The National Key R&D Program (国家重点研发计划) is a major national-level research funding program in China since 2016. https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%9B%BD%E5%AE%B6%E9%87%8D%E7%82%B9%E7%A0%94%... https://www.eeas.europa.eu/sites/default/files/1.pdf#page=59 The National Key R&D Program, and specific grant numbers thereof, are frequently acknowledged in research papers. But finding information beyond the grant numbers is difficult. There's no central public source of grant metadata such as the title, the name of the principal investigator, the start and end dates, and the funding amount. MERICS has published at least one report with aggregate statistics about Key R&D projects (https://merics.org/en/report/controlling-innovation-chain#2-research-project...) but apparently the sources of data they used are no longer available. But sometimes information about grants gets out through other sources. An example is grant number 2023YFB3106700, which appears in the CV of a researcher named Cao Jie with start and end dates that the English title "Research on Generalized Security Theory for Dark Web Suppression". https://jiejaycao.github.io/CV_Jie.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20260421165501/https://jiejaycao.github.io/CV_Ji... https://github.com/JieJayCao/JieJayCao.github.io/blob/b9c4ff3f8e2d4cbe5253bd...
Research on Generalized Security Theory for Dark Web Suppression Nov. 2013 – Dec. 2024 Researcher, National Key R&D Program of China (Key Special Program), Grant No. 2023YFB3106700
We can do a web search to find research publications that have been funded by this "dark web suppression" grant. I found 6 published papers and 1 preprint: "TorHunter: A Lightweight Method for Efficient Identification of Obfuscated Tor Traffic Through Unsupervised Pre-training". Yuwei Xu, Xu Zhengxin, Cao Jie, Wang Rongrong, Yuan Yali, Cheng Guang. International Conference on Information and Communications Security, 2024. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-97-8801-9_1 https://dblp.org/rec/conf/icics/XuXCWYC24 "FullView: Using Bidirectional Group Sequences to Achieve Accurate Encrypted Traffic Classification". Xu Yuwei, Liang Zhiyuan, Xu Zhengxin, Song Kehui, Xiang Qiao, Cheng Guang. Security and Privacy in Communication Networks, 2024. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-94448-2_11 https://dblp.org/rec/conf/securecomm/0001LXSX024 "OnionPeeler: A Novel Input-Enriched Website Fingerprinting Attack on Tor Onion Services". Xu Zhengxin, Cao Jie, Hou Yujie, Xu Yuwei, Cheng Guang. Security and Privacy in Communication Networks, 2024. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-94455-0_11 https://dblp.org/rec/conf/securecomm/Xu0H0024.html "GateKeeper: An UltraLite malicious traffic identification method with dual-aspect optimization strategies on IoT gateways". Cao Jie, Xu Yuwei, Yu Enze, Xiang Qiao, Song Kehui, He Liang, Cheng Guang. Computer Networks, 2024. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1389128624003888 https://dblp.org/rec/journals/cn/CaoXYXSHC24 "Attack smarter: Attention-driven fine-grained webpage fingerprinting attacks". Yuan Yali, Zou Weiyi, Cheng Guang. Computers & Security, 2025. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167404825003323 https://dblp.org/rec/journals/compsec/YuanZC25 https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20082 "M3S-UPD: Efficient Multi-Stage Self-Supervised Learning for Fine-Grained Encrypted Traffic Classification with Unknown Pattern Discovery". Yuan Yali, Huang Yu, Zeng Xingjian, Mei Hantao, Cheng Guang. 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21462v1 "METRA: Robust Encrypted Traffic Detection Against Adversarial Attacks via Multi-Task Learning and Label Denoising". Wang Yaohui, Sun Degang, Wan Wei, Zhao Jing, Du Guanyao, Long Chun International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 2026. https://cmsworkshops.com/ICASSP2026/view_paper.php?PaperNum=5312 https://english.cnic.cas.cn/rsearch/rp/202603/t20260323_1153131.html https://cnic.cas.cn/gzdt/202603/t20260313_8159227.html If I had to guess, I would say that the principal investigator of grant 2023YFB3106700 is probably professor 程光 (Cheng Guang) of Southeast University. https://cyber.seu.edu.cn/_s303/cg1/list.psp This is certainly not the only Chinese grant that funds Tor / dark web / onion service / encrypted traffic classification research. I'm highlighting it just because I found a title for it, which is rare.