How Chinese President Xi Jinping imagines the world in the year 2049, i.e. on the centenary of the People's Republic, has often been made clear.
China is then the most powerful nation in the world.
This requires the strongest army and, because you can't do it on your own, the friendly support of European science.
As early as 2007, Chinese scientists were sent all over the world via the thousand talents program in order to use the knowledge they had acquired there to accelerate their ascent.
The military authorities acted as clandestine liaison officers and placed their compatriots in research projects that promised militarily profitable knowledge for China.
The German universities and institutes gratefully accepted the money,
A consortium of eleven European media around the investigative networks Correctiv and Follow the Money has now revealed how much European science has been harnessed to China's military rise.
The research team examined thirty thousand publications from the years 2000 to 2022 for links to the Chinese military.
Across Europe, they found something in almost three thousand cases.
Germany is way up there with 348 publications.
48 German universities cooperate or have cooperated with Chinese institutions that are close to the military, some of them consciously take the risk and refer to internal test procedures;
others state that they know nothing of the military background.
The result does not necessarily come as a surprise.
It is the consequence of a policy that has long applied (and still applies) standards to a country that has given itself quite different standards.
The freedom of research guaranteed by the German constitution is being exploited by a Chinese system that has consistently subordinated science to the army since the military-civilian merger decided in 2017.
From a European point of view, it is certainly not always clear whether scientific knowledge can also be used militarily.
In some cases, however, the documents also show an astonishingly naïve or even negligent handling of risks.
The fact that the criticized cooperation also affects the National University of Defense Technology, which has particularly close ties to the People's Liberation Army,
really shouldn't have happened.
Where a military derivation is possible, cooperation should be avoided in the future.
This point must not be left out of the China strategy that the Federal Ministry of Research is currently revising.