Chinese graduate students ‘entangled’ in Japan’s security agenda

Concerns about research security are increasingly influencing decision-making within Japanese universities, particularly when projects involve Chinese graduate students, a study has found.

Co-authors Yicheng Zhou and Futao Huang, both based at the Research Institute for Higher Education at Hiroshima University, interviewed 18 Chinese graduate students at three research universities in Japan to understand how research security was influencing their academic and career trajectories.

Their findings, published in the Journal of Studies in International Education, show that Japanese universities are increasingly having to balance internationalisation ambitions alongside security concerns. This was partly because of their “reliance on public research funding and their role in advancing national strategic priorities”.

“Alongside the rise of research security, international students have become increasingly entangled in geopolitical narratives surrounding knowledge production and national competitiveness,” the authors write.

In their view, this development is particularly relevant to Chinese students, one of the largest international student groups in Japan.

Although institutions in the US, UK and Australia have come under pressure to review ties with certain Chinese institutions in recent weeks, there is considerable student mobility and research collaboration between Japan and China.

According to the Japan Student Services Organization, Japan hosted 131,097 Chinese students in 2025. This number includes students at universities as well as specialist institutions for learning Japanese.

The co-authors found that research-security governance was particularly prominent at certain stages of institutional processes in Japan, for example, during risk assessments, background screening, conference attendance and research topic selection.

Huang told Times Higher Education that geopolitics is becoming “embedded in routine governance in quite practical ways”.

He said that research partnerships, contracts and externally funded projects are reviewed more closely and that he has noticed “more involvement of central administrative offices in decisions that were previously left largely to individual academics or departments”.

Another broad trend that Huang has observed, particularly in STEM-related fields, is a “greater caution around access to particular projects, laboratories, data or collaboration”.

“Some students consequently become more careful about the topics they choose and the projects they join.”

When it comes to working with Chinese students, Huang said that supervisors are also becoming more “selective” especially in fields considered “strategically or technologically sensitive”.

According to Huang, supervisors and departments are becoming “more conscious of research-security requirements, export controls, funding conditions and possible reputational or administrative risks”.

“This can make collaboration more cautious in particular sensitive fields, rather than producing a general unwillingness to supervise Chinese students.”

rosalind.skillen@timeshighereducation.com