On 15 September 2026, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute extended its China Defence Universities Tracker to Hong Kong and Macau institutions for the first time, in an article by ASPI staff writer Geoff Wade headlined “ China’s military research absorbs HK, Macau. ”ASPI describes the Tracker as a tool for governments, universities and companies to conduct research-security due diligence , and its expansion announcements confirm that Hong Kong universities are now part of a regular update cycle beginning in 2026.That reach gives the database an influence well beyond an ordinary think-tank publication, which is why it is reasonable to apply to ASPI’s own article the same evidentiary standard it asks universities and their partners to meet.

The article documents real relationships: a Faculty of Engineering memorandum at the University of Hong Kong with an AVIC-linked aviation institute, research centres at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, an oceanographic expedition involving the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and space-related cooperation at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Each connection exists. What the article does not establish is that any of them amounts to military integration.

The HKU case illustrates the gap. Low-altitude economy cooperation of the kind described — the field several Hong Kong universities, including HKUST and CUHK , have separately signed agreements to develop— is officially defined in China in explicitly civilian terms: airspace activity generally below 1,000 metres (extendable to 3,000 metres for specialised uses), covering functions such as logistics, agriculture, medical delivery, infrastructure inspection and urban air mobility . China’s Civil Aviation Administration projects the sector’s civilian market size at RMB 1.5 trillion by 2025 and RMB 3.5 trillion by 2035 . Treating a corporate defence pedigree as sufficient on its own to recharacterise this kind of agreement changes the finding without adding any new fact about the memorandum’s terms, funding or use.

A similar pattern appears at CUHK, where the State Key Laboratory of Quantum Information Technologies and Materials, established in 2025, describes its own work as covering diamond quantum sensing, condensed-matter physics, biology, energy materials, precision metrology, space-based communication and navigation . At HKUST, the research vessel Shenhai Yihao and the submersible Jiaolong took part in a 45-day 2024 expedition co-led by HKUST under the UN Decade of Ocean Science’s “Digital DEPTH” programme, an internationally staffed project examining deep-sea biodiversity and mineral resources, endorsed by UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission . At PolyU, the clearest case of direct technical contribution — the “Surface Sampling and Packing System” built with the China Academy of Space Technology for the Chang’e-6, Chang’e-5, Chang’e-4/3 and Tianwen-1 missions — is itself a civil deep-space exploration programme, publicly described by PolyU in those terms . In each instance, the underlying record supports a civilian description at least as strongly as a military one.

This matters because so much contemporary research is inherently dual-use. Nor is university-defence cooperation itself unusual or uniquely Chinese. MIT states that almost 15 percent of sponsored research on its main campus supports the Department of Defense, in addition to roughly $1.3–1.5 billion in national-security R&D annually at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, which draws about 90 percent of its funding from the DoD . Every one of Australia’s 37 public universities has signed the Defence Science and Technology Group’s Defence Science Partnerships framework. In July 2026, the UK’s Ministry of Defence launched a 35-member Defence Universities Alliance including Oxford, UCL and King’s College London. Defence-adjacent research is a longstanding feature of research universities across allied countries; the question research-security analysis needs to answer is not whether a connection exists, but what it actually does.

The same standard of scrutiny is worth turning back on ASPI itself. Its 2024-25 annual report records total own-source revenue of A$14.31 million, of which A$6.5 million came directly from Department of Defence core funding for its Canberra and Washington operations, with a further A$4.98 million in sponsorship income ; ASPI’s leadership describes Defence funding as “a crucial source of funding and a key enabler of our operations.” Its research-collaboration funding claims are also worth checking against the actual rules: the RGC-NSFC Joint Research Scheme that supports much Hong Kong-mainland cooperation is structured so that Hong Kong and mainland partners receive and can only spend their grants in their own jurisdiction — a rule that limits, rather than expands, any inference of a unified funding flow .

None of this means research-security concerns are groundless. Classified research, controlled technologies, undisclosed funding and genuine technology transfer to military end-users are legitimate subjects of scrutiny. But a serious accounting has to distinguish a memorandum from a programme, a research centre from a military laboratory, and a corporate affiliation from a demonstrated military use. On the evidence ASPI has itself published, that distinction has not been made for the Hong Kong institutions named in its latest report.

The danger is that national-security language becomes so expansive that almost any institutional connection can be made to sound suspicious. A university signs an agreement with an aerospace institute. A research vessel conducts ocean science. Suddenly, a directory of relationships begins to resemble a map of military penetration.

But consider the absurdity at the edge of this logic. If supplying bottled water to a defence department makes a company part of the international-security problem, Coca-Cola would have rather more explaining to do than most universities. The US Department of Defense has in fact awarded Coca-Cola-related suppliers contracts to provide bottled water and other beverages to military customers . Would that make drinking Coca-Cola a national-security decision?

The point is that association has to remain proportionate to the claim being made. Research security deserves serious scrutiny. Universities should disclose relevant partnerships, comply with export controls and protect sensitive technologies. But the answer cannot be to treat every civilian institution with a defence-adjacent relationship as though the institution itself has become part of a military apparatus.