Is the United Kingdom leasing itself to Hamas or to the Chinese Communist Party? Maybe they’re sharing. A new study published UK-China Transparency confirms earlier reports that CCP interference in academic matters in the UK is rampant (ANI, August 7, 2025):
The publication, titled “Cold Crises: Academic Freedom and Interference in China Studies in the UK”, claims that the Chinese government is employing students, scholars, and financial leverage to intimidate academics and limit discussions on sensitive subjects, thereby creating a culture of fear across UK campuses.
Drawing on feedback from 50 scholars specialising in China studies throughout UK institutions, the findings depict a troubling scenario of surveillance, harassment, and self-censorship in academia. UKCT reports that Chinese students and academics are sometimes pressured through threats against family members back home to monitor their peers and report on politically sensitive conversations to Chinese authorities.
“We’re observing you,” one academic recounted being told by a visiting scholar from China, while others shared experiences of online harassment and intimidation.
“By failing to act on these matters, we in the UK are complicit in the Chinese authorities’ attempts to impose their idyllic depiction of China on the minds of students and non-students alike,” says Gregory Lee, a professor emeritus at the University of St Andrews who studies “the culture and cultural history of China and its diaspora from the nineteenth-century imagining of China the nation-state to today…collective memory, censorship, the technical/technological society….”
The influence of the Chinese Communist Party is distorting the study of China in the United Kingdom, but not throughout the university system, according to the scholars surveyed for the report.
Not All Is Lost
“The crisis is uneven,” the UK-China Transparency report says, “and some institutions appear largely unaffected or to be offering proper support to China studies practitioners. Of the scholars surveyed, 38% agreed that university administrators’ concern about relations with the Chinese government have made it ‘more difficult to study or conduct original investigative research on sensitive issues’; but 46% stated that this was not the case.”
The “internationalisation of the CCP’s domestic apparatus for repression” in of higher education that the report describes is plenty widespread enough: it entails the Chinese government’s denial of visas to scholars involved in sensitive research, harassment of the family members in China of Chinese nationals because of their academic work in the UK, CCP efforts to enlist Chinese students in the UK to spy on other students, CCP threats to cut off financial support unless a UK university toes the Party line, and university administrators’ willingness in turn to pressure academics to toe the Party line “sometimes with explicit reference to lucrative ties to China.”
However, it’s good to know that the CCP-sponsored corruption of the UK’s university system is not ubiquitous.
Also see:
UK-China Transparency: “Cold Crisis: Academic freedom and interference in China studies in the UK”
StoptheCCP.org: “Why U.S. Universities Accept Spying by the Chinese Communist Party”
StoptheCCP.org: “Are British Universities Taking Marching Orders From China?”
StoptheCCP.org: “Peter Wilby Sees Right-Wingers Under Bed, CCP in UK Universities”
