Ex-MI6 boss: China’s ‘malign inf luence’ on science in Britain
BRItAIn’S scientific community has been compromised to an extent by a ‘malign Chinese communist influence’, the former head of MI6 said yesterday.
Sir Richard Dearlove suggested ministers were reviewing the degree to which Chinese funding to UK universities and close relationships with its science sector had blinded academics to the possibility that the Covid outbreak was caused by a lab leak.
the spy chief, who led the secret intelligence service from 1999 to 2004, believes many UK universities have become reliant on Chinese funding over the past two decades and established too cosy relations with the Chinese scientific community. As a consequence, many scientific journals and academic institutions have failed to question the Chinese ‘narrative’ that the virus had a natural origin and refused to consider the possibility of a laboratory leak from Wuhan.
In future, he believes, it will be necessary to keep tabs on where Chinese research students go and a register of their interests.
Speaking to a podcast for the Australian newspaper, he said: ‘Many of our academic institutions and many academic journals have become partially or totally dependent on Chinese funding.
‘Here in the UK now, as a result of this whole business, there is a move centrally in Government to look closely at the extent to which the scientific community has been subject to a malign Chinese communist influence.
‘In the future, we will have to take very careful steps to control this in terms of registering where Chinese research students go and what their interests are, and take greater steps to protect intellectual property in our universities, particularly in areas of sensitive research.’
After the coronavirus outbreak emerged in Wuhan in late 2019, Sir Richard said Chi
‘Information campaign’
na’s ministry of state security developed an ‘information campaign’ about the origins of the virus which the West ‘went along’ with.
It was so successful that any suggestion of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which houses the world’s largest collection of coronaviruses, was dismissed as a conspiracy theory throughout 2020.
Sir Richard has previously spoken about his concern over the origin of the pandemic, saying Covid-19 had all the signs of ‘taking a natural virus and mucking around with it’.
Mike Pompeo, former US Secretary of State under President trump, told the podcast there was ‘enormous – albeit indirect – evidence’ that the Wuhan lab was the ‘centre point’.