A Communist Party Talent-Recruitment Official Co-Wrote a Book With the Canadian Scientist Now Charged With Copying Thousands of Government Files
Dennis Lu's co-author is a Communist Party personnel official at Southeast University who this spring shared a talent-recruitment forum with a senior cadre of the United Front Work Department.
OTTAWA — Dennis Lu, the Natural Resources Canada scientist at the center of one of the most consequential foreign-interference prosecutions in the country’s history, co-authored a scholarly book on carbon-capture technology that his publisher released in December 2024 — months after Canada’s national security police had already detained him. The Bureau has confirmed Lu’s co-author was a Chinese professor who is also a Communist Party personnel official: the man who, since 2020, has helped run the recruiting machinery at Southeast University in Nanjing and today directs its Talent Work Office.
The two scientists earned degrees at that same university, decades apart — Lu a master’s in thermal energy and power engineering in 1985, his co-author a doctorate in 2010 — and they were still publishing together as Lu awaited trial. Beyond the 2024 monograph, Fluidized Bed Reactors for Carbon Capture, the two men are listed as co-authors on a further book chapter that appeared in October 2025, about a year after Lu’s arrest.
The Bureau identified the co-author, from the publisher’s own record and Chinese-language sources, as Lunbo Duan, a professor in Southeast University’s School of Energy and Environment whose research field, like Lu’s, is carbon capture. An official Communist Party personnel notice, issued by the university’s Party Committee in June 2020 and marked for public disclosure, appointed Duan to a concurrent post as Deputy Director of the Committee’s Organization Department — the arm of the Communist Party that controls cadre appointments and personnel. His official biography lists that Party role, held continuously since, alongside his directorship of the university’s Talent Work Office. He is, in other words, not a professor who happens to belong to the Party, but a Party cadre whose institutional portfolio is talent recruitment.
The open record situates him more precisely still within that apparatus. In May, at a talent-development forum convened in Jinan as part of a Shandong provincial talent conference, Duan appeared as an invited speaker, presenting on “The Practice of Talent Work at Southeast University” and setting out the university’s measures for talent introduction, cultivation, and utilization. He shared the program with senior Party cadres drawn from across China’s university system — among them Liu Jian, who at Shandong University concurrently serves as Minister of the United Front Work Department, Minister of the Personnel Department, and Director of the Talent Work Office, and who spoke on “Exploration and Practice of Talent Work in the New Era.” The overlap in Liu’s titles is itself meaningful.
In the Party’s university machinery, talent recruitment and United Front work — the Communist Party’s system for cultivating influence and co-opting elites at home and abroad — are braided into a single administrative function, and Lu’s co-author moves within that world as a matter of official routine. It is another piece of open case information that locates Lu’s scholarly network inside the sprawling apparatus of the Chinese party-state.
Southeast University is an institution The Bureau has examined before. It is among a set of Chinese universities tracked by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a security-focused think tank, for their entanglement with China’s military and security establishment. According to that assessment, Southeast holds secret-level security credentials permitting it to take on classified defense projects, and its researchers, the institute reports, have been linked to cyberespionage — including work at its cyber-science school funded by the Ministry of State Security, China’s civilian intelligence agency, and close ties to a security firm that trains and recruits People’s Liberation Army cyber officers.
The case against Lu is serious but, as yet, unproven. Lu, 65, faces two counts of unauthorized use of a computer and one count of breach of trust. According to courthouse records first reported by CBC News and confirmed by The Bureau through a May court ruling, Canadian Security Intelligence Service briefed Natural Resources Canada about Lu no fewer than three times between 2000 and 2021, prompting the department to launch a covert internal investigation in early 2023 to monitor and search his computer. While on leave in China that year, Lu allegedly sent nearly 2,000 emails from his work account to his personal account; on July 7, 2023, he allegedly copied 2,414 documents from a departmental shared server onto a device, and on August 9 a further 188. The Crown alleges his seized devices held evidence of undisclosed affiliations and employment with Chinese companies, universities and academics, contrary to departmental rules, and that he intended to share the material with China. He was arrested in 2024 by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police-led national security team in Ottawa.
For more than five years, Western intelligence agencies have warned that this kind of collaboration — a government scientist with privileged access, an undeclared foreign institutional identity, and working relationships with state-linked researchers abroad — is precisely the channel through which sensitive knowledge migrates to China. The FBI has told Congress that China’s talent-recruitment plans “encourage theft of intellectual property from U.S. institutions,” luring researchers to carry their knowledge to China “even if that means stealing proprietary information or violating export controls to do so.” In 2018, Christopher Wray, then the bureau’s director, told the Senate that China was cultivating professors, scientists and students as “non-traditional collectors” of intelligence across nearly every discipline.
None of this establishes that Duan and Lu’s research collaboration was anything other than the openly published civilian science it appears to be — the FBI itself notes that “mere participation in a talent plan is not illegal,” and the connection here is structural, not an allegation of wrongdoing.
The best-known of those initiatives is China’s Thousand Talents Program, the overseas-facing recruitment drive that a bipartisan Senate investigation in 2019 described as a systematic conduit for moving federally funded research to China, often without disclosure to the institutions footing the bill. That is the program Canadian authorities scrutinized in the most serious science-security failure in recent Canadian memory — the case of Xiangguo Qiu, the Winnipeg scientist recruited into the Thousand Talents Program who collaborated with China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences before live virus samples were shipped from Canada’s highest-security laboratory to Wuhan.
Courthouse records, CBC reported, show no evidence that Lu transmitted the documents he is accused of copying, and his defense has told the court that the departmental drive was not password-protected, that employees routinely carried work home on USB devices, and that Lu had been working on publications with Chinese counterparts on the department’s behalf and intended to finish them. CSIS flagged Lu, by the government’s own record, repeatedly between 2000 and 2021. Natural Resources Canada did not move against him until 2023. Lu’s trial is scheduled for January at the Ottawa Courthouse.