MI5 and GCHQ have warned universities to put national security before commercial interest as fears grow over state theft of research and intellectual property from campuses.
The agencies are concerned that a reliance on Chinese money and students, particularly postgraduates paying up to £50,000 a year in fees, makes some universities particularly vulnerable.
They are also urging chancellors to ensure that research and funding partnerships with Beijing do not compromise academic freedom or make campuses an “easy route for a hostile nation”.
An estimated 500 Chinese military scientists have spent time at British universities in the past decade. They include some who have worked on technologies linked to jet aircraft, supercomputers, missiles and even microscopically thin film that could be used to disguise tanks and ships.
The campaign is the work of GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre and the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure, which reports to MI5. They have told universities: “Hostile state actors are targeting UK universities to steal personal data, research data and intellectual property, and this could be used for their own military, commercial and authoritarian interests. “Individual researchers may be targeted by a hostile state actor, but equally you may also be targeted by an academic institution to undertake research which is of strategic benefit to that country.” The worries follow an explosion in the number of Chinese studying in Britain. At 106,000, the figure has doubled in a decade. Three institutions — Manchester, Liverpool and University College London — have Chinese cohorts of nearly 5,000 each. On some postgraduate courses, Chinese students outnumber those from Britain. At Liverpool, almost one in five of its 27,000 students is Chinese. Critics say that professors reliant on foreign funding to prop up their departments and jobs have come under pressure from Chinese state officials to censor debate on subjects such as democracy in Hong Kong, the movement for independence in China’s far west province of Xinjiang — where China is believed to have detained 1m people from mostly Muslim ethnic minorities since 2017 — and the status of Tibet and Taiwan. Some Hong Kong students on British campuses fear they are being watched, and that this could blight their lives. Vincent Mak, 22, a politics student at Sheffield, was in the city centre giving out leaflets about the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, his home city, when he and his friends were surrounded by mainland students, some waving the Chinese flag and singing the national anthem. “A glass was thrown at one of my friends and one of our flags was broken,” said Mak. “We were terrified. In Sheffield there are nearly 4,000 Chinese students and only a few hundred Hong Kong students. It’s difficult to avoid them. They use WeChat to pass messages. “It’s the fear of what they might do that scares us. We are sure we will be on watch lists when we go home.” Some Hong Kong students on British campuses fear they are being watched Several British cities have seen clashes between Hong Kong and Chinese students, amid claims that some from the mainland are being directed by the state to defend the communist government. At Birmingham, Hong Kong students think they are being spied on. They are afraid that three mainland students who took pictures of them playing table tennis on Thursday were sharing the images in social media threads to reveal their identities. There are nearly 3,500 Chinese students at the university. A third-year student, 21, said: “We don’t know what they’re doing with the photos or what they will do to us. It’s really unnerving. We now try to be accompanied wherever possible.” Aston University in Birmingham is investigating a complaint from Hong Kong students of harassment by Chinese peers. They say a man tried to remove a face mask as they handed out leaflets in the city centre. The following day mainland students interrupted a film screening on campus to video those attending. Campus security staff intervened. According to a report into Chinese influence by Charles Parton, a fellow of the Royal United Services Institute, Oxford’s vice-chancellor, Louise Richardson, was approached by the Chinese embassy and asked to stop the university’s chancellor, Lord Patten, visiting Hong Kong, where he had been the last governor under British rule before the territory was handed back to China in 1997. Richardson refused, the report says. When threatened with the withdrawal of Chinese students from Oxford, she declined to back down. This weekend, Oxford said it would not comment on private conversations. Patten has confirmed an approach by the embassy in his early days as chancellor. “The Buddhist Society in Oxford invited the Dalai Lama to come and speak,” he told the Commons foreign affairs committee. “Within 48 hours I had the then Chinese ambassador on the phone saying, ‘This is a disgraceful insult to the People’s Republic of China,’ and so on. I said, ‘But this is a university, they are students. They invite whoever they want.’ She said, ‘Well, what do we do about it?’ I said, ‘Well, I am sure your Chinese students will do what any students will do if they do not like the Dalai Lama.’” A senior official working on the campaign by the intelligence agencies, which was quietly launched this month, said: “Clearly a campaign of this nature has only been created and had the funding because there’s been a need for it, so the fact it exists implies there’s a problem.” Britain’s frustration with Beijing reflects that felt by the other western intelligence agencies in the Five Eyes partnership — America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada — and follows revelations by the FBI director Christopher Wray that his agency was running 1,000 investigations into Chinese infiltration of commercial and government targets. British spy agencies have warned campuses that foreign partners should be given only limited access to computer systems and research. “In some cases you may want to segregate IT network access, information and potentially people to prevent one partner having visibility of the work another partner is sponsoring,” the campaign says. In a reference to the potential cost to advances in science, it adds: “These activities may undermine the system of international research collaboration in the UK, which has been integral to the success of our research and, ultimately, global scientific progress.” At Nottingham, one of two British universities with a branch in China, it is understood that managers put pressure on academics to drop events after complaints from state officials. One was a talk by an academic working on Tibet at the campus in China, the other a speaker from Taiwan at the Nottingham campus. It is believed that the first speaker was cancelled and the second was taken off campus for a private meeting. The university said: “Any reports of political influence at our campuses are very much wide of the mark.” An official at the Chinese embassy warned a debating society at Durham against allowing a critic of Beijing and supporter of the spiritual movement Falun Gong to speak, saying it could damage relations between the UK and China. This weekend, Patten said he feared the sort of interference seen in Australia. At a top university there, data from 200,000 student and staff accounts was stolen by suspected Chinese hackers, and it is thought this may be used to turn vulnerable students into spies. “The things I am worried about from a UK perspective are the things Australia has had to confront,” he said. “Students being photographed in lectures by people reporting to local consul generals. There has been evidence of manipulation of Chinese student bodies. A lot of worry about who gains most in collaborations.” Patten backed the idea of a body to advise universities on research proposals. “No university is going to be told what to do by government, but there may be a case for universities being able to go for advice on particular projects. It would depend on the context.” He cited quantum technology, an emerging field of physics and engineering that could revolutionise defence, as an example. Universities UK, which represents institutions and is involved in the intelligence agencies’ Trusted Research campaign, said its members should develop policies to protect themselves. “We are unaware of any systematic attempt to interfere with the sector,” it said. Although the intelligence agencies acknowledge the importance of international research, which attracts £1.39bn a year of foreign funding for universities, they fear it puts academia at risk. The security services have told universities to improve vetting of academic partners by investigating their “relationship with a state or state military, and the nature of any previous research”. Experts are calling for academics to set up a register of who funds their research and travel costs, so that if a lecturer refuses to write a reference for a student to work on a subject sensitive to China, as has happened, it is easy to check whether it might reflect a conflict of interests. “The government should be doing research to look at the extent of this problem,” said Parton. “And we need a register. Universities will hate it but it should be required by government regulation. And it needs to be policed.” Additional reporting: Kyle Fitzpatrick and Ewan Somerville