A research partnership between China and the University of Wisconsin unintentionally helped to advance the Chinese surveillance machine and control system, a new report from Strategy Risks says.
Director of research at Strategy Risks Sam Shulman told The Center Square that the broader implication of his organization’s report is that foreign academic partnerships “that may have looked routine or low-risk a decade ago can take on a very different meaning as the institutions and geopolitical environment around them change.”
“In this case, UW-Madison researchers participated in federally supported research in Xinjiang alongside Chinese institutions with documented ties to the country’s defense sector, which raises legitimate questions about how universities reassess longstanding partnerships over time,” Shulman said.
Shulman noted that Strategy Risks is not “alleging espionage or intentional technology transfer by UW-Madison.”
“The concern is that even legitimate civilian research can create risk when it takes place within an ecosystem that includes sanctioned or defense-linked institutions, and universities need to be much more attentive to that institutional context,” Shulman said.
“Universities and federal agencies need stronger, recurring due diligence that looks beyond the stated purpose of a project and examines who the foreign partners are, their relationships with military or security institutions, and whether the risk profile has changed since the collaboration began,” Shulman said.
UW-Madison has not yet responded to The Center Square’s request for comment.
According to Strategy Risks’ report, a Joint Research Institute (JRI) was established between the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) and China’s Southeast University in 2017.
The partnership focused on “intelligent transportation, connected vehicles, and vehicle-road-cloud technologies,” Strategy Risks’ report said.
Now, Strategy Risks discovered that the partnership has helped China’s Ministry of Public Security to “deploy technologies that further entrench China’s surveillance state.”
For instance, the report explains how China’s Ministry of Public Security “has formally integrated JRI-advocated vehicle-road-cloud standards into China’s national standards and has begun to deploy them throughout the country,” the report said.
The report explained that “vehicle-road-cloud systems link onboard vehicle sensors, roadside sensors and cameras, and centralized cloud servers, allowing them to function as both traffic-management tools and mechanisms for surveillance and control.”
According to the report, vehicle-road-cloud systems were implemented in July 2024 across 20 pilot cities.
It is “a surveillance and control system,” the report said, capable of tracking and issuing commands to vehicles “in real time.”
Beyond the vehicle-road-cloud system, Strategy Risks also found that “for about a decade, federally funded UW-Madison physicists have participated in Tianlai, a radio astronomy experiment which studies the structure and evolution of the universe.”
The “broader research network” surrounding this work included collaboration with a Chinese “subsidiary of a major defense conglomerate,” which the U.S. has identified as “a principal contractor building communications equipment” for the People’s Liberation Army and has “long been under” U.S. sanctions. Recently, it has also been sanctioned by Japan.
Strategy Risks drew from publicly available and open-sourced information and documents for its report.
Strategy Risks is a global business intelligence firm that “empowers companies, investors, and governments to identify, measure, and reduce their geopolitical risks across supply chains, partnerships, investments, and talent networks,” with special insights into China, according to its website.
