and I was convinced it did.
Only in recent years, it became apparent how impossible people in charge of China are, constant human rights violations, trying to expand influence into Europe, trying to take over less developed countries in Africa through debt trap plans, constantly claiming ownership over Indian, Russian and other foreign territories, not to mention the entirety of Taiwan, the way whole Hong Kong got fckd back into PCR with energy recently seen in Belarus and Kazachstan, “We will kill everyone who stands in our way” just confirmed all Western worries.
We should definitively guard Europes intellectual properties and interests. And unless the situation improves, blocking Chinese students on EU universities should come into consideration , even the US is talking about it, no matter how Cold War paranoia it sounds.
It is somewhat reassuring that they (the CCP) still think that there are things to be gained from Europe which means we are in the lead. Once Chinese spying stops, that’s when you really have to start worrying.
Can you imagine a student from a western country going these lengths to spy in Russia or China
11 comments
>*A Chinese student spied on French laboratories Between April 2018 and September 2021, the PhD student spent several nights in sensitive laboratories in Metz and Strasbourg, allowing one of her compatriots to penetrate them. The DGSI is concerned about the vulnerabilities of French research institutions.*
>
>*A conscientious and diligent PhD student, Xuan Wu is also a an absent-minded young woman. On several occasions, this Chinese national has let herself be locked in at night in the laboratories where she conducts her work on cyber-physical systems.*
>
>*First in the laboratory of design, manufacture and control (LCFC) of the Arts et Métiers campus in Metz. Spotted by members of the establishment and called to order, the young woman disciplined herself and no longer fell asleep on the Metz site.*
>
>*But a few weeks later, she did it again, this time in the ICube research laboratory of the Insa Strasbourg. Xuan Wu stayed there all weekend. No doubt in order not to suffer too much from the solitude, she opened the doors several times to a compatriot, who had nothing to do there. This does not prevent him, according to the DGSI, which will be interested in these intrusions, from using certain materials of the laboratory.*
>
>*Xuan Wu is an easily distracted young woman, but also discreet. On the Internet, her presence remains superficial. The few photos on her Facebook account, created when she arrived in France and inactive since her departure in 2021, show a student with black hair and fine features, living in Strasbourg. Most of her 50 friends are Chinese expatriates, fellow students from Arts et Métiers, the University of Strasbourg or an engineering school in Saclay (Essonne).*
>
>*”I met Xuan Wu at the end of 2018, at the Metz town hall, during the ”gourmet exchanges”, organized by the Crous, recalls one of his friends. The principle is to receive a foreign student at your table and then welcome her at home. I remember a rather discreet student who didn’t speak French and who came with a fellow LEA student to do the translation. I remember she had a habit of always taking pictures of everything.*
>
>*”She joined France in April 2018 thanks to a scholarship issued by the China Scolarship Council, an agency of the Chinese Ministry of Education. As soon as she arrived, her behavior challenged the staff at the Arts et Métiers campus in Metz, where she was doing her thesis under cotutelle with Insa Strasbourg. At issue: an annoying habit of logging on to the laboratory’s computers with the identifiers of other doctoral students.*
>
>*An indelicate practice and especially contrary to the computer charter. The teaching staff reminded her several times of the school’s rules. But these warnings did not have the desired effect. The Chinese doctoral student argued that she did not understand French.*
>
>*The management of the laboratories in the Grand Est region probably did not have the precedent in mind, but Xuan Wu’s line of defense is reminiscent of that used by another Chinese student, Huang Lili.*
>
>*While attending the University of Technology in Compiègne, Lili, a young woman of 22, was awarded an internship in 2005 in the Research & Development department of the automotive supplier Valeo. She was arrested and incarcerated because she had copied about forty files unrelated to her internship. In court, she was sentenced to one year in prison, ten months of which were suspended, for breach of trust. Huang Lili apologized for not having paid attention to the confidentiality agreement presented at the beginning of her internship: “I read it quickly without paying attention. She had also ignored the warnings of Valeo staff who always saw her with her laptop equipped with a 40-gig hard drive.*
>
>*Seventeen years later, history is repeating itself. Xuan Wu ignores the warnings of the teaching staff and reoffends. She even became more and more daring. At the beginning of 2020, she was no longer content to log on to the computer system with the logins of other researchers; she spent her nights in the laboratories and, in the spring of 2020, she invited a compatriot to join her.*
>
>*The matter was reported to the DGSI, which investigated and eventually recommended that the Arts et Métiers and the Insa Strasbourg forbid access to their buildings to the doctoral student. The two schools complied. Xuan Wu’s studies were interrupted and the Ministry of Higher Education organized her return to China last fall. Xuan Wu is currently writing her thesis and will complete it in her home country. She should defend it in the next few weeks. The Chinese embassy did not answer our questions sent by e-mail on Wednesday, February 9.*
>
>*Studies within one of the Chinese “seven sons of national defense” What was Xuan Wu looking for? What was there to spy on in these laboratories? The colleagues who worked with her, those who supervised her thesis and the management of Arts et Métiers and Insa Strasbourg did not wish to comment. Or they are trying to be reassuring. Like Laurent Champaney, director general of Arts et Métiers in Metz. Contacted, he explains that the young woman “only had access to offices and shared spaces for doctoral students,” sensitive data being protected by a “digital lock. She could not, according to the elements in his knowledge, engage in espionage.*
>
>*To be seen. An expert on these issues at the European level is more concerned: “Just by logging on to the schools’ computers, she can understand the dynamics of the research projects that the European Union is funding with the school: who is collaborating with whom, on what topics.”*
>
>*Xuan Wu’s thesis focuses on cyber-physical systems, technologies boosted with artificial intelligence that allow autonomous vehicles to navigate in space, as well as automate, analyze and adjust the output of a production line live. While research on these systems in the United States is mainly focused on the military sector, they are opening the doors to “industry 4.0”, where machines are monitored and controlled in real time.*
>
>*These processes are at the heart of the research conducted by the LCFC at Arts et Métiers, which “has demonstrated exceptional influence in the research landscape at the regional and national levels,” according to the report on its latest evaluation by the Haut Conseil de l’évaluation de la recherche et de l’enseignement supérieur. Strategic for France, this research is just as strategic for China. Developed in 2015 by Premier Li Keqiang, the “Made in China 2025” program aims to shift the country’s industrial sector towards this Industry 4.0.*
>
>*And just before arriving in France, Xuan Wu earned a master’s degree in industrial and manufacturing systems engineering at Beihang University, a Beijing university specializing in aerospace and aeronautics, with which Arts et Métiers has had a partnership since 1987.*
>
>*A school on which French intelligence keeps a close eye. It is one of China’s “seven sons of national defense”, the name given to universities close to the army. “It is here that some of the Chinese arms engineers are trained,” explains Antoine Bondaz, a researcher at the Foundation for Strategic Research, a specialist in China.*
>
>*The DGSI points out the risk of “unbalanced partnerships” between universities Particularly vigilant in the face of attempts to interfere in universities, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) assesses the level of potential danger of partnerships with Chinese universities. An agreement with Beihang University is presented as “very high risk”. Despite these doubts, Beihang University maintains partnerships with other French schools, notably ISAE-Supaero and Estaca, and since 2005 has been home to the campus of École Centrale Beijing.*
>
>*A senior French intelligence official, who described the Xuan Wu affair to us as a “fairly aggressive” example of espionage, sounds the alarm: “We were lucky that the laboratories had the right reflex and alerted the DGSI. But many schools are financed with Chinese funds. In return, they welcome researchers from that country and when they catch these students, they do not dare to denounce them for fear that Chinese investors will cut off the money.”*
>
>*In an October 2021 DGSI document, which Mediapart accessed, French counterintelligence identifies various cases of vulnerability in higher education and research institutions. Xuan Wu’s “particularly intrusive behavior” tops the list.*
>
>*Among the other cases mentioned, that of a student, whose nationality Mediapart did not identify, suspected of having facilitated the commission of cyberattacks targeting a French university. However, over the years, the student’s home institution has multiplied “unbalanced partnerships” with the French faculty, which is now “in a situation of critical dependence” on foreign funding. Also, the DGSI deplores, “despite the proven facts, likely to have compromised its computer network, the French institution did not want to take the risk of exposing itself to retaliatory measures from the foreign university and therefore did not file a complaint against the student.*
This precedent should encourage EU to protect its research facilities, laboratories and intellectual property.
Greed, blindness and naivety toward China has been embarrassing for decades.
This is absolutely nothing new. In our research group there was an open secret that any collaboration with Chinese partners would result in a similar publication coming out months later, with some superficial changes.
Sadly, a large percentage of Chinese researchers have no shame or respect for other’s research. I’ve routinely seen conference participants take photos of poster and presentations where there is a strict “no cameras” rule, and then feign ignorance when caught.
Most research that comes out of China is garbage quality with very little originality or scientific rigour. A personal experience again showed me that when sending students to a partner research group in Shanghai, to repeat their fantastic results (from 1 experimental replicate) of a particular method, the students were absolutely not able to reproduce them. Their group leader claims we sent crap students, when the reality was that they were never properly shown techniques or methods, everything was chaotic and obfuscated intentionally by the language barrier.
Chinese universities are paper mills, they do not provide any meaningful contribution to the scientific community because the research is usually tainted with bullshit claims and unsubstantiated methodology. Chinese universities, and in turn researchers, are massively pressured and coerced to do this as they are **owned by the Communist Party**, and in order to look good on the world stage, they dangle grants and bursaries above their heads.
Disclaimer: Before I get the claims of “racism”, please be aware that I am attacking the scientific culture of China, and not the people. **I have met many, many diligent, highly intelligent, hard-working and brilliant researchers from China**, who have luckily relocated and escaped the dystopic hell-scape, and actually allowed to think freely. I hope many more do the same, because there is a untapped well of talent.
What a shocker. Let us bend even more then.
Same thing is happening in Canada and probably most countries where there are lots of Chinese students.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/national-microbiology-lab-scientist-investigation-china-1.5307424
In the Munich university there was arcade of which I have heard. Where Chinese students would use specially prepared shoes to collect metal abrasives from the laboratories. To reverse engender the alloys.
The way I see it.
Everyone believed better life and mutual dependency would change people’s minds about communism, it worked so well in EX soviet countries that most of these people are now willing to fight for the newfound life…
There was a reason to believe this would work, and I was convinced it did.
Only in recent years, it became apparent how impossible people in charge of China are, constant human rights violations, trying to expand influence into Europe, trying to take over less developed countries in Africa through debt trap plans, constantly claiming ownership over Indian, Russian and other foreign territories, not to mention the entirety of Taiwan, the way whole Hong Kong got fckd back into PCR with energy recently seen in Belarus and Kazachstan, “We will kill everyone who stands in our way” just confirmed all Western worries.
We should definitively guard Europes intellectual properties and interests. And unless the situation improves, blocking Chinese students on EU universities should come into consideration , even the US is talking about it, no matter how Cold War paranoia it sounds.
It is somewhat reassuring that they (the CCP) still think that there are things to be gained from Europe which means we are in the lead. Once Chinese spying stops, that’s when you really have to start worrying.
Can you imagine a student from a western country going these lengths to spy in Russia or China
Spying is actually pretty much how the US came up to speed with European Industrial Revolution technologies by the 20th century https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-europe