Oxford University’s chancellor warns of national security risks when academics collaborate with China

Oxford University’s chancellor has warned of national security risks when academics collaborate with China.

Lord Patten, who was the last British governor of Hong Kong, said there should be a point of contact in the Government for universities chiefs to turn to if they are concerned about a particular project.

Joint academic research projects in the field of humanities as well as the sciences could be pose security risks, he added.

“If the Government has anxieties about a company, then it should be possible for a university – if it is being offered research collaboration with that company – to ask somewhere in Government what’s happening,” Lord Patten told the foreign affairs select committee.

“I think the more we talk about this – as the Australians, the New Zealanders, the Canadians, and the Americans are – the more we talk about it and the more we’re grown up about it, first of all the more likely we are to get things right and pick up things like intellectual property theft and problems of security.”

Lord Patten, a cross-bench peer and former chair of the Conservative Party, said it would be “astonishing” if China was not exercising soft coercion on academics and students in the West, by funding or collaborating on research.

It emerged this week that Oxford University has cuts ties with Huawei, the Chinese technology company, amid security concerns.

An email sent to computer science doctoral students at the university warned students not to pass sensitive information to Huawei employees. The university said that it has decided not “pursue new funding opportunities” with Huawei Technologies Co Ltd or its related companies.

Huawei has faced criticism from intelligence agencies around the world over its close links to the Chinese government. The company has regularly denied any suggestions that its technology could be used for espionage.

Lord Patten told MPs of a case where a university was asked to work on a humanities research project along with a consortium of other British and Chinese universities.

“You discover that there are some issues that are clearly going to be off-bounds, or you discover that the whole thing is being run not by an academic in the humanities but a Chinese engineer who happens to be….rather senior in the Communist party,” he said.

“And if you discover you’re being shut out of some meetings that only the Chinese are going to, then you’ve got a right to be suspicious.”

He said that Confucius institutes - Chinese government funded cultural centres attached to British universities - and their activities “raise some issues” since they are  “by-and-large an offshoot of the propaganda department of the Communist Party”.

He went on: “If the Confucian  Institute is working on a university campus as a contributor to Chinese language instruction, to understanding about the spectacular Chinese civilisation, that is fine. If it’s trying to shape the curriculum, if it’s trying to shape students’ attitude to Tibet or Xinjan or free speech or other issues like that, then it’s not acceptable.”

Lord Patten said that all British universities should take these issues seriously, adding: “It is simply craven to argue you can’t raise this or that issue or that because it will annoy [China] and you won’t do as much business.”

Last month, MPs urged British universities to exercise "extreme caution" accepting money from Huawei, amid growing international concern about the security threat posed by the controversial Chinese telecom company.

Huawei, the world's biggest telecom equipment manufacturer, has agreed to pour at least £6m into UK universities including Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester and York despite warnings from intelligence agencies around the world over potential security risks posed by the company’s technology.