French Senate Report Details Chinese, Russian and Turkish Influence Strategies in Science and Academia

The French Sen­ate has pub­lished a report detail­ing Chi­nese, Russ­ian and Turk­ish for­eign influ­ence in French acad­e­mia. Accord­ing to its Eng­lish abstract:

Sep­tem­ber 29, 2021: France’s research and high­er edu­ca­tion sec­tor is no longer shield­ed from for­eign states influ­ence, with cer­tain state actors using sys­temic strate­gies that verge on inter­fer­ence. This is the con­clu­sion of the fact-find­ing mis­sion estab­lished in July 2021 at the ini­tia­tive of the Rassem­ble­ment des démoc­rates, pro­gres­sistes et indépen­dants (RDPI) group, chaired by Eti­enne Blanc (Les Répub­li­cains, Rhône) with André Gat­tolin (RDPI, Hauts-de-Seine) as rapporteur.After more than 30 hear­ings, ques­tion­ing all high­er edu­ca­tion estab­lish­ments, and extend­ing the inves­ti­ga­tion to sev­er­al coun­tries that have already been impact­ed, the fact-find­ing mis­sion on non-Euro­pean State influ­ences in the French aca­d­e­m­ic and uni­ver­si­ty sec­tors and their impact adopt­ed the final report on 29 Sep­tem­ber 2021.

Read the rest here. 

Read the full report here.

There are sev­er­al sec­tions of the full French-lan­guage report of par­tic­u­lar rel­e­vance: 

• A sec­tion on the objec­tives of Chi­nese, Russ­ian, and Turk­ish influ­ence strate­gies in French academia.

• A sec­tion about Turkey’s influ­ence on high­er edu­ca­tion includ­ing grant­i­ng access to researchers, Turkey’s use of think tanks, and threats aca­d­e­mics receive from Turk­ish nation­al­ist groups such as the Gray Wolves.

• A sec­tion about China’s use of its glob­al­ly-based Con­fu­cius Insti­tutes and the Unit­ed Front, based in Bejing.