A Chinese University Affiliation, Chinese State Funding, and Warnings Ignored: The Dennis Lu Case Follows a Pattern Canada Has Seen Before

ASPI reports the university “has been linked to cyberespionage,” researchers “have been funded by the MSS, China’s civilian intelligence agency."

OTTAWA – Dennis Lu, the veteran federal scientist accused in an explosive foreign interference case echoing the scandal involving Dr. Xiangguo Qiu at Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory, published a book after his arrest that lists his institutional affiliation not as the Government of Canada, where he worked for nearly three decades, but as a Chinese university — one credited, along with the book, as receiving Chinese state funding and red-flagged by Australian security analysts for ties to Chinese intelligence.

The revelation, collected by The Bureau from open-source records, adds a new dimension to a prosecution that already reaches into Canada’s most closely guarded offices. In December 2024 — months after Ottawa INSET, the RCMP-led national security enforcement team, detained Lu — a scientific publisher released a monograph Lu co-authored on carbon-capture technology, Fluidized Bed Reactors for Carbon Capture: A Review of …Techniques for Decarbonization.

On the publisher’s official listing, Lu is placed under a single institution: the School of Energy and Environment at Southeast University in Nanjing — the same Chinese university where Lu earned his master’s degree in 1985. The volume’s acknowledgments credit the National Natural Science Foundation of China and a Southeast University research fund.

The publisher’s own biography of Lu, published alongside the book, celebrates the Canadian government career now at the center of his prosecution, describing his nearly three decades at CanmetENERGY, Natural Resources Canada. It is a portrait of a scientist operating at the summit of Canada’s clean-energy research establishment — and, under the banner of a Chinese university.

As The Bureau has reported, Lu, 65, a longtime Natural Resources Canada carbon-capture specialist, faces two counts of unauthorized use of a computer and one count of breach of trust, in a case first detailed by CBC News and confirmed by The Bureau through a May court ruling ordering Canada’s national security agencies to disclose sensitive records to his defense.