A Chinese spy agency has managed to silence debates in British universities, a senior Conservative lawmaker has warned.
Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, told the House of Commons on Feb. 10 that China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), the communist regime’s main intelligence agency, has been working to erode freedoms in UK university campuses.
Tugendhat said he had spoken to some students the day before, who told him that “their debates in their universities were silenced.”
“They said that people were not willing to speak out or to stand up for what they knew was true, because they would face the pressure of the Ministry of State Security, China’s enforcement arm, in silencing them in debate here in the UK,” said Tugendhat, who is also a co-founder of the China Research Group of Conservative MPs.
Tugendhat said the students told him that the interference “often comes from a fellow student or from a teacher or lecturer who is connected in some way to the state.”
“We are seeing the erosion of the liberty of British citizens and of those who have come here seeking that liberty, whichever country they come from, because we are sadly not robust enough in standing up for it,” he said.
Tugendhat warned that dictatorships such as China and Russia are trying to undermine democracies, saying: “We are seeing an erosion of our own freedoms here in the UK.”
He said the UK needs to close down the Confucius Institutes which have been set up in British universities with funding from the Chinese regime, because they are “agencies of a hostile state through the United Front Work Department (UFWD),” an organ of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) which specializes in domestic and foreign influence operations.
The senior lawmaker said it is a fundamental role of government to defend “the liberty of British people to study and learn ideas of any kind, of any form, in a free environment.”
“Silencing debate undermines us and erodes freedom. It also erodes our path to the future,” he added.
In a debate about Britain’s relations with Taiwan, Tugendhat said he remains optimistic because he sees Taiwan as “an example showing that Chinese society and culture, in different forms, are intrinsically at home with liberty.”
He said he sees hope that the CCP’s attempts to silence people will eventually fail.
Alicia Kearns is another Conservative member of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, and she is also on the steering committee of the China Research Group.
She called Taiwan “the living, breathing truth that societies rooted in Chinese culture are capable of developing into free market, democratic, and rules-respecting members of the international community.”
“It is this truth that explains why the Chinese Communist party fears Taiwan so greatly, because as long as Taiwan exists, the world will know that government need not be defined by control, repression, and even genocide, as we have seen under the Chinese Communist Party,” she said.
Kearns said the free world “cannot sit back and wait for any tragedies, such as those in Hong Kong, to occur again.”
She urged the UK government to “work with our allies around the world, to engage with those nations that respect freedom and have the same concerns that we do, to set in place deterrents and diplomacy to protect our Taiwanese friends.”
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