In a post about how officials and institutions in the United Kingdom keep surrendering to the Chinese Communist Party, we noted that a critic of the trend, Daniel Kochis, who gave three major examples, could have added a fourth: the “pervasive propaganda, surveillance, and censorship” conducted by the CCP within many of the country’s university classrooms.
A report published in October 2025 by the China Strategic Risks Institute focuses on “The Chinese Communist Party’s Ideological Control in UK-China Joint Educational Ventures.”
Among author Tau Yang’s findings:
● Courses that students must take in these Chinese-UK schools to complete UK degree programs “promote CCP authoritarian views, suppress critical discussion and are often concealed from clear disclosure.”
● On PRC campuses, CCP committees working in the joint educational institutes (JEIs) “organise ideological surveillance of all students and staff, with senior management holding meetings to arrange such activities.”
● But the surveillance doesn’t occur only on JEI campuses inside the People’s Republic of China, a country where everybody is constantly being surveilled with or without the cooperation of British partners. “Surveillance extends to the UK campuses of co-host universities to maintain ideological oversight of PRC students undertaking part of their degree studies in the UK.”
● Criticism of the CCP is routinely censored on JEI campuses. “Non-compliance can lead to employment discrimination, harassment, or other penalties, as exemplified by two cases of foreign academics being unfairly dismissed or demoted at the JEIs, and CCP officials allegedly influencing guest speaker invitations and hiring decisions on JEI campuses.”
● Course materials are routinely censored.
Yang says that the officials at UK universities “appear largely unaware” of the ideological operations being conducted in their own joint educational ventures in part because English-language versions of Chinese-language course materials “often conceal CCP activities and disguise them under themes of openness and global collaboration.” The Chinese course materials, in contrast, are “relatively candid.”
Yang may be too generous here. Isn’t such concealment just the kind of thing one ought to be looking for when dealing with the Chinese Communist Party? Did it just not ever occur to anybody on the UK side to get a non-CCP speaker of Chinese to review the Chinese materials?
Yang notes “potential violations” of UK laws pertaining to equality of rights, freedom of speech, and academic rigor. He recommends independent review of what’s happening; that it be made easier to submit complaints about violation of freedom of speech; that “a harmonised set of guidelines” be followed by UK higher education providers engaging in TNE [transnational education] activities in the PRC”; etc.
In sum, the JEIs must “uphold” the right academic values, must “prohibit” ideological surveillance, must “ensure…transparency and consistency.” Everybody must be good.
Food versus poison
It’s a fantasy. No set of diligent reforms will accomplish the transformation Yang hopes for. The JEIs must be shut down. These partnerships should not exist. They cannot be reformed to any significant extent either internally or externally with the help of third-party enforcement of rational guidelines. “Stop acting like the CCP” is a very fine guideline except insofar as it will be ignored.
The partnerships were a travesty from the start. The very forming of university partnerships putatively grounded in Western liberal values in which one of the partners is the Chinese Communist Party gave Party functionaries a stature and a power to oversee and to impose to which they are not entitled on any rational grounds. The partnerships could only have been destructive of Western classrooms, which had nothing to gain from being subjected to CCP overlordship.
What Yang reports should not be surprising. “In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win,” wrote Ayn Rand. “In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.”
