Roma — To understand whether it is a diplomatic mix-up, a hostile act or a simple coincidence resulting from underestimation, we need to put the facts in line. Here they are: yesterday the undersecretary to the Presidency of the Council Alfredo Mantovano announced the presentation of a national action plan to protect Italian universities and research from foreign interference. The appointment is for tomorrow morning at Palazzo Chigi. To understand the scope of the operation, a detail must be added: the main suspect in these infiltration activities is China, although the monitoring has also detected suspicious activities of Iranian and North Korean origin. The University Minister has been working on the project for months Anna Maria Berniniwho not surprisingly will work alongside Mantovano. The government’s announcement is unexpected, sudden and unforeseen. And it presents a problem: a few hours after the plan was presented, Sergio Mattarella he will be received in Beijing by the Chinese president Xi Jinping. This is enough to fuel suspicions, embarrassments, backtracks and clarifications.
The “university” dossier had been open for a long time. A first information from AISI is dated 2022, at the beginning of 2024 there were a series of additions. Then in May the German government warned its partners of Chinese aggressiveness in terms of precious scientific research projects: data obtained from laboratories and experiments, exchanges of human resources in the field of new technologies, medicine and above all artificial intelligence and of Quantum computing (in fact, quantum AI). Germany’s alarm – among other things in line with a European directive also from last May – was then relaunched by the British.
At that point Italy decided to intervene. For months, Bernini’s ministry has been designing an alert system that aims to find suspicious intrusions. The objective was to present the plan next December 4-5 in Bari. Something, however, changed the course of things. Some information on potential infiltrations was handed over to intelligence, through Chigi. And Mantovano, after receiving Bernini last week, imposed the acceleration without even waiting for the project to be completed.
When asked, Palazzo Chigi denies that there is a specific alert on China and that Beijing will not be explicitly discussed. The question remains: why schedule the press conference a few hours after Mattarella’s visit? If we want to exclude the rudeness at Colle after the very recent tensions, a possible explanation comes from Palazzo Chigi’s need to reassure Washington, alarmed by Chinese activity. Almost to balance the presidential visit to the East.
