Bethany Allen explains her investigation into a British university’s joint venture campus in China and the risks of critical tech collaboration.
Recently an ASPI team led by our head of China investigations and analysis Bethany Allen published a report on a joint venture university campus between Xi’an Jiaotong University in China and Liverpool University in Britain. Their findings raise serious questions about research collaboration into sensitive technologies, including those with military applications.
In today’s episode, Bethany talks through the findings, including the joint university’s partnerships and close links with entities sanctioned by Britain, the US, the EU and other nations for supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and helping with China’s military modernisation.
She explains the risks that these partnerships create, how widespread they might be, and what more needs to be done by universities themselves by way of due diligence into their partnerships, but also the need for governments to set clearer rules and guidelines about what defines unacceptable risk.
Read the article A British university’s technology entanglements with Russia and China, by Bethany Allen, Danielle Cave and Adam Ziogas.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Stop the world. So universities in Australia, in
the US and UK, they need to go through and do a very clear
housekeeping on what are their partners in China getting up to
and what are their own programmes in China getting up
to. Do they have any relationships
with sanctioned entities or companies that are on a trade
blacklist? Do they have any joint
institutes with companies that are on a trade blacklist?
(00:23):
They need to know very, very clearly what is going on.
Welcome to this special weekend episode of STOP THE World.
I'm David Roe. And I'm Olivia Nelson.
Recently, an ASP team led by ourHead of China Investigations and
Analysis, Bethany Allen, published a report on a joint
venture university campus between Shan Jiaotong University
(00:43):
in China and Liverpool University in Britain.
Their findings raise some serious questions about research
collaboration into sensitive technologies, including those
with military applications. In today's episode, Bethany
talks through the findings, including the joint university's
partnerships and close links with entities sanctioned by
Britain, the US, the EU and other nations for supporting
(01:04):
Russia's invasion of Ukraine andhelping with China's military
modernization. Bethany explains the risks that
these partnerships create, how widespread they might be, and
what more needs to be done by universities themselves by way
of due diligence into their partnerships, but also the need
for governments to set clearer rules and guidelines about what
defines unacceptable risk. Yes, importantly, Bethany makes
(01:27):
the point that research collaboration is important for
humanity and we don't want to choke it off entirely.
But there is a need for de risking so that innovation
deriving from Western universities doesn't produce
capabilities used by militaries of authoritarian nations like
Russia. Amazingly, the joint university
includes a centre for China Russia humanitarian cooperation
(01:48):
and development. I chuckle somewhat because
clearly China Russia cooperationwe always associate with
humanitarian motivations. Anyway, it helps Chinese
companies enter the Russian market and promotes research
ties between China and Russia. You can find this report on
ASP's Strategist site, and we'llalso link to it in your episode
(02:09):
notes. We strongly urge you to have a
read if you haven't already. So now enjoy hearing Bethany
explain it all. I'm here with Bethany Allen.
Bethany, thanks for coming on STOP THE WORLD.
Thanks so much for having me. So you had a piece recently in
ASP's Strategist. It was an investigation that
looked into the relationship between the University of
(02:32):
Liverpool in the United Kingdom and a major Chinese defence
university. It's a fairly complicated set of
relationships, but Bethany, perhaps just to help our
listeners understand as simply as you can talk through the
chain of connections that you'veidentified.
Sure. So we're actually looking at 3
universities here. There's the University of
(02:54):
Liverpool in the UK, there's theChinese university, which is
Xi'an Jiao Tong University, and then there's a third university
that those two parent universities created.
It's a joint venture university called Xian Jiao Tong Liverpool
University, and we're going to refer to that as XJTLU.
(03:18):
So XJTLU, it is, it's a very large campus.
It has around between 10 and 20,000 students.
And this is the university that our piece looks at.
And what we found was that XJTLUhas a number of formal and
(03:42):
official relationships with entities that are sanctioned by
Britain, the USEU and others foreither supporting Russia's
invasion of Ukraine or for assisting China's military
modernization and human rights violations.
What kind of organisations are we talking about there that are
(04:05):
sanctioned? So XJTLU just last year opened a
China Russia Centre on its campus.
It's called the, the full name is the China Russia Centre for
Humanitarian Cooperation. And that centre, I mean, you
(04:25):
know, let let's back up a bit again.
This is a university. XJTLU, one of its parent
universities, is a British university.
And XJTLU doesn't issue its own degrees.
When a student graduates from XJTLU, it's graduating, they're
graduating with a dual degree, one from Liverpool and one from
the Chinese parent university. So there's a very clear
(04:47):
relationship here. And this China Russia centre is
the Russian Co Director of the centre is affiliated with a
Russian government agency that is sanctioned for its overseas
influence activities and for itsin support of Russia's invasion
(05:07):
of Ukraine. And not only that, XJTLU
welcomed a high level Russian government delegation to its
campus to launch this centre. And that delegation was led by a
former Russian senator who is herself sanctioned by the US,
(05:28):
the EU, Britain and others for her support for Russia's
invasion of Ukraine. So you have a, this very direct
kind of relationship with a sanctioned government agency and
a sanctioned Russian individual.And in addition, XJTLU is a
research university. It has a lot of focus on
(05:53):
research in emerging critical and, and even dual use
technologies. And as any university in this
space these days, it, it has a lot of partnerships outside of
its own campus. And we found that it has a an
official partnership with a Chinese government
(06:15):
supercomputing centre that is sanctioned by the US for its
support of China's military modernization.
It also has a chips school on campus that was Co founded by a
Chinese government semiconductorResearch Institute and that is
sanctioned by the US as well. And that chips school, the top
(06:39):
staff at that school have said that its aims are to design and
manufacture its own advanced semiconductors.
And you know, so the question here is about XJTLU is it is it
breaking any laws when we don't have an answer to that?
But that's certainly a it's at risk.
(07:00):
We can say it's certainly it's facing a high degree of
political risk but also more broadly, if you know it is, if
it's parent institution, University of Liverpool is
supporting this, all of this behaviour that potentially goes
against the U KS interests if it's helping China develop dual
(07:20):
use technologies. Has there been a failure of
oversight on the part of the UK government and also on the part
of the university, University ofLiverpool?
Interesting. Let's come back to that.
I, I suppose I can see it almostas two separate strands here. 1
is the, you know, work that is supporting Russia's war of
(07:45):
aggression against Ukraine. I mean that is sort of self
evidently a, a sanctionable or a, you know, a type of activity
that that obviously needs to be subject to penalties and
restrictions. But then secondarily, there is
collaboration that supports the strengthening of Chinese
(08:09):
research and development in key strategic fields that the US,
the UK, Australia for that matter, all agree that we should
not be, you know, helping China to build its capabilities in
those areas because ultimately that is going to be to our to
(08:31):
our strategic detriment. So so if tell me if I'm.
Thinking about this, the right. Way, I mean one overarching risk
is that Liverpool University andhence the UK research community
might be for instance, providingintellectual property or helping
develop intellectual property about those key security
technologies. You mentioned dual use ones for
(08:53):
instance, or, or capabilities ultimately to a Chinese defence
university through it's relationship to XJTLU and, and
through that collaboration then strengthening military
capabilities that China could one day use against its
adversaries, including Western nations.
(09:14):
Is that the right way to look atit?
Yes, that is, and you're right that there's, there's kind of
two separate strands here. You know, however, in this
particular case, if you look more deeply into it, and of
course we did, there's actually a degree of convergence.
And let me explain what I mean by that.
(09:37):
If you look at the China Russia centre, it's not an it's not
primarily an academic exchange centre.
What you look at the statements of its Russian Co director, its
Chinese Co director, and the statements that it, you know,
that were made on its launch. Part of its purpose is to help
(09:57):
Chinese businesses and particularly Chinese tech
companies enter the Russian market.
And the Russian Co director is also separately in a different
role. He also is an advisor to the
Moscow government, the Moscow regional government, and has
also served in a similar capacity for the Jiangsu
(10:18):
provincial government. And he's working on a project to
get Chinese tech companies from the Jiangsu area to open an
advanced technology development park in Moscow.
And so if you look at the the China Russia Cooperation Centre,
it's very much in line with that, right?
It's getting Chinese companies to go and enter the Russian
(10:40):
market. Now, if in a different world, in
a different geopolitical world, there would be nothing wrong
with that. But Russia has been cut off from
so much foreign direct investment and from so much of
the of, you know, international economy because of the, the
heavy sanctions that has faced because of its, it's war of
aggression in Ukraine. And it has repeatedly and across
many sectors turned to China to kind of break those sanctions,
(11:03):
if you will, to to have a market, to go to a market for
its companies and to have a way to access advanced technology
and to have foreign direct investment in Russia.
So this centre is engaging in inexactly that behaviour, trying
to get Chinese companies into Russia to, you know, to kind of
bring some vitality, you know, back to the Russian tech
(11:26):
ecosystem and back to the Russian economy.
And in that sense, it's directlyparticipating in Russia's
efforts to maintain its resiliency in spite of all these
sanctions. So it's not, it's not simply on
paper that there are sanctions concerns here.
It's that the very purpose of the centre, you could say, is
(11:49):
goes against the entire goal of of the sanctions and indeed the
the goals of Western nations at this time.
Yeah, I mean, even if you argue,for instance, that there should
be limits on decoupling or de risking from Chinese industry,
(12:10):
the fact that it is so directly in this case flowing through to
support for Russia, which is, you know, here and now right in
front of us, you know, continuing its war against
Ukraine and and causing enormoushuman suffering.
(12:30):
I mean, it really, I mean, it flies so obviously in the face
of our concerns about, you know,the no limits partnership
between China and Russia. And the fact that China, as you
just point out, is supporting and enabling Russia to continue
the war that it might otherwise be struggling to to continue,
(12:52):
given how much, how much money, people and and equipment it has
expended on that war. So, I mean, are we just, sorry,
I'll let you talk in a moment, but are we just?
Very, very fuzzy. And muddled in our strategy on
this, I mean this idea of tryingto put some constraints on
(13:15):
things like the the partnership between China and Russia.
And trying to avoid. Things that empower them in
their strategic competition against the.
West are we just muddled? In our thinking on on that.
Or are we just not very good at then turning that into practical
(13:35):
measures to actually prevent it from about benefiting these
adversaries or potential adversaries?
I mean, is is the strategy muddled or is the implementation
of the strategies not just not being done effectively?
Well, I, I think that there's, there's a couple of different
things going on and, and one of them is that, you know,
(13:57):
universities like this, this joint venture university, it
was, it was China's, it's China's largest joint venture
university. It was founded in 2006 and that
was a completely different time period.
It was a different era. You know, China was not such a a
security concern. It wasn't the main strategic
rival of, you know, of democratic countries.
(14:19):
It was not nearly as developed as it is now.
It's not it was not a research leader.
It wasn't, you know, at risk of displacing the US as as a top
tech power of the world. And so at that time, there was
this huge wave of optimism that China's system was was opening
up. You know, this was before the
2008 Olympics. China's system really did appear
(14:41):
to be opening up, you know, right when the university was
founded. And so there was the sense that
the more that, you know, Westerncountries engage with China,
invest in China, open up, you know, joint academic ventures
with China, the the more China will open up, the more liberal
they will become, more democratic they will become.
(15:04):
Of course, you know, now we knowthat's not what happened.
Xi Jinping came into power, he oversaw a hard authoritarian
turn and and China also developed extremely rapidly, you
know, has become the top rival of US tech dominance.
And, and what, So what hasn't happened is that, you know, what
(15:28):
do we do with all of these research partnerships, with all
of these academic partnerships, with these, you know, the way
that that business has gotten all, you know, intricately
linked into these academic partnerships and into China's
development. How do we unwind that?
Do should we unwind that? How do we start doing that?
(15:49):
And at a university like this, you know, it's a multi
$1,000,000 endeavour as if you can't just, you know, it's not
like a small company, you can just close and there's, there's
thousands of students who are involved.
You know, it's, it's a huge campus.
How do you, you know, if you're,if you're University of
Liverpool, how do you extricate yourself from that?
So it's, it's really a challenge.
(16:12):
And then, you know, the the other thread here is, is a
question of enforcement. So it was one of the big
projects of people who work on China and work especially China
and security in the past seven or eight years has been trying
to get a kind of a sanctions regime around Chinese tech.
(16:34):
You know, we know that the Chinese government has
supported, you know, IP theft tosupport China's development.
We know that there's a lot of dual use technologies that China
is trying to get from the West or benefit from the West in
order to strengthen their military modernization.
And so now they're these, you know, sanctions and various
(16:55):
kinds of, you know, export, you know, technology export
prohibitions. They're now in place, but
they're not really being enforced to the extent that they
could be. And so there's a whole research
ecosystem in China. And XJTLU is just one example of
this where you have these, thesein some cases, long standing
(17:18):
relationships with entities thatthen get put on some kind of a
trade blacklist. Well, then what do you do?
You know, another example is from our article is that XJTLU
has a joint lab with Iflytech, which is a surveillance
technology company that has been, you know, put on a, a
(17:38):
blacklist because of its involvement in the human rights
violations in, in Xinjiang, You know, the, the, the ongoing
genocide against the Uyghurs. They're, they're, they're
involved in that. So, so should they close their
lab? I would say yes, but that's, you
know, that's a fairly big deal. And also XJTLU, when it opened
that lab with Ifly tech, Ifly tech was not on that on that
(18:00):
list, you know, so it's not exactly their fault.
And so you have relationships like that just all over China
with with, you know, institutions from all around the
world that are in this situation.
And there hasn't really been much of A public discussion
about what should we do about these.
So there's this Centre for China, Russia, Humanitarian
(18:23):
Cooperation and Development thatyou've meant mentioned Bethany.
I mean, it's just, it's almost comical putting humanitarian in
the name. But just tell me a bit more
about the work that that's doingand what I suppose some of the
sort of practical capabilities that are coming out of that.
So again, you know China Russia Centre, it's trying to get
(18:46):
Chinese tech companies into Russia.
But something else that's interesting about it is that the
Chinese Co director of that China Russia centre is also a
director of 1 of XJTLU's technology transfer centres, now
a technology transfer centre, because the term technology
transfer now has such negative connotations and we think of it
(19:08):
as forced technology transfer. So in China, Chinese companies
or the Chinese, you know, local governments, they kind of force
foreign companies to hand over their technology to Chinese, to
their Chinese joint venture partners.
That's not what a technology transfer centre does it it
rather it uses above board methods to facilitate technology
(19:28):
transfer in legal ways. But the concern here is that if
XJTLU and University of Liverpool have a very close
relationship, which they do. And we know that professors from
both universities do research together.
And we know that University of Liverpool does quite a bit of
sensitive or you know, or government funded research.
(19:51):
They've gotten funding from the US, from the Pentagon, They've
gotten funding from the from theUS, from the FBI.
In fact, they've gotten funding from.
Caucus research funding through through AUCUS, I should say for
some sensitive projects, including I believe a project on
electronic warfare. We know that University of
(20:12):
Liverpool does sensitive research in areas that China
would be interested in and we know that they have a close
relationship with XJTLU. So that raises a concern.
Not not, we don't have evidence of this, but we can lay out the
ecosystem to say why it's a concern.
There is a potential channel forUK government funded research,
(20:33):
you know, paid for by UK taxpayers to to go through XJTLU
into Russia through a centre like this that is trying to get
technology that Chinese companies have into Russia.
Chinese companies are getting trying to get some of their
technology from UK and other countries.
(20:53):
So that is another concern here of that China Russia centre.
And, and what that, you know, emphasises for Western partners
of Chinese universities is that these days, not only are they
facing a risk that their research could be, you know,
stolen or, or even if not stolen, simply incorporated into
(21:15):
projects that would support China's, you know, military or
overall geopolitical power. But that they're now through
those Chinese universities that there's actually a risk of
exposure to the Russian market and to and and to Russia.
I mean that's it's an extraordinary just practical
(21:37):
example especially. I think it was an electronic
warfare. That you mentioned.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I mean, the, the, the obvious application of that in,
in Russia's war on Ukraine is, is enormous.
I mean, I know Ukraine, for instance, is having to to fly
fibre optic cable drones so thatthey aren't vulnerable to
(21:58):
electronic jamming. So there's just a really, really
clear instance there of a of a direct risk that is being
created. So what do you have thoughts?
On how we start to draw some lines on.
What actually constitutes risky collaboration?
(22:22):
I think you mentioned earlier sort of possible failure of
oversight by say the UK government for instance.
I mean, if we if we deem Russia a strategic rival and a
potential near term adversary, Russia clearly is, is an
aggressor against its neighboursas we speak.
(22:43):
I mean, there's an argument for stopping any kind of research
and development cooperation withthem in in some way that helps
them build their their national power.
But at the same time, we don't want to break the global economy
by by, you know, by decoupling or heavy handedly de risking.
(23:04):
What are your thoughts on what we need to do as a, you know, at
least as a starting point aroundsome sort of public and
political debate about how we define and isolate those things
that need to be subject to research, collaboration
restrictions and things that ought to be able to go ahead and
(23:26):
that we can say, OK, that's going to be reasonably innocuous
going forward. I mean, do we just need to have
do a lot more work in that area?Well, I think the first thing
that needs to happen is that universities and research
institutes that have some kind of partnerships in China, they
need to, to do kind of a, a housekeeping where they go in
(23:49):
and do their own due diligence. I mean, do their own kind of,
you know, Chinese language Osentresearch.
What are their partners getting up to?
What are they doing? Because there's, there's always
these, you know, new partnerships being formed.
You know, the, the Chinese research sort of environment now
is it's, it's full of vitality. There's, you know, a huge
(24:12):
emphasis in China on a research university research industry
ecosystem. That's a term creating this
ecosystem. So there's always these new
partnerships being founded and created, you know, so
universities in Australia, in the US and the UK, they need to
go through and do a very clear housekeeping on what are their
(24:33):
partners in China getting up to and what are their own
programmes in China getting up to.
Do they have any relationships with sanctioned entities or
companies that are on a trade blacklist?
Do they have any joint institutes with companies that
are on a trade blacklist? They need to know very, very
clearly what is going on. That seems to be one of the top
issues with XJTLU. It seems to me that they may,
(24:57):
they may have sort of, you know,the left hand has lost a sense
of what the right hand is doing.And I say that because among
other things, after our piece was published, the announcement
in English on the XJTLU website about the China, the founding of
the China Russia Centre, that was taken down.
So some somebody realised in a way they hadn't before that this
(25:21):
was problematic and you can't really do anything until
universities know who they're partnering with, even if, you
know, removed by one or two degrees of separation.
And then what needs to happen is, as you said, a public
discussion about how much risk is acceptable risk.
(25:42):
Where do we draw that line? Because if you try to, this is
generally true for national security, if you try to
eliminate all risk, you know, bring it down to 0, you're going
to be losing so much in that pursuit that you're going to be,
it's going to harm more than it helps.
And I think we're in the same kind of position here.
(26:02):
We're not at a stage where we need to cut off all research
ties to China. But I think that there, you
know, there is a, a place where where you should say these kinds
of technologies are very sensitive.
You know, these these companies,we need to stay away from them.
And I think that the governmentsneed to make it very, very clear
(26:23):
where that line is. If a Chinese company like
iflytech or some other is put onthe, you know, the US Commerce
Department's, you know, BIS Federal entity List, governments
around the world need to make clear what that means for their
own universities. So a question is, you know, like
(26:47):
I, I believe it's Oxford, I think they state clearly on
their website that they do not partner with companies that are
on US blacklist or sanctioned list.
They don't do that. I don't know if they're, I don't
know that they're legally required to not do that, but
they know that they might lose access to some US funding if
they do that. Governments need to help
(27:08):
universities understand what is the legal environment that
they're operating in and what are the government's
recommendations. Do the governments recommend
that universities cut off ties to the companies like this and
entities like this or not? Because universities aren't
necessarily equipped to make those decisions themselves.
Universities don't have nationalsecurity councils.
(27:30):
They don't know they can. They can come up with a list of
of entities they're partnering with.
That doesn't mean they know whatto do about it.
So that's where the role of governments come in to, to put
regulations and to say, hey, we've done the work for you.
You know, we have the resources to do that.
Here's our guidelines. And I mean, when it comes to
doing the due diligence, clearlyuniversities have absolutely no
(27:53):
excuse not to do that. I mean, you are a formidable
China researcher, if I may say, and you have a great team under
you helping you with that work. But I mean, you alone have
managed to identify a number of very problematic linkages and,
(28:13):
and, and entities that are either sanctioned or, or
entities of concern for one university.
So really there's no excuse for universities not to be able to
do that open source due diligence themselves.
Yeah. Oh, that's right.
And again, a lot of this was in English.
Yes, I can do, you know, fancy Chinese language research, but
(28:34):
that wasn't even necessary for most of this.
I mean, some of it was just in English on the university
website itself. You know, this was this was not
rocket science. You know, this, this was very
easy. So there, as you said, there is
no excuse for them not to know what's happening in their own
house. Yeah, Yeah.
And you can treat this either asa, as a comment or a question
and respond accordingly. But you know, adjacent to what
(28:58):
we're talking about here is the fact that the US has just
announced that NVIDIA can once again sell it's age 20 chips to
China. The, you know, the, the very
powerful chips that are good fortraining AI models and for using
for, for AI inference. It does sort of feed into a
(29:23):
picture that that there is diminishing rather than
increasing concern about collaboration.
Look, the US I think Howard Lutnick said, well, you know,
these aren't the, the best chipsNVIDIA has, They're only the
third best or the 4th most powerful or whatever it is.
(29:44):
That might feel a little bit more reassuring if this change
of policy was part of a defined policy and strategy, but instead
it seems to be part of a deal todo with critical minerals.
It's essentially essentially part of a transaction.
And so I mean, whether I don't know whether you have any
reflections or not, but it does sort of feel as if there is
(30:08):
broadly, you know, a, a, a lessening of the concern about
collaboration either in researchor development or in, you know,
things like export controls. Yeah.
I mean, I think my view on this is that, you know, either we're
serious about the reality that semiconductors are the key to
(30:32):
the future. They're the key to to future
economic and geopolitical power.Either we're serious about that
or we're not. And letting you know, NVIDIA
again, have permission to sell its chips in China would be a
big step back in the work that people have done to try, you
know, to to try to be serious about that.
(30:54):
We're very, you know, we're verylate.
You know, we should have been doing this 10 years ago. 15
years ago, Yeah. All right, One more question to
to wrap up. I mean, your work here is, I
mean, this is, this is one Western university, in this case
Liverpool University that you'veidentified.
(31:15):
It's, it's open source research.As you say, a lot of it was in
English. It's there if you know where to
look. Now, obviously we don't know
what we don't know. And at the risk of sounding
Rumsfeldian, there are unknown unknowns here.
But I mean, what are the chancesthat this is the sort of tip of
an iceberg here? I mean, if you know you, you,
you went looking and you found one, one extremely egregious
(31:39):
example of it is it, is it possible that there is a huge
iceberg sitting beneath the surface here that if people
actually start looking that theywill, they will identify pretty
quickly? Well, yes and no.
So in terms of joint venture universities or the kind of
joint venture institutes, there's a fairly limited number
(32:02):
of those. I mean, you know, there's not
thousands of those, there's not even hundreds.
So looking at that particular kind of problematic, you know,
potential for problematic relationships where you have,
you know, an entity in China University that is actually part
of a British university. There's there's not a lot like
that. There's Duke Quenchon
University, there's University of Nottingham, Ningbo, there's,
(32:24):
you know, I could name six others, not a tonne.
So from that perspective, this this exact kind of problem,
there's not a lot of them. However, there are, if you're
willing to broaden it to other kinds of relationships.
You know, company to company relationships, Western
(32:46):
universities having relationships with Chinese
companies, Western companies having direct relationships with
Chinese universities or researchinstitutes.
Definitely tip of the iceberg. Or or even researcher to
researcher, right? I mean, there are there are
either researchers or or small teams of researchers who are who
are collaborating in all sorts of ways.
(33:08):
Yes, and I think that is that the researcher to researcher or
you know, just people collaborating for one paper or
one project or one, you know, something like that.
I think that's the the hardest to try to manage because that's
the level of, you know, scientific cross border
scientific collaboration that you don't want to quash.
You know, that's kind of the bread and butter of the, you
(33:30):
know, the, the vibrancy of, of science.
And if you try to control it at that level, I, I think we would,
all the world, humanity would suffer a lot.
And I think that probably innocent people would get, you
know, caught up in things that are not really their fault.
But I think I think doing it, you know, if you can, I think on
(33:52):
an institution to institution level, looking at companies,
looking at research institutes, I think that's a more realistic
way of, of going after it. And so you don't have to create
like a basically a research surveillance state.
You don't want to do that. You want to create guidelines
and structures to get rid of some of the most egregious
things without trying to micromanage everything.
(34:17):
Yeah. No, that's a very fairpoint and
and an important, I think lessonfor people to remember.
I mean, a complete bifurcation will likely only sort of harden
adversarial positions people to people links do actually matter.
And as you say, there's a lot ofinnocent.
Positive. Collaboration that is actually
(34:37):
going to help humanity overall. And we we don't terrible,
terrible cliche, but we don't want to throw the baby out with
the bathwater. All right, Bethany, look, that's
been really fascinating to hear about.
I urge listeners to jump on the strategist and find the piece
that we've been talking about here.
(34:59):
It's by Bethany Allen, Danielle Cave and Adams Jogis.
So it's a fantastic piece and and well worth the read.
Bethany, thanks for. Talking with us.
Thanks so much, David. That's all we have time for
folks on STOP THE World. Thanks for listening.
We'll be back with another episode next week.
Stop the world. So universities in Australia, in
the US and UK, they need to go through and do a very clear
housekeeping on what are their partners in China getting up to
and what are their own programmes in China getting up
to. Do they have any relationships
with sanctioned entities or companies that are on a trade
blacklist? Do they have any joint
institutes with companies that are on a trade blacklist?
(00:23):
They need to know very, very clearly what is going on.
Welcome to this special weekend episode of STOP THE World.
I'm David Roe. And I'm Olivia Nelson.
Recently, an ASP team led by ourHead of China Investigations and
Analysis, Bethany Allen, published a report on a joint
venture university campus between Shan Jiaotong University
(00:43):
in China and Liverpool University in Britain.
Their findings raise some serious questions about research
collaboration into sensitive technologies, including those
with military applications. In today's episode, Bethany
talks through the findings, including the joint university's
partnerships and close links with entities sanctioned by
Britain, the US, the EU and other nations for supporting
(01:04):
Russia's invasion of Ukraine andhelping with China's military
modernization. Bethany explains the risks that
these partnerships create, how widespread they might be, and
what more needs to be done by universities themselves by way
of due diligence into their partnerships, but also the need
for governments to set clearer rules and guidelines about what
defines unacceptable risk. Yes, importantly, Bethany makes
(01:27):
the point that research collaboration is important for
humanity and we don't want to choke it off entirely.
But there is a need for de risking so that innovation
deriving from Western universities doesn't produce
capabilities used by militaries of authoritarian nations like
Russia. Amazingly, the joint university
includes a centre for China Russia humanitarian cooperation
(01:48):
and development. I chuckle somewhat because
clearly China Russia cooperationwe always associate with
humanitarian motivations. Anyway, it helps Chinese
companies enter the Russian market and promotes research
ties between China and Russia. You can find this report on
ASP's Strategist site, and we'llalso link to it in your episode
(02:09):
notes. We strongly urge you to have a
read if you haven't already. So now enjoy hearing Bethany
explain it all. I'm here with Bethany Allen.
Bethany, thanks for coming on STOP THE WORLD.
Thanks so much for having me. So you had a piece recently in
ASP's Strategist. It was an investigation that
looked into the relationship between the University of
(02:32):
Liverpool in the United Kingdom and a major Chinese defence
university. It's a fairly complicated set of
relationships, but Bethany, perhaps just to help our
listeners understand as simply as you can talk through the
chain of connections that you'veidentified.
Sure. So we're actually looking at 3
universities here. There's the University of
(02:54):
Liverpool in the UK, there's theChinese university, which is
Xi'an Jiao Tong University, and then there's a third university
that those two parent universities created.
It's a joint venture university called Xian Jiao Tong Liverpool
University, and we're going to refer to that as XJTLU.
(03:18):
So XJTLU, it is, it's a very large campus.
It has around between 10 and 20,000 students.
And this is the university that our piece looks at.
And what we found was that XJTLUhas a number of formal and
(03:42):
official relationships with entities that are sanctioned by
Britain, the USEU and others foreither supporting Russia's
invasion of Ukraine or for assisting China's military
modernization and human rights violations.
What kind of organisations are we talking about there that are
(04:05):
sanctioned? So XJTLU just last year opened a
China Russia Centre on its campus.
It's called the, the full name is the China Russia Centre for
Humanitarian Cooperation. And that centre, I mean, you
(04:25):
know, let let's back up a bit again.
This is a university. XJTLU, one of its parent
universities, is a British university.
And XJTLU doesn't issue its own degrees.
When a student graduates from XJTLU, it's graduating, they're
graduating with a dual degree, one from Liverpool and one from
the Chinese parent university. So there's a very clear
(04:47):
relationship here. And this China Russia centre is
the Russian Co Director of the centre is affiliated with a
Russian government agency that is sanctioned for its overseas
influence activities and for itsin support of Russia's invasion
(05:07):
of Ukraine. And not only that, XJTLU
welcomed a high level Russian government delegation to its
campus to launch this centre. And that delegation was led by a
former Russian senator who is herself sanctioned by the US,
(05:28):
the EU, Britain and others for her support for Russia's
invasion of Ukraine. So you have a, this very direct
kind of relationship with a sanctioned government agency and
a sanctioned Russian individual.And in addition, XJTLU is a
research university. It has a lot of focus on
(05:53):
research in emerging critical and, and even dual use
technologies. And as any university in this
space these days, it, it has a lot of partnerships outside of
its own campus. And we found that it has a an
official partnership with a Chinese government
(06:15):
supercomputing centre that is sanctioned by the US for its
support of China's military modernization.
It also has a chips school on campus that was Co founded by a
Chinese government semiconductorResearch Institute and that is
sanctioned by the US as well. And that chips school, the top
(06:39):
staff at that school have said that its aims are to design and
manufacture its own advanced semiconductors.
And you know, so the question here is about XJTLU is it is it
breaking any laws when we don't have an answer to that?
But that's certainly a it's at risk.
(07:00):
We can say it's certainly it's facing a high degree of
political risk but also more broadly, if you know it is, if
it's parent institution, University of Liverpool is
supporting this, all of this behaviour that potentially goes
against the U KS interests if it's helping China develop dual
(07:20):
use technologies. Has there been a failure of
oversight on the part of the UK government and also on the part
of the university, University ofLiverpool?
Interesting. Let's come back to that.
I, I suppose I can see it almostas two separate strands here. 1
is the, you know, work that is supporting Russia's war of
(07:45):
aggression against Ukraine. I mean that is sort of self
evidently a, a sanctionable or a, you know, a type of activity
that that obviously needs to be subject to penalties and
restrictions. But then secondarily, there is
collaboration that supports the strengthening of Chinese
(08:09):
research and development in key strategic fields that the US,
the UK, Australia for that matter, all agree that we should
not be, you know, helping China to build its capabilities in
those areas because ultimately that is going to be to our to
(08:31):
our strategic detriment. So so if tell me if I'm.
Thinking about this, the right. Way, I mean one overarching risk
is that Liverpool University andhence the UK research community
might be for instance, providingintellectual property or helping
develop intellectual property about those key security
technologies. You mentioned dual use ones for
(08:53):
instance, or, or capabilities ultimately to a Chinese defence
university through it's relationship to XJTLU and, and
through that collaboration then strengthening military
capabilities that China could one day use against its
adversaries, including Western nations.
(09:14):
Is that the right way to look atit?
Yes, that is, and you're right that there's, there's kind of
two separate strands here. You know, however, in this
particular case, if you look more deeply into it, and of
course we did, there's actually a degree of convergence.
And let me explain what I mean by that.
(09:37):
If you look at the China Russia centre, it's not an it's not
primarily an academic exchange centre.
What you look at the statements of its Russian Co director, its
Chinese Co director, and the statements that it, you know,
that were made on its launch. Part of its purpose is to help
(09:57):
Chinese businesses and particularly Chinese tech
companies enter the Russian market.
And the Russian Co director is also separately in a different
role. He also is an advisor to the
Moscow government, the Moscow regional government, and has
also served in a similar capacity for the Jiangsu
(10:18):
provincial government. And he's working on a project to
get Chinese tech companies from the Jiangsu area to open an
advanced technology development park in Moscow.
And so if you look at the the China Russia Cooperation Centre,
it's very much in line with that, right?
It's getting Chinese companies to go and enter the Russian
(10:40):
market. Now, if in a different world, in
a different geopolitical world, there would be nothing wrong
with that. But Russia has been cut off from
so much foreign direct investment and from so much of
the of, you know, international economy because of the, the
heavy sanctions that has faced because of its, it's war of
aggression in Ukraine. And it has repeatedly and across
many sectors turned to China to kind of break those sanctions,
(11:03):
if you will, to to have a market, to go to a market for
its companies and to have a way to access advanced technology
and to have foreign direct investment in Russia.
So this centre is engaging in inexactly that behaviour, trying
to get Chinese companies into Russia to, you know, to kind of
bring some vitality, you know, back to the Russian tech
(11:26):
ecosystem and back to the Russian economy.
And in that sense, it's directlyparticipating in Russia's
efforts to maintain its resiliency in spite of all these
sanctions. So it's not, it's not simply on
paper that there are sanctions concerns here.
It's that the very purpose of the centre, you could say, is
(11:49):
goes against the entire goal of of the sanctions and indeed the
the goals of Western nations at this time.
Yeah, I mean, even if you argue,for instance, that there should
be limits on decoupling or de risking from Chinese industry,
(12:10):
the fact that it is so directly in this case flowing through to
support for Russia, which is, you know, here and now right in
front of us, you know, continuing its war against
Ukraine and and causing enormoushuman suffering.
(12:30):
I mean, it really, I mean, it flies so obviously in the face
of our concerns about, you know,the no limits partnership
between China and Russia. And the fact that China, as you
just point out, is supporting and enabling Russia to continue
the war that it might otherwise be struggling to to continue,
(12:52):
given how much, how much money, people and and equipment it has
expended on that war. So, I mean, are we just, sorry,
I'll let you talk in a moment, but are we just?
Very, very fuzzy. And muddled in our strategy on
this, I mean this idea of tryingto put some constraints on
(13:15):
things like the the partnership between China and Russia.
And trying to avoid. Things that empower them in
their strategic competition against the.
West are we just muddled? In our thinking on on that.
Or are we just not very good at then turning that into practical
(13:35):
measures to actually prevent it from about benefiting these
adversaries or potential adversaries?
I mean, is is the strategy muddled or is the implementation
of the strategies not just not being done effectively?
Well, I, I think that there's, there's a couple of different
things going on and, and one of them is that, you know,
(13:57):
universities like this, this joint venture university, it
was, it was China's, it's China's largest joint venture
university. It was founded in 2006 and that
was a completely different time period.
It was a different era. You know, China was not such a a
security concern. It wasn't the main strategic
rival of, you know, of democratic countries.
(14:19):
It was not nearly as developed as it is now.
It's not it was not a research leader.
It wasn't, you know, at risk of displacing the US as as a top
tech power of the world. And so at that time, there was
this huge wave of optimism that China's system was was opening
up. You know, this was before the
2008 Olympics. China's system really did appear
(14:41):
to be opening up, you know, right when the university was
founded. And so there was the sense that
the more that, you know, Westerncountries engage with China,
invest in China, open up, you know, joint academic ventures
with China, the the more China will open up, the more liberal
they will become, more democratic they will become.
(15:04):
Of course, you know, now we knowthat's not what happened.
Xi Jinping came into power, he oversaw a hard authoritarian
turn and and China also developed extremely rapidly, you
know, has become the top rival of US tech dominance.
And, and what, So what hasn't happened is that, you know, what
(15:28):
do we do with all of these research partnerships, with all
of these academic partnerships, with these, you know, the way
that that business has gotten all, you know, intricately
linked into these academic partnerships and into China's
development. How do we unwind that?
Do should we unwind that? How do we start doing that?
(15:49):
And at a university like this, you know, it's a multi
$1,000,000 endeavour as if you can't just, you know, it's not
like a small company, you can just close and there's, there's
thousands of students who are involved.
You know, it's, it's a huge campus.
How do you, you know, if you're,if you're University of
Liverpool, how do you extricate yourself from that?
So it's, it's really a challenge.
(16:12):
And then, you know, the the other thread here is, is a
question of enforcement. So it was one of the big
projects of people who work on China and work especially China
and security in the past seven or eight years has been trying
to get a kind of a sanctions regime around Chinese tech.
(16:34):
You know, we know that the Chinese government has
supported, you know, IP theft tosupport China's development.
We know that there's a lot of dual use technologies that China
is trying to get from the West or benefit from the West in
order to strengthen their military modernization.
And so now they're these, you know, sanctions and various
(16:55):
kinds of, you know, export, you know, technology export
prohibitions. They're now in place, but
they're not really being enforced to the extent that they
could be. And so there's a whole research
ecosystem in China. And XJTLU is just one example of
this where you have these, thesein some cases, long standing
(17:18):
relationships with entities thatthen get put on some kind of a
trade blacklist. Well, then what do you do?
You know, another example is from our article is that XJTLU
has a joint lab with Iflytech, which is a surveillance
technology company that has been, you know, put on a, a
(17:38):
blacklist because of its involvement in the human rights
violations in, in Xinjiang, You know, the, the, the ongoing
genocide against the Uyghurs. They're, they're, they're
involved in that. So, so should they close their
lab? I would say yes, but that's, you
know, that's a fairly big deal. And also XJTLU, when it opened
that lab with Ifly tech, Ifly tech was not on that on that
(18:00):
list, you know, so it's not exactly their fault.
And so you have relationships like that just all over China
with with, you know, institutions from all around the
world that are in this situation.
And there hasn't really been much of A public discussion
about what should we do about these.
So there's this Centre for China, Russia, Humanitarian
(18:23):
Cooperation and Development thatyou've meant mentioned Bethany.
I mean, it's just, it's almost comical putting humanitarian in
the name. But just tell me a bit more
about the work that that's doingand what I suppose some of the
sort of practical capabilities that are coming out of that.
So again, you know China Russia Centre, it's trying to get
(18:46):
Chinese tech companies into Russia.
But something else that's interesting about it is that the
Chinese Co director of that China Russia centre is also a
director of 1 of XJTLU's technology transfer centres, now
a technology transfer centre, because the term technology
transfer now has such negative connotations and we think of it
(19:08):
as forced technology transfer. So in China, Chinese companies
or the Chinese, you know, local governments, they kind of force
foreign companies to hand over their technology to Chinese, to
their Chinese joint venture partners.
That's not what a technology transfer centre does it it
rather it uses above board methods to facilitate technology
(19:28):
transfer in legal ways. But the concern here is that if
XJTLU and University of Liverpool have a very close
relationship, which they do. And we know that professors from
both universities do research together.
And we know that University of Liverpool does quite a bit of
sensitive or you know, or government funded research.
(19:51):
They've gotten funding from the US, from the Pentagon, They've
gotten funding from the from theUS, from the FBI.
In fact, they've gotten funding from.
Caucus research funding through through AUCUS, I should say for
some sensitive projects, including I believe a project on
electronic warfare. We know that University of
(20:12):
Liverpool does sensitive research in areas that China
would be interested in and we know that they have a close
relationship with XJTLU. So that raises a concern.
Not not, we don't have evidence of this, but we can lay out the
ecosystem to say why it's a concern.
There is a potential channel forUK government funded research,
(20:33):
you know, paid for by UK taxpayers to to go through XJTLU
into Russia through a centre like this that is trying to get
technology that Chinese companies have into Russia.
Chinese companies are getting trying to get some of their
technology from UK and other countries.
(20:53):
So that is another concern here of that China Russia centre.
And, and what that, you know, emphasises for Western partners
of Chinese universities is that these days, not only are they
facing a risk that their research could be, you know,
stolen or, or even if not stolen, simply incorporated into
(21:15):
projects that would support China's, you know, military or
overall geopolitical power. But that they're now through
those Chinese universities that there's actually a risk of
exposure to the Russian market and to and and to Russia.
I mean that's it's an extraordinary just practical
(21:37):
example especially. I think it was an electronic
warfare. That you mentioned.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I mean, the, the, the obvious application of that in,
in Russia's war on Ukraine is, is enormous.
I mean, I know Ukraine, for instance, is having to to fly
fibre optic cable drones so thatthey aren't vulnerable to
(21:58):
electronic jamming. So there's just a really, really
clear instance there of a of a direct risk that is being
created. So what do you have thoughts?
On how we start to draw some lines on.
What actually constitutes risky collaboration?
(22:22):
I think you mentioned earlier sort of possible failure of
oversight by say the UK government for instance.
I mean, if we if we deem Russia a strategic rival and a
potential near term adversary, Russia clearly is, is an
aggressor against its neighboursas we speak.
(22:43):
I mean, there's an argument for stopping any kind of research
and development cooperation withthem in in some way that helps
them build their their national power.
But at the same time, we don't want to break the global economy
by by, you know, by decoupling or heavy handedly de risking.
(23:04):
What are your thoughts on what we need to do as a, you know, at
least as a starting point aroundsome sort of public and
political debate about how we define and isolate those things
that need to be subject to research, collaboration
restrictions and things that ought to be able to go ahead and
(23:26):
that we can say, OK, that's going to be reasonably innocuous
going forward. I mean, do we just need to have
do a lot more work in that area?Well, I think the first thing
that needs to happen is that universities and research
institutes that have some kind of partnerships in China, they
need to, to do kind of a, a housekeeping where they go in
(23:49):
and do their own due diligence. I mean, do their own kind of,
you know, Chinese language Osentresearch.
What are their partners getting up to?
What are they doing? Because there's, there's always
these, you know, new partnerships being formed.
You know, the, the Chinese research sort of environment now
is it's, it's full of vitality. There's, you know, a huge
(24:12):
emphasis in China on a research university research industry
ecosystem. That's a term creating this
ecosystem. So there's always these new
partnerships being founded and created, you know, so
universities in Australia, in the US and the UK, they need to
go through and do a very clear housekeeping on what are their
(24:33):
partners in China getting up to and what are their own
programmes in China getting up to.
Do they have any relationships with sanctioned entities or
companies that are on a trade blacklist?
Do they have any joint institutes with companies that
are on a trade blacklist? They need to know very, very
clearly what is going on. That seems to be one of the top
issues with XJTLU. It seems to me that they may,
(24:57):
they may have sort of, you know,the left hand has lost a sense
of what the right hand is doing.And I say that because among
other things, after our piece was published, the announcement
in English on the XJTLU website about the China, the founding of
the China Russia Centre, that was taken down.
So some somebody realised in a way they hadn't before that this
(25:21):
was problematic and you can't really do anything until
universities know who they're partnering with, even if, you
know, removed by one or two degrees of separation.
And then what needs to happen is, as you said, a public
discussion about how much risk is acceptable risk.
(25:42):
Where do we draw that line? Because if you try to, this is
generally true for national security, if you try to
eliminate all risk, you know, bring it down to 0, you're going
to be losing so much in that pursuit that you're going to be,
it's going to harm more than it helps.
And I think we're in the same kind of position here.
(26:02):
We're not at a stage where we need to cut off all research
ties to China. But I think that there, you
know, there is a, a place where where you should say these kinds
of technologies are very sensitive.
You know, these these companies,we need to stay away from them.
And I think that the governmentsneed to make it very, very clear
(26:23):
where that line is. If a Chinese company like
iflytech or some other is put onthe, you know, the US Commerce
Department's, you know, BIS Federal entity List, governments
around the world need to make clear what that means for their
own universities. So a question is, you know, like
(26:47):
I, I believe it's Oxford, I think they state clearly on
their website that they do not partner with companies that are
on US blacklist or sanctioned list.
They don't do that. I don't know if they're, I don't
know that they're legally required to not do that, but
they know that they might lose access to some US funding if
they do that. Governments need to help
(27:08):
universities understand what is the legal environment that
they're operating in and what are the government's
recommendations. Do the governments recommend
that universities cut off ties to the companies like this and
entities like this or not? Because universities aren't
necessarily equipped to make those decisions themselves.
Universities don't have nationalsecurity councils.
(27:30):
They don't know they can. They can come up with a list of
of entities they're partnering with.
That doesn't mean they know whatto do about it.
So that's where the role of governments come in to, to put
regulations and to say, hey, we've done the work for you.
You know, we have the resources to do that.
Here's our guidelines. And I mean, when it comes to
doing the due diligence, clearlyuniversities have absolutely no
(27:53):
excuse not to do that. I mean, you are a formidable
China researcher, if I may say, and you have a great team under
you helping you with that work. But I mean, you alone have
managed to identify a number of very problematic linkages and,
(28:13):
and, and entities that are either sanctioned or, or
entities of concern for one university.
So really there's no excuse for universities not to be able to
do that open source due diligence themselves.
Yeah. Oh, that's right.
And again, a lot of this was in English.
Yes, I can do, you know, fancy Chinese language research, but
(28:34):
that wasn't even necessary for most of this.
I mean, some of it was just in English on the university
website itself. You know, this was this was not
rocket science. You know, this, this was very
easy. So there, as you said, there is
no excuse for them not to know what's happening in their own
house. Yeah, Yeah.
And you can treat this either asa, as a comment or a question
and respond accordingly. But you know, adjacent to what
(28:58):
we're talking about here is the fact that the US has just
announced that NVIDIA can once again sell it's age 20 chips to
China. The, you know, the, the very
powerful chips that are good fortraining AI models and for using
for, for AI inference. It does sort of feed into a
(29:23):
picture that that there is diminishing rather than
increasing concern about collaboration.
Look, the US I think Howard Lutnick said, well, you know,
these aren't the, the best chipsNVIDIA has, They're only the
third best or the 4th most powerful or whatever it is.
(29:44):
That might feel a little bit more reassuring if this change
of policy was part of a defined policy and strategy, but instead
it seems to be part of a deal todo with critical minerals.
It's essentially essentially part of a transaction.
And so I mean, whether I don't know whether you have any
reflections or not, but it does sort of feel as if there is
(30:08):
broadly, you know, a, a, a lessening of the concern about
collaboration either in researchor development or in, you know,
things like export controls. Yeah.
I mean, I think my view on this is that, you know, either we're
serious about the reality that semiconductors are the key to
(30:32):
the future. They're the key to to future
economic and geopolitical power.Either we're serious about that
or we're not. And letting you know, NVIDIA
again, have permission to sell its chips in China would be a
big step back in the work that people have done to try, you
know, to to try to be serious about that.
(30:54):
We're very, you know, we're verylate.
You know, we should have been doing this 10 years ago. 15
years ago, Yeah. All right, One more question to
to wrap up. I mean, your work here is, I
mean, this is, this is one Western university, in this case
Liverpool University that you'veidentified.
(31:15):
It's, it's open source research.As you say, a lot of it was in
English. It's there if you know where to
look. Now, obviously we don't know
what we don't know. And at the risk of sounding
Rumsfeldian, there are unknown unknowns here.
But I mean, what are the chancesthat this is the sort of tip of
an iceberg here? I mean, if you know you, you,
you went looking and you found one, one extremely egregious
(31:39):
example of it is it, is it possible that there is a huge
iceberg sitting beneath the surface here that if people
actually start looking that theywill, they will identify pretty
quickly? Well, yes and no.
So in terms of joint venture universities or the kind of
joint venture institutes, there's a fairly limited number
(32:02):
of those. I mean, you know, there's not
thousands of those, there's not even hundreds.
So looking at that particular kind of problematic, you know,
potential for problematic relationships where you have,
you know, an entity in China University that is actually part
of a British university. There's there's not a lot like
that. There's Duke Quenchon
University, there's University of Nottingham, Ningbo, there's,
(32:24):
you know, I could name six others, not a tonne.
So from that perspective, this this exact kind of problem,
there's not a lot of them. However, there are, if you're
willing to broaden it to other kinds of relationships.
You know, company to company relationships, Western
(32:46):
universities having relationships with Chinese
companies, Western companies having direct relationships with
Chinese universities or researchinstitutes.
Definitely tip of the iceberg. Or or even researcher to
researcher, right? I mean, there are there are
either researchers or or small teams of researchers who are who
are collaborating in all sorts of ways.
(33:08):
Yes, and I think that is that the researcher to researcher or
you know, just people collaborating for one paper or
one project or one, you know, something like that.
I think that's the the hardest to try to manage because that's
the level of, you know, scientific cross border
scientific collaboration that you don't want to quash.
You know, that's kind of the bread and butter of the, you
(33:30):
know, the, the vibrancy of, of science.
And if you try to control it at that level, I, I think we would,
all the world, humanity would suffer a lot.
And I think that probably innocent people would get, you
know, caught up in things that are not really their fault.
But I think I think doing it, you know, if you can, I think on
(33:52):
an institution to institution level, looking at companies,
looking at research institutes, I think that's a more realistic
way of, of going after it. And so you don't have to create
like a basically a research surveillance state.
You don't want to do that. You want to create guidelines
and structures to get rid of some of the most egregious
things without trying to micromanage everything.
(34:17):
Yeah. No, that's a very fairpoint and
and an important, I think lessonfor people to remember.
I mean, a complete bifurcation will likely only sort of harden
adversarial positions people to people links do actually matter.
And as you say, there's a lot ofinnocent.
Positive. Collaboration that is actually
(34:37):
going to help humanity overall. And we we don't terrible,
terrible cliche, but we don't want to throw the baby out with
the bathwater. All right, Bethany, look, that's
been really fascinating to hear about.
I urge listeners to jump on the strategist and find the piece
that we've been talking about here.
(34:59):
It's by Bethany Allen, Danielle Cave and Adams Jogis.
So it's a fantastic piece and and well worth the read.
Bethany, thanks for. Talking with us.
Thanks so much, David. That's all we have time for
folks on STOP THE World. Thanks for listening.
We'll be back with another episode next week.
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