I am a professor of geography at a university in China. I work in a department with no Chinese employees. I am being groomed to help the Chinese government expand its territory. Am I really the first person they’ve approached that sees this as a red flag?

I am a professor of physical/yerea/landscape/human geography at a (medium ranked) university in China. I wasn’t born in China, but my parents are originally from China, so I could apply for citizenship. My department is oddly fully foreign. I’m the only person from China and the rest of staff and PhD students in the department are from all over the world (Poland, Brazil, Germany, America, India, etc). <br><br>I think part of why I got the position may have been because I am a Chinese citizen but not technically a native Chinese person, so I could be considered as an “international hire”. Why that matters, is that at this particular university, all non-Chinese hires receive a significantly higher salary than the Chinese staff. In this case, even though they are paying me quite a lot by global standards (I am fairly young, early 30s), they are still paying me the Chinese rate. <br><br>As far as I can tell, everything about the university seems quite normal. I can’t see any obvious red flags. I was getting a lot of job offers in my field (with my background, there is a lot of demand for people like me), so I shopped around a lot. I had some other very impressive offers, but ultimately I chose this one. <br><br>I have the impression that the university itself has been bought out by a government agency, and my department is funded by the Chinese government. One of our core research themes is a project called “Reclaiming the South China Sea”. I am somewhat new, so my role is fairly peripheral and I don’t have any students under me yet, but as far as I can tell, the projects are largely about hydrological and oceanic analyses projecting the impacts of both pure land reclamation (building new land out of sea) and also by pumping in sand and sediment to build land. It looks at projections in the next 50-100 years of the impact of these activities in altering the coastline, and to an extent, the boundary between China and other nations in that region.<br><br>I see this as a massive red flag. I’m not a political expert, but I’m fairly certain that China is already doing this on a large scale and without international approval. I can’t see how what we’re doing is legal. But I’m also a little conflicted. I’m not a political person at all. I have always been apolitical. I don’t care about nationalism. I’m not patriotic and I’m not Anti-China. And I do see the merits of what the project is doing. If you consider hydrological and environmental concerns, then you can dramatically mitigate the negative impacts of land reclamation.<br><br>Additionally, I have to consider my situation. I’m being VERY well paid, way more than I could have gotten for a tenure track job as junior faculty in the west. I’m able to save a lot and invest a lot. I can easily afford to maintain a high quality of life. I feel guilty complaining about a high paying job, but it is the only one I have. I’m quite new to this department and still in the process of trying to get a picture of what is going on, and obviously it doesn’t help that I’m a professor of geography and not international law. <br><br>But my question is…….am I really the first person they’ve approached that sees this as a problem? I feel like it’s insane that they could get so many people from outside of China to join this department. The university is in a pretty developed city in China, but the only people who move here are either older Chinese people returning from retirement, or younger Chinese people who are moving here for work. I can’t see how they could get so many people from the west to move here unless this is somehow a normal thing that people know about and I’m just stupid?<br><br>Sorry for the long post, any thoughts?<br><br>&#x200B;