Sintra Advisory
European Union flags outside the Berlaymont building in Brussels. Photograph: Guillaume Périgois / Unsplash.
Seven Chinese universities share a nickname, the Seven Sons of National Defence, and a reporting line: the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the agency that oversees China’s defence industry through its subordinate body SASTIND. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute rates all seven “very high risk” on its China Defence Universities Tracker. Four sit on the US Bureau of Industry and Security Entity List. More than half of their research budgets go to defence work, and all seven hold accreditation for classified weapons research.
Until December 2025, they were eligible for European Union research funding.
The pipeline comes to light
Horizon Europe, the EU’s €93.5 billion research and innovation framework, had been sending money to these institutions for years. In 2023, an investigation by Science|Business identified five active Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions involving four of the Seven Sons, worth a combined €4.4 million in EU contributions. The projects covered swarm robotics, high-performance motor drives for propulsion systems, vehicular communications security, and heat transfer technologies with published applications in fighter jet thermal management.
The timing of one grant told the story better than any policy paper. Micro-FloTec, a €437,000 Horizon Europe project involving Beihang University (CORDIS 101082394), began on 28 March 2023. Two days later, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen delivered her landmark speech on de-risking Europe’s relationship with China. Brussels was funding a Seven Sons university in the same week its leadership was publicly warning about strategic dependency on Beijing. Asked about the projects, the Commission declined to comment. Under the rules then in force, nothing was technically wrong.
Fourteen projects, €26 million
The five MSCA projects turned out to be the visible edge of a wider pattern. In March 2025, the Swedish MEP Karin Karlsbro (Renew Europe) filed Parliamentary Question E-000926/2025, putting harder numbers on the problem: over the past decade, she wrote, the EU had funded at least 14 projects worth approximately €26 million involving Chinese universities that independent experts considered high-risk. And between December 2024 and January 2025, while the Commission was already drafting new restrictions, more than 20 new agreements, partnerships, and joint publications were announced between Seven Sons universities and European institutions.
December 2024 alone was remarkably busy. Beihang University’s president, Wang Yunpeng, spent a week touring France and Austria under the banner of the Beihang-Europe Cooperation Committee, a body the university had quietly founded the year before. The delegation visited ENAC, France’s national civil aviation school, where Beihang runs a joint aviation institute in Hangzhou; IIASA in Austria; Dassault Systèmes; ESPCI Paris; and INSA Toulouse. The trip produced agreements on AI, integrated circuits, metaverse technologies, and chemistry, along with a scholarship pipeline steering Beihang undergraduates into European institutions. Beihang’s School of Integrated Circuits separately visited the Catalonia Institute of Nanoscience in Barcelona to discuss two-dimensional materials research.
In the same period, Northwestern Polytechnical University, which ASPI identifies as the only Chinese university with a dedicated defence drone laboratory, signed a collaboration on aeronautical engineering with the University of Salamanca. Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics agreed a joint laboratory with Samara University in Russia, and Beijing Institute of Technology deepened its partnership with Bauman Moscow State Technical University on underwater robotics and lunar rovers. These were signed institutional commitments, publicly announced, and built to outlast any policy shift in Brussels.
Karlsbro’s question cited the Russia-facing partnerships directly, warning that EU-funded collaboration with the Seven Sons could be indirectly supporting Russian military technology development. Agreements documented by the Jamestown Foundation showed Beihang, NPU, NUAA, and BIT all strengthening ties with Russian defence-linked institutions in the same months that European restrictions were being drafted. Europe’s universities were building new ties to the very institutions Europe’s policymakers were preparing to ban.
Institutions moved first
Some did not wait for Brussels. On 20 January 2024, the Flemish government banned new collaborations with all Seven Sons outright, describing them as deeply rooted in China’s defence industry and under the military control of the Chinese army. Flanders simultaneously stood up a knowledge security desk, modelled on the Dutch National Contact Point for Knowledge Security, and published new guidelines for its universities.
In Germany, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg became the first university to suspend cooperation with scholars funded by the Chinese Scholarship Council, from June 2023, citing espionage risks and conflicts between CSC contracts and the Basic Law. In the Netherlands, TU Delft began refusing candidates linked to the Seven Sons, and Maastricht University withdrew three PhD positions connected to the group.
Denmark went further. Aarhus University rejected 24 foreign researchers on security grounds in the first seven months of 2025, one in every twelve applicants from China, Russia, and Iran, and hired five specialists fluent in Russian, Chinese, and Persian to evaluate incoming applications. Vice-Dean Brian Vinter put the reasoning plainly: the rejected applicants risked gaining access to information that could put them under pressure to share it with a foreign power. Aarhus had already stopped admitting CSC-funded PhD students in March 2022, after concluding that the contracts imposed obligations incompatible with academic freedom. The University of Copenhagen followed in August 2025 with screening procedures of its own, using dedicated staff and an external consultancy to assess applicants in the natural and health sciences.
Copenhagen’s arrangement points to a pattern among the early movers: few relied on internal capacity alone. Several turned to outside specialists for background screening, affiliation checks, and risk profiles of prospective partners and personnel. The logic is practical. Few research offices have in-house fluency in Chinese military-industrial structures, Russian defence procurement networks, or the overlapping entity lists maintained across jurisdictions, and a specialist who tracks those affiliations full-time will produce a faster, more defensible determination than a department head confronting an export control list for the first time.
The most carefully reasoned decision came from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. On 5 May 2025, ULB’s Academic Council voted to suspend the university’s institutional partnership with Beihang and to rule out new agreements with any of the Seven Sons, after its Committee on Compliance with International Law and Dual Use reviewed both a proposed agreement with NUAA and the renewal of an existing Beihang memorandum. The Council cited the total opacity in which the Seven Sons operate, the scale of their classified military research, and the risk of sensitive technology reaching universities that work directly with the Chinese armed forces. Its conclusion deserves a wide readership among European research administrators: risk management with these institutions is not difficult, it is impossible, because no European university can reliably assess what its contributions will ultimately be used for. Individual academic relationships with colleagues at Seven Sons universities were explicitly left untouched; the restriction targets the institutional pipeline, not the personal one.
Brussels reverses the default
The endgame began at the Flagship Conference on Research Security, held in Brussels in October 2025 with roughly 500 policymakers from 15 countries. Commissioner Ekaterina Zaharieva announced six new measures there, among them a European Centre of Expertise on Research Security and, for the first time, a commitment to write research security into law through the forthcoming European Research Area Act.
Six weeks later, on 11 December 2025, the Commission adopted the Horizon Europe Work Programme 2026-2027 (Decision C(2025) 8493), with a budget of €14 billion. Its General Annexes, applying Article 22(6) of the Horizon Europe regulation, reversed the default on Chinese participation. Where previous work programmes had listed specific calls closed to Chinese entities, the new one states that unless otherwise specified, Chinese entities cannot participate in any Research and Innovation Action. The shift from opt-out to opt-in sounds procedural. In practice it rewrites the terms of consortium-building across the continent.
Three clusters are now closed to Chinese entities entirely: Cluster 1 (Health), Cluster 3 (Civil Security for Society), and Cluster 4 (Digital, Industry and Space), which together cover AI, semiconductors, quantum technologies, biotechnology, telecommunications, and health research. Chinese entities can still take part in portions of the three remaining clusters, covering culture, climate, and food systems, and in a handful of bilateral topics co-funded by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology. The Seven Sons are banned from all of it, including the clusters that stay open to other Chinese institutions.
The programme also introduced a provision that will occupy grants officers for years: EU-based entities directly or indirectly controlled by China are excluded from Innovation Actions in AI, semiconductors, quantum, and biotechnology. The General Annexes never define what “controlled” means, offering no ownership threshold, no board-composition test, and no guidance on joint ventures or spin-offs with partial Chinese investment. Grants offices are left to make the determination call by call, using criteria borrowed from the 5G security provisions that amount to a list of factors without a decision rule.
The burden lands on universities
Every institution preparing a Horizon Europe application must now verify that no consortium member is established in China for the restricted clusters, that no EU-based partner is Chinese-controlled for critical-technology Innovation Actions, and that no MIIT-affiliated university appears anywhere in the application in any capacity. For institutions with long-standing Chinese partnerships, cotutelle agreements, visiting scholar arrangements, and joint PhD supervision, the review reaches into relationship infrastructure that took decades to build. Some of those relationships will survive scrutiny; others will not. Most institutions have never conducted the kind of systematic assessment required to tell the difference.
The Commission justifies the restrictions by citing a persistent lack of progress in the EU-China Innovation Cooperation Dialogue and substantive concerns about undesired transfer of intellectual property, naming both the Made in China 2025 strategy and China’s Military-Civil Fusion strategy. The rules do not apply retroactively to existing agreements. The direction of travel, though, is unmistakable. The proposed next Framework Programme, FP10, would make dual-use research eligible by default across a €175 billion budget, breaking with four decades of civilian exclusivity, and the ERA Act, expected in the second half of 2026, would make research security legally binding for the first time. Today’s work programme conditions are on their way to becoming statutory obligations.
Universities have pushed back, carefully. The Guild questioned whether closing entire research clusters was justified; the EUA warned against risk aversion replacing risk management; the Coimbra Group pointed to the cost of not collaborating. Joy Zhang, a sociologist at the University of Kent, told Nature in February 2026 that IP theft is more common among commercial companies than cutting-edge researchers, a right intention, she argued, applied to the wrong target. At a January 2026 webinar, Commission business analyst Beatrice Plazzotta answered that the current geopolitical and economic situation requires paying attention to what institutions do and whom they collaborate with. The debate is legitimate and will outlast the current work programme. The compliance obligations will not wait for it.
Where this is heading
ULB’s Academic Council produced the clearest statement of the underlying problem: the opacity of these institutions makes risk management impossible. The observation reaches well beyond the Seven Sons.
Thirty months ago, the Commission was funding joint projects with military-linked Chinese universities and declining to comment on it. Today those universities are shut out of the entire programme, and the definition of who else might be excluded is growing faster than the guidance on how to decide. Named universities have given way to undefined “controlled” entities, work programme conditions are giving way to binding legislation, and opt-out exceptions have become opt-in defaults. Each step has been broader than the last, and each has arrived sooner than institutions expected.
For research offices, the live question is no longer whether the restrictions are justified but whether the institutional machinery exists to answer the screening question before a funder or an auditor asks it. Institutions that have built that capacity will absorb whatever comes next. Those that treat December 2025 as a one-off adjustment will find themselves rebuilding their compliance approach every time the rules tighten again.
Sintra Advisory works with research institutions on partnership vetting and research security compliance.
Sources
EU documents and proceedings
Horizon Europe Work Programme 2026-2027, Decision C(2025) 8493 (European Commission, December 2025)
New measures to strengthen research security (European Commission, October 2025)
Institutional decisions
Decision of the Academic Council on collaborations with the Seven Sons universities (ULB, May 2025)
Flanders bans collaborations with Chinese Seven Sons universities (Belga News Agency, January 2024)
Danish universities reject Chinese researchers over espionage concerns (Scandasia, July 2025)
Investigations and analysis
EU continues to fund research with Chinese military-linked universities (Science|Business, May 2023)
Why Europe barred China from flagship Horizon research programmes (Nature, February 2026)