At the Prague-based Sinopsis, René Bigey has published a new report on the CCP’s use of professional associations to pursue technology transfer and political influence in France:
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has developed a sophisticated strategy to transfer knowledge and technologies from abroad. Its implementation includes recruiting scholars and entrepreneurs for short-term or permanent positions in China or from abroad. As has been documented elsewhere, talent recruitment programs are often associated with misconduct and intellectual property theft.
This study — the first devoted to PRC talent recruitment in France — has identified extensive networks within the French science and technology ecosystem with close links to the PRC party-state and its technology transfer bureaucracy. These networks may create channels for China (including its military) to obtain technology key to France’s innovative edge and national security. In some cases, these channels may also be used for political influence purposes.
Our research focuses on a sample of 20 French-based associations active in transferring knowledge and technology to China. Members of these associations (claimed to number over 10,000) work for top French companies and research institutions.
[…] As partners of PRC agencies, these associations could serve the CCP as political influence instruments. Highlighting this potential, 4D China, a group linked to our study’s associations that seeks to fight “misconceptions” about China in French society, was co-founded by a senior expert at France Stratégie, a French agency advising the prime minister. [Source]
Like authors of earlier reports on PRC foreign interference, Bigey highlights the CCP’s proprietary attitude toward overseas Chinese communities, which has often left members of the diaspora caught between pressure from Beijing and misdirected backlash in their own countries:
Forming diaspora professional associations is a legitimate way for otherwise potentially isolated people to gather and discuss common topics of interest. However, the associations studied in the present report have little to do with spontaneous creations of autonomous actors in French civil society. Through their membership in a CCP-linked federation, their relationship with the united front bureaucracy and their dealings with the Chinese embassy in France, all of them have been sponsored or coopted by, or at least linked to, the party-state. These links help explain why even associations that have not been contracted to officiate as “work stations” may still be receptive to official guidance as to how best to “serve the motherland”. Their entanglement in party-state networks also helps explain why some of their members have engaged in some sort of political influence. […]
Although their primary mission is to identify talents and technologies and link them up with various conduits through which they can be absorbed by Chinese organizations, those associations are deeply embedded in the party-state nexus. Many of these associations have developed under the auspices of the united front system, with (engineered or spontaneous) “patriotism” as one of the main engines for mobilization. Therefore, they are often also used as conduits for political influence towards the overseas Chinese (scientific) community as well as French society at large. This is not a recent phenomenon — the party’s work on overseas Chinese explicitly seeks to use them as vectors for political influence.
[…] AEFC [Association des experts français et chinois] president Claire Li is active in organizing “root-seeking” summer camps in China for younger generations of Chinese immigrants to France. The 2019 summer camp she participated in in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, brought together 120 young people from 20 different countries, including France, Spain and Switzerland.
The summer camp’s inauguration was presided by the party secretary of Wuxi’s Overseas Chinese Federation, who is also the deputy head of the municipal United Front Work Department. Activities organized during such summer camps include drawing, music and calligraphy classes, which may seem benign. Yet, those are infused with officially-sanctioned “patriotic” content aimed at instilling a sense of “national” belonging. For instance, during their calligraphy classes, children were made to draw the Chinese characters for “China Dream”, a concept closely associated with Xi Jinping who routinely equates it with the idea of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. At the camp, they are also asked to become the “good messengers” of Chinese culture overseas and bridges between China — referred to as “the motherland” — and their home country — referred to only as their “country of residence”. Such efforts are characteristic of the party-state’s efforts to nurture transnational loyalty among the overseas Chinese, regardless of the citizenship of each individual. [Source]
