A rustling noise runs through the back of an amphitheater, rue Sainte-Marguerite, in the heart of old Strasbourg. It is February 2019, in one of the rooms of the ENA. One of the conference participants has just slipped away discreetly at the request of several students. They noticed that their friend, a student of the long international cycle – which welcomes senior foreign officials – took a place in the last row. Of Chinese nationality, he has no place in a meeting relating to… a French secret service.
Bernard Emié, the director of the General Directorate of External Security (DGSE), comes to present career opportunities in his department to students in the Molière class. The exercise is usual: each year, a place at the DGSE is reserved for an enarque, whose name is then removed from the list of graduates. In the cozy atmosphere of the school, the incident caused no scandal. But he is relieved by the boss of the DGSE. “He explained to us that it is obvious that the Chinese students who are currently coming to our major schools are repeating to their country what they do there and what is said there,” reports one of the students. .
Concerns at the DGSI
The concern is such that, for five years, the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI), responsible for counter-espionage, has put in place a “specific plan” for “protection of the world of research and ‘higher education’ against foreign interference. The intelligence service is trying to make up for three decades of recklessness. Despite multiple warnings, French research is struggling to do without the best of Chinese students and, above all, their funding.
The episode was kept secret. At the beginning of 2017, the prestigious Paris-Saclay University almost concluded a problematic pact. At the end of February, the first French scientific innovation center was contacted by a certain Mr. Gang Lou. He represents the Chinese public company TusHoldings, supposedly dependent on Tsinghua University, a prestigious establishment where officials of the Chinese Communist Party – including its current secretary general, Xi Jinping – studied. The holding company specializes in the creation of international “science parks”, a sort of giant incubator intended to bring together engineers, researchers and companies to encourage innovation. She would like to make the French university the “barycenter” of its European establishment. The project would allow student exchanges, but not only that. TusHoldings would invest $100 million and take a stake in the companies in the newly created cluster. The French Embassy and the CNRS in China are in favor of the partnership. For Paris-Saclay, the opportunity is great. Too much. Seized with a last-minute doubt, the president of the university contacted the executive.
China, “offensive actor” in matters of interference
At the top of the State, the negotiation is worrying. At Bercy, the teams from the strategic information and economic security service (Sisse) understand that TusHoldings does not really depend on the university, but on a complex financial arrangement. The investors are unknown. “Anyone could be behind this project. From what we saw, we were perhaps in the process of selling part of the Saclay plateau to Huawei,” breathes a person close to the file, who chokes up: “ We weren’t going to sell off half of what Saclay produces for 100 million euros!” On July 7, 2017, Jean-Baptiste Carpentier, commissioner for strategic information and economic security, expressed concern, in a letter sent to the president of Paris-Saclay, about “elements” in the file “likely to reveal a significant risk of predation of national intangible heritage”. The project was stopped at the last minute.
The episode reflects a concern that haunts the intelligence services: that of a soft heist, organized to suck up French knowledge. “China is the most offensive actor detected at universities and in major schools,” explains a senior executive from a French intelligence service. He warns: “Three quarters of the approaches to unbalanced partnerships and research funding that can make a university entity dependent come from Chinese actors.”
A bottomless pit
The DGSI has set up discussions with major schools and higher education to counter the problem. Between June 2022 and June 2023, the secret service established nearly a thousand “contacts” – bilateral exchanges, conferences, advice – with the institutions. The anxieties of counterespionage depend on the specialties of the establishments. At Sciences Po or the ENA, the DGSI warns, for example, of the risks of recruitment, particularly through Chinese students, of French professors who could then serve as a relay of influence for Beijing.
As for business schools, services are alarmed by a weakening of establishments that could become dependent on Chinese capital. This has already happened: in 2017, the Chinese group Weidong Cloud Education became the main shareholder of the Brest Business School (BBS). A case sufficiently worrying to be noted in a senatorial report on the protection of academic knowledge, published in September 2021. “For a long time, the major schools said to themselves that the more Chinese students there were, the better they could make ends meet, observes MEP (Renew) Nathalie Loiseau, chair of the security and defense subcommittee in the European Parliament. China was a bottomless pit. They were sinking into it.”
Avoid looting
The most sensitive point of vigilance concerns the hard sciences. From the beginning of the 2010s, a teacher at Ensta, an engineering school affiliated with Polytechnique, was the subject of a concerned note from the interministerial delegation for economic intelligence, in Matignon. Winner of the Chinese Communist Party’s “thousand talents” program, he visited Chinese universities linked to the army. To avoid looting, a specific protection system has been put in place, symbolized by restrictive regime zones (ZRR), which make it possible to regulate access to research laboratories. This system is not flawless: between April 2018 and September 2021, a student from the Metz campus of Arts et Métiers spent several nights and weekends in laboratories in Metz and Strasbourg. Called to order, Xuan Wu finally returned to her country. Several other cases “related to Chinese students” in France “retain the attention” of the State, a senior intelligence executive tells us. They could involve “possible sanctions, including against university executives who made these breaches possible”.
Faced with espionage, researchers are asked to be vigilant when recruiting. The CVs of foreign doctoral students are put through the mill. When they are Chinese, several signals are scrutinized. “A graduate from a renowned university close to the Communist Party will question things,” explains a former director of a major engineering school. “If a doctoral student has holes in his CV, even more so.” Students arriving through the China Scholarship Council CSC scholarship, entirely funded by Beijing, are also the object of all attention. “We know that these students are required to provide precise information about what they are doing and the content of their research to the Chinese authorities,” explains the senior intelligence executive.
“The research was a sieve”
In order to avoid the transmission of sensitive information, laboratories now prohibit access to any research linked to industrial applications. However, there is no question for major engineering schools to give up this windfall. “We constantly live under the pressure of contradictory injunctions: on the one hand we are asked to pay attention to the risk of industrial espionage, on the other Polytechnique beats all the drums to attract Chinese students,” sighs Mathis Plapp, research director at the CNRS and professor at the Polytechnique.
These often brilliant students remain prized by certain laboratory directors, but more and more researchers are becoming disillusioned. “In 2020, during one of their conferences, the DGSI showed us that cutting-edge technology from a French laboratory had been copied, a few weeks later, by a Chinese laboratory. There had clearly been espionage” , says the director of a ZRR in a large Parisian school, who sighs: “Until recently, research was a sieve. I must admit: we were completely fooled.”