Students from China are allegedly being used as spies against British universities, which in turn face accusations of avoiding so-called “sensitive” issues for the communist government in Beijing for fear or losing funding and lucrative tuition from Chinese students, a think tank has found.
A report from UK-China Transparency (UKCT), which surveyed academics in Chinese studies programmes in Britain, claimed that Chinese students who come to the UK for university are being pressured by CCP officials and police to spy on fellow students, class work, and campus events.
The think tank said that scholars told them that this is being done to stifle conversations surrounding embarrassing topics for the Chinese government, with one scholar telling the think tank that they were “told by Chinese students that surveillance is omnipresent and students are interviewed by officials when they return to China.”
The report specifically pointed to the Chinese Student and Scholar Associations (CSSAs), a group of organisations supposedly intended to assist Chinese students acclimating abroad but which has been accused of advancing the aims of the CCP on foreign campuses.
The think tank cited a British academic who said that they “are probably the primary source of student spies on campus, with observable and constant connections with local consulates.” Others claimed to have seen evidence of Chinese diplomats and other CCP officials interfering with Chinese students and China study programmes on British universities.
In addition to monitoring and stifling Chinese students in Britain, the report found evidence that Beijing was actively pressuring UK universities to avoid so-called sensitive issues for the CCP, such as human rights abuses in Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang to the Covid-19 crisis.
According to the UKCT report, one academic said that they were blocked from one such sensitive areas of study by university management, who warned that such inquiries could jeopardise the school’s finances, given the reliance on tuition fees from Chinese students.
Another scholar relayed an account of a recent research project being cancelled after the Chinese government directly pressured the university leaders to quash it.
“There is strong evidence that CCP influence is a source of systemic distortion for the study of China in the UK, shaping careers and disincentivising certain research and other activity that might be negatively received by the CCP,” the think tank said.
“This distortion is likely to have a downstream effect on the knowledge and advice supplied to government, the press, the public, think-tanks and business,” UKCT added.
On top of money received through student tuition, which is often subsidised by CCP scholarships, UK universities have also been alleged to have received millions from CCP-tied organisations, including the controversial Confucius Institute, an arm of the government which has also been accused of stifling discussion on Western campuses.
British universities have also come under criticism for allegedly partnering with researchers in China on weapons projects, reportedly sparking MI6 investigations of hundreds of academics in the UK.
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