Who goes to work for China’s defense industry? In our latest, @emily_sw1 and I mapped talent flows between 🇨🇳 universities and defense SOEs.
🚨 We found that U.S. tech companies are indirectly aiding China's military.
Thread: (1/10)
2/10 In our report for @CSETGeorgetown, we measured the relationships between elite 🇨🇳 universities and China's defense industry by looking at their Graduate Employment Quality Reports.
Kudos to @alexjoske @ASPI_org for highlighting these sources:
3/10 We looked at disaggregated employment data for 29 of 45 leading universities—China’s Double First Class universities + those administered by MIIT.
Our dataset reflects the career moves of 140,000 Chinese university graduates in 2019.
6,000 took jobs at defense SOEs.
4/10 We confirmed that 🇨🇳 defense giants like CASC, CETC, and CSIC disproportionately recruit from seven universities: the Seven Sons of National Defense (国防七子).
The Seven Sons produced just 16% of graduates in our dataset, but 72% of those who took jobs at defense SOEs.
5/10 Then we started looking into the resources available to Chinese universities, investigating documents from the Ministry of Education.
MOE frequently "asks" foreign companies to help Chinese universities in research & curriculum development—the price of doing business in 🇨🇳.