A British university has accepted over £20 million in funding and donations from China in just four years.
The Epoch Times can reveal that London’s Imperial College is one of a staggering number of UK universities receiving millions of pounds from the Beijing regime, as well as Chinese companies accused of crime and human rights abuses.
Many of the organisations identified as bankrolling British educational institutions have also been blacklisted by other countries over national security fears.
At least one has been linked to Chinese spy balloon incidents recorded in the United States this year.
The information, gathered through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, has been described as “astonishingly dangerous” by experts who say the government needs to hold an inquiry into universities’ funding sources.
The Epoch Times approached over 160 universities in the UK and asked them about their funding sources connected to China.
Many responded, while some heavily redacted details of donations and grants.
Others, including the London School of Economics—which is home to a business Confucius Institute—refused to reveal any of its financing from China.
Imperial College London, which bills itself as a “world class” institution specialising in science, engineering, medicine, and business, was awarded a total of £18,380,012 in research funding between 2018 and 2022.
Those grants emanated from 20 organisations based in China.
That included an unknown amount from China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC)—a state-owned oil company accused in the past of having drug-trafficking ties and carrying out human rights abuses in Burma.
National Security Blacklist
Documents show that the University of Edinburgh accepted almost £11 million from U.S.-blacklisted telecoms company Huawei.The firm was listed as a national security threat in 2020, with U.S. companies banned from using subsidies to buy its equipment.
The United States House Intelligence Committee previously warned that Huawei’s telecommunications equipment could be used by the Chinese regime to spy on American citizens.
In 2022, the UK government ordered that Huawei technology must be removed from all 5G public networks by the end of 2027.
The UK ban on Huawei in 5G followed guidance from the National Cyber Security Centre that the security of the company’s products—such as equipment used at phone mast sites and telephone exchanges—can no longer be managed owing to the impact of U.S. sanctions.
The prestigious Scottish university has also accepted over £39,000 from Tencent, a technology institution in China that has been accused of spying on behalf of the Chinese regime.
Tencent owns WeChat, a social media app hugely popular in China.
In 2020, then-U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order against Tencent banning all U.S. business with the technology giant over national security fears surrounding WeChat.
He said the app represented a security threat by collecting “vast swathes” of data on Americans and other users, and by allowing “the Chinese Communist Party a mechanism for keeping tabs on Chinese citizens who may be enjoying the benefits of a free society for the first time in their lives.”
The order said: “WeChat, like TikTok, also reportedly censors content that the Chinese Communist Party deems politically sensitive and may also be used for disinformation campaigns that benefit the Chinese Communist Party.”
The conglomerate denies that it received intelligence funding, saying its finances were “transparent.” It rejects accusations of wrongdoing.
Citizen Lab found text and images sent between international accounts were also monitored by the technology company to help inform domestic censorship.
Tencent has also used artificial intelligence to identify and block images created by users to circumvent CCP censorship.
It has been known to shut down social media accounts that share information critical of the Chinese regime.
In its FOI response to The Epoch Times, the University of Edinburgh said its links with Tencent, which started 2022, involved research on “serving big machine learning models.”
Millions for Computer Research
Edinburgh’s donation from Tencent is a drop in the ocean compared to monies given to the University of Oxford.It has accepted sums totalling £1.25 million from the shadowy technology company—including a pledge of £750,000.
FOI documents reveal that Oxford has used the cash—donated from 2018 to 2022—for its computer science and physics departments.
In 2021, Oxford’s plans to rename one of its most historic professorships after the Chinese technology company caused uproar.
The Wykeham Professorship of Physics was to be renamed “Tencent-Wykeham Professorship of Physics” following a donation from the company.
Following criticism from leading politicians including Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the university later said it would not be renamed and instead the current holder would be given a separate post called “Tencent Chair of Theoretical Physics” to run concurrently with his Wykeham post.
Cardiff University, which has cashed in over £2.5 million from Chinese sources over the last four years, was also a recipient of Tencent donations.
According to FOI documents, it received two donations from the technology company in 2018 for research into “virtual and augmented reality.”
Another big funder of Cardiff University is China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) a majority state-owned, multinational engineering and construction company.
It was placed on a trade blacklist by the United States in 2020, accused by the Trump administration of helping China build islands in the South China Sea.
The United States said the construction program was an illegal attempt to control an important shipping route.
Cardiff has received just over £832,000 in research grants from CCCC and a number of its companies in the last four years.
According to FOI documents, the money was used on a variety of research projects and programmes including architectural data governance and compliance checking research and development.
China Military Links
Companies closely linked to China’s military and intelligence wings have also been plying UK universities with research cash.CRRC Corporation Limited was designated as a “Chinese military company” by the U.S. Defence Department last year.
It has a number of institutions and companies paying tens of thousands of pounds towards research programmes in the UK.
From 2019 to 2022, the University of Sheffield received £700,000 from CRRC’s Zhuzhou Institute.
The university was also given a cash boost of £103,000 from an organisation called the 10th Research Institute of China.
It is owned by China Electronics Technology Group Corporation (CETC), a company founded with the stated goal of leveraging civilian electronics for the benefit of China’s military.
The United States accused CETC of being involved in the Chinese balloon spying incidents earlier this year.
All of CETC’s institutes, including the 10th Institute, were blacklisted as a result.
A number of universities refused to be transparent about their foreign funding sources, including the University of Surrey.
Although admitting that it received over £11 million from Chinese sources, it declined to tell The Epoch Times the name of the donor or company that provided the cash, or what the money was used for.
The University of Bradford also declined to provide information on its China links, only stating that it had an “ongoing commercial relationship” with Sinopec companies.
The group is the largest oil refining, gas, and petrochemical conglomerate in the world.
Inquiry Needed
Mark Sabah, UK and EU director with The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, said the government needs to launch an inquiry into university funding sources.“There has to be some review into university funding, there has to be an investigation or an inquiry into it,” he told The Epoch Times.
“And alternative funding streams need to be developed by all these universities as to how they can keep themselves going without taking money from China, because what we’re seeing from China is what we were seeing from Russia 10 years ago.
“The way this reputation laundering was done by the Russians, wings being set up in colleges and museums and galleries in the name of a prominent Russian donors.
“And those institutions needed desperately the money and so they were willing to say, ‘Oh, it’s nothing wrong, it’s just the business fund.’
“Of course they now will face a dilemma when these people are sanctioned.”
Sabah said the biggest question is why Chinese companies are funding British universities.
He added: “Is it truly just for research and development? Because if it is, why is it not reciprocated?
“Why are Edinburgh students and professors not given access to the laboratories in Chinese universities?
“You would think that the reciprocal route is you give money for us to develop something in our labs, but we have to come to you, and that never happens.”
The campaigner said it was important to note that most funding from China went towards national security related courses.
He said: “Huawei is not investing millions in Chaucer and Shakespeare, they are investing money in research and technology for communications satellites, etc.
“That’s another big issue that we in the UK, and many Western countries, we’re simply relegating national security for funding, and university funding is the gateway at every point we look at .
“Universities are an astonishingly vulnerable part of our system when it comes to infiltration and persuasion.”
Benedict Rogers, chief executive of Hong Kong Watch, said the dependency of UK universities on Chinese funding is now “a matter of critical concern.”
“Too many of our universities are disproportionately dependent on Chinese government funding, Chinese students’ tuition fees, and Chinese corporate funding from companies that are closely linked to the Chinese Communist Party and complicit with grave human rights violations, atrocity crimes, surveillance, and espionage,” he told The Epoch Times.
“This dependency threatens to undermine and compromise academic freedom and freedom of expression in the UK.
“The government must urgently work with our universities to address this, diversify sources of funding, and reduce dependency on sources of funding linked to the Chinese regime.”
