Belgian research powerhouse turns hawkish on China

LEUVEN, Belgium — The European Union's top research hub is second-guessing some of its global collaboration in the face of rising realpolitik.

The Belgian university town just east of capital Brussels will be in the global spotlight when trade and technology officials of the European Union and the United States gather on Thursday and Friday for a meeting of the EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council (TTC).

Its leading university KU Leuven has recently prohibited common projects with Chinese universities with ties to the country's military, known as the Seven Sons of National Defense. It has also blocked Chinese researchers for projects that it deemed risky because the applications could be used for military purposes, the head of the university, Luc Sels, told POLITICO in an interview.

Both Europe and the United States are increasingly shy about engaging with geopolitical rival China over fears Beijing is using sensitive technology against their interests. That distrust has led to calls to dismantle Europe's and the U.S.'s reliance on China in areas like microchips, quantum computing and artificial intelligence — including by shoring up "research security."

The hawkish line on research collaboration runs counter to Leuven's traditional framing as a neutral ground where companies and researchers from across the world can collaborate to push the boundaries of next-generation technology.

Leuven's model of close collaboration with key players in Europe and elsewhere has developed over decades. The city's university KU Leuven is the top beneficiary of grants under Horizon Europe, the EU's flagship research and development program. Its crown jewel is the research institute Imec, a world leader in microelectronics research, which is on the agenda of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken for a visit on Thursday.

"A company like Imec, that's about collaboration. They're able to let Apple and Samsung work together on innovation," Leuven Mayor Mohamed Ridouani told POLITICO. Corporate competitors "work through Imec on innovation that benefits everyone," he said.

That model of openness is now under threat.

In an interview mid-March, Imec Chief Executive Officer Luc Van den hove said geopolitical developments have increasingly made it "impossible to work with everyone." Imec's key partners are the U.S., Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. Collaborations with China have been "drastically reduced," he said.

The remarks, which confirmed POLITICO's previous reporting, were a watershed moment for the company. In the past Van den hove had touted Imec as the "Switzerland of semiconductors," a place where all the key industry players — including Chinese players like SMIC and Huawei's HiSilicon — could come together.

KU Leuven has also increased its scrutiny of research collaborations, its head Sels said. There is now a "strictness that we didn't have when I became rector in 2017," he said in the run-up to the TTC meeting.

The university boasts a country-agnostic policy (with exceptions for full-on boycotts on ties to Iran and Russia). Three committees evaluate research collaborations for possible human rights violations, the risk of research misuse and its general security.

As a rule, the university doesn't collaborate with China's defense universities that are part of the Seven Sons of National Defense, a grouping of universities affiliated with the country's industry ministry and believed to have close ties to its army. The Flemish government, which defines education policies for Belgium's northern region including in Leuven, recently banned new collaborations with the grouping, it said in January.

Sels said he had also refused three China-funded scholarships earlier this year, saying the university had a hunch the research could be used for for military as well as civil applications (so-called dual-use research).

Sels said Chinese counterparts, too, have increasingly told European partners that they don’t want to collaborate in sensitive areas of research like semiconductors and artificial intelligence. In a strange way, the university head said, that has opened up easier conversations around cooperation in other areas like climate change. Sels cautioned not to cut off all ties to China as a rule because that would hurt Europe even more.

The university's barriers to sensitive research collaborations, the microchips champion's pivot to cut ties to China: It's a paradigm shift for the European research hub and a sharp departure from decades of increased global integration of research and academia.

"The geopolitical situation is one of realpolitik," Ridouani, the mayor, said.