Beijing’s Big Bet
THE TEL AVIV POLITICAL SCIENTIST WAS skeptical about the message that popped up on his social media feed offering attractive rewards if he came to work in China. “I just ignored it,” he told Newsweek. “It was kind of funny.”
Yet the message from the Zhejiang Torch Center in Hangzhou was completely serious—part of a multiyear, multiprong effort by the Communist Party of China (CCP) to transfer human talent and top technology to fuel its “China Dream” of global preeminence by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the Communist revolution.
In messages on WeChat, China’s main social media app, “Casey Xu” presented himself as an “international recruiter.” Xu shared examples of people from “past projects” identified only by a three-letter country code and three-digit number. One blurry photograph showed “GBR 004” (Great Britain), a specialist in microwave photons used in cooking but also quantum physics and radio communications in hard-to-reach spots such as tunnels or jungles. “NZL 002” (New Zealand) was an expert in nanomaterials that are important for aerospace and defense. “IND 004” (India) specialized in integrated circuits, key to the “Internet of Things” that is increasingly connecting people and devices everywhere. Since China also values inside information, the Israeli policy expert could perhaps have had a future as “ISR 007.”
The Zhejiang Torch Center boasts that it hosts a unit of China’s national science and technology development “863 Plan,” making it likely it seeks military applications, as that’s what the plan was set up to do. The pitch promised “attractive rewards and benefits.” The center was an official project of the local government, “supported by the Chinese government,” Xu said helpfully. He added, “If you travel to China, you might not get a visa. However, if you are a member of a talent introduction project, the company and local government will assist you with this issue.”
The Israeli analyst, who spoke to Newsweek on condition of anonymity, rejected the approach. It wasn’t the first he’d gotten from China. The Chinese party-state operates hundreds of recruiting networks targeting intellectual property (IP) around the world, and Israel has a flourishing sector in emerging technologies like laser optics and augmented and virtual reality. It is one of the world’s foremost innovation hubs, with around 4,000 active start-ups, spending 5 percent of its annual GDP on research and development—the highest in the world, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic & International Studies. Israel is uniquely attractive in its combination of highly advanced defense and security-minded tech and research, plus still-weak safeguards. In the past 20 years, 97 percent of known investments in Israel from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were in the technology sector.
Other countries, including the U.S., work to lure top IP talent for government and private-sector projects,
