Blacklisted technology company Huawei has plunged at least 30 million pounds ($37.9 million) into British universities via research grants and donations.
The telecom giant—deemed a national security threat by the U.S. government—is the biggest China-based donor to higher educational institutions in the UK.
Over the past four years, Huawei and its advanced chip-producing company HiSilicon spent millions of pounds financing expert-led information, technology, and communications projects.
One university received 10.7 million pounds ($13.5 million) in grants since 2017.
The funding has once again sparked concern from critics who say the Beijing bankrolling is putting universities and the cities where they’re based at risk of “huge” damage.
The revelations come just days after one of Canada’s leading universities said it was cutting ties with Huawei.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service previously warned Canadian academic institutions that research partnerships can be vehicles for espionage, compromising intellectual property and allowing technological advancements to fall into the hands of the Chinese or other regimes.
AI and Cloud Research
The 30 million pounds ($37.9 million) of university funding from the telecoms company has been gathered from analysis by The Epoch Times.Freedom of Information (FOI) requests sent to more than 160 education institutions show that many were taking money from Huawei and its other blacklisted subsidiaries, as well as other Beijing companies accused of crime and human rights abuses.
Of all the British institutions that responded to questions about the sources of their funding, almost all had received grants or donations from Huawei or its companies.
Some universities—including the London School of Economics—refused to answer questions about their Beijing cash sources, meaning that the multi-million-pound figure is likely to be significantly higher.
Of those that did respond, the University of Edinburgh confirmed it has received 10,798,369 pounds ($13.6 million) in research grants from the 5G giant.
From 2017 to 2022, the Scottish university has been relying on Huawei for financial support toward tech projects carried out by its School of Informatics.
Last year, Huawei Technologies provided a grant for “research collaboration in cloud-based service assurance.” The university would only state that the funding fell between 200,001 pounds ($252,397) and 450,000 pounds ($567,900).
That same year, it received a further 222,257 pounds ($280,500) for “advanced research in the area of computer operating systems.”
In 2020, Edinburgh accepted a 4.2 million pound ($5.3 million) cash boost from Huawei for its Distributed Data Management and Processing Laboratory.
The tech company has also funded multiple studentships and doctorate students for research in similar fields.
Huawei is listed as one of the 20 Beijing-linked organisations putting forward huge cash sums toward research projects.
According to FOI documents, 16 of the university’s projects were funded by the telecom company in those years.
They included research on big data machine learning, robust articulated hand-tracking algorithms, and secure channel coding.
Huewai also donated unknown sums toward Imperial College’s Academic Salon in Intelligent Communications, AI workshops and seminars, and projects in “next-generation data centres.”
As previously revealed by The Epoch Times, the London university also received cash from China National Offshore Oil Corporation—a state-owned oil company accused in the past of having drug-trafficking ties and carrying out human rights abuses in Burma.
The company is also said to have collaborated with the Chinese Communist Party to send employees who practice Falun Gong to labour camps and mind-control facilities unless they renounce their beliefs.
National Security Threat
Two of the UK’s most esteemed universities, Cambridge and Oxford, also received significant funding from Huewai.Over the past four years, the University of Cambridge has pocketed 2.6 million pounds ($3.3 million) in research grants.
It also accepted an estimated 10 million pounds ($12.6 million) in donations from the telecom company, according to FOI documents.
Of those, seven donations fall between 100,000 pounds ($126,206) to 499,000 pounds ($629,770), five between 500,000 pounds ($631,082) to 999,000 pounds ($1.26 million), and one between 1.2 million pounds ($1.51 million) to 4.9 million pounds ($6.2 million).
Cambridge stated that those donations went toward computer science, student support, engineering, and “millennium mathematics.”
The University of Oxford received funding for only one research grant from Huawei in 2018: a cash sum between 100,000 pounds ($126,206) and 249,000 pounds ($314,267) for a project on AI robustness.
Multiple other universities received smaller but significant donations from Huawei or HiSilicon.
They include the University of Reading, which in 2021 signed a 50,000-pound ($63,106) research agreement to “identify the key factors that impacted the 5G programme of Huawei” in the UK.
In 2022, the UK government ordered that Huawei technology had to 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 firm was listed as a national security threat in 2020, with U.S. companies being banned from using subsidies to buy its equipment.
The U.S. House Intelligence Committee previously warned that Huawei’s telecommunications equipment could be used by the Chinese regime to spy on U.S. citizens.
Huge Risk
Mark Sabah, UK and European Union director of The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, said universities have put themselves at huge risk by accepting just vast amounts of funding from sources such as Huawei.“The sheer volume of investment by Chinese companies, which all have ties to the Chinese Communist Party, exposes the risk that British universities have should the government ever choose to enforce who and where donations can come from,” he told The Epoch Times.
“It’s a high-risk strategy by universities and one that could do a huge amount of damage to the higher education sector, as well as to British cities in general.
“Because if universities started losing money and students, they have not made sufficient plans to mitigate the risk of those investments.”
Sabah said the tech giant has not only invested millions in British universities but also other projects, including an attempt to run the UK’s 5G network.
“The government rightly stopped that happening due to massive opposition,” he said.
“The next step is to be questioning who is giving money to our higher education institutions, why they are giving money in such numbers, and are those universities putting in place a risk mitigation plan should that funding ever be withdrawn?”
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