MPs Told UK Universities Need Broader Risk Awareness of Chinese Collaboration

Semiconductor chips on a circuit board of a computer in a photo illustration taken on Feb. 25, 2022. (Florence Lo/Reuters)

While there has been greater awareness in British universities and better government support in the past years around the risks of research collaboration with Chinese institutions, government guidelines and risks awareness among academics are still “quite narrow,” a committee of MPs heard.

Giving evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday during an ad-hoc hearing on UK universities’ engagement with autocracies, Fiona Quimbre, defence and security analyst at RAND Europe, told MPs that the security risk is “much larger” than someone stealing information from the universities and transferred it back to China.

“The current guidelines I think are quite narrow. The reason for that is because I think the risk awareness itself is quite narrow,” Quimbre told MPs, adding that the problem is “much larger.”

The guidance, for instance, “does not speak about the talent recruitment program that China organizes,” she said.

Quimbre told the MPs that the communist regime’s approach to technology transfers is beyond IP  theft and cyber-hacks. “It is about creating those links and contacts, restating them throughout the years,  and being able to direct research towards areas of interest,” she said

Imperial College London last year closed two of its joint research programmes with Chinese aerospace research centres that are connected to the Chinese military after the UK government’s Export Control Joint Unit (ECJU) refused to grant export licences.

Asked how the college could have overlooked its partners’ military connections, Quimbre declined to comment on the specific case, but said it’s “the tip of the iceberg.”

“What we currently do not have information on is talent programmes, start-up competitions, and new forms of donations and funds. Those are vectors and enablers of influence in our universities that we do not speak about,” she said.

“It is very important to understand that the current enablers of future research collaboration with countries such as China are also the enablers of potential technology transfer. That is what makes this challenge so difficult and complex. Our enablers mirror their enablers in their approach and tactics.”

Better Awareness

According to a 2021 study by the Institute for the Study of Civil Society think tank, more than half of the Russell Group universities had “productive research relationships with Chinese military-linked manufacturers and universities,” with much of the research also being sponsored by the UK taxpayers.

Asked whether the situation has changed, Tim Bradshaw, CEO at Russell Group, said, “I do not think very many will be looking to renew those sorts of relationships. Things have moved on very substantially.”

Bradshaw argued that the government intervention in the Imperial College collaborations is a good example of the export structures and processes working to mitigate the risks and the university responding positively to the intervention.

Another panelist agreed that there has been greater awareness and effort in universities about the risks.

Vivienne Stern, CEO of Universities UK (UUK), gave an example in which a university declined a collaboration proposal.

In one of the anonymised case studies published by the UUK, an academic was approached by a colleague at another UK higher education institution about a proposal to join a new consortium, which was based around a UK-registered company, with a significant amount of research funding available.

After carrying out due diligence checks, the university declined the offer as “it became apparent that the overseas owner of the UK company was a state-owned manufacturing company, with links to military shipbuilding,” the study reads.

Stern told MPs that the university then published its own study on the case to share their experience.

Better Tools

The experts said it’s challenging to deal with the risks as they are dynamic in nature.

Stern suggested that classified information may be needed as “public domain information might not be enough to help institutions” to make risk assessments, “particularly when thinking about the forms of modern warfare, where it is quite hard to work out whether the end use of something could have a military application.”

Quimbre, on the other hand, said the information is “out there” online, but they need to be packaged “as a nice tool” for universities to use easily.

The panel said public bodies established in recent years, such as the Research Collaboration Advice Team, have been a great help, and that there is a role for the government to play in providing and updating guidelines. Institutions need to draw in existing expertise to tackle the risks.

Academics who enter into research partnerships may not understand the political and economic background of their partners in terms of human rights and how they are supporting an authoritarian regime. “But in almost all Russell Group universities there will be specialists within the university who do know,” John Heathershaw, professor of International Relations at the University of Exeter told the MPs.

“If you are bringing in your China specialists at an early stage in [the] discussion of a partnership, even if that means that there is a little bit of tension with, maybe, a natural physical scientist who wants to enter into a partnership, nevertheless it is important, because that is how the university gets the information internally,” he said.