Academic gets £80k grant to defend Beijing

AN ACADEMIC is to receive £80,000 of public money to accuse MPs of spreading ‘moral panic’ over China.

The Government will sponsor a doctoral thesis that is expected to criticise parliamentarians who campaign against Beijing’s human rights abuses.

The focus of the study is said to be the China Research Group of Conservative MPs and the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.

The groups campaign against Chinese human rights abuses, such as Uighur oppression, and seek to expose economic and infrastructure threats.

The formal proposal for the thesis describes the CRG as having played ‘a major role in the social and political construction of China as the new international pariah’.

It will also explore ‘the potential role of the CRG in the construction of a new international political moral panic focused on China’. University of Birmingham academic Rong Wei is scheduled to receive £20,892 plus inflation annually for the next four years.

Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Tory MP and IPAC member, called for an investigation into the grant. ‘It is unbelievable that a British government can sponsor a research project whose purpose is to denigrate legitimate parliamentary research, in IPAC’s case across 22 countries, both on the Left and the Right,’ he told the Sunday Telegraph.

The CRG, which is led by Tory MP Tom Tugendhat, was established in April 2020 after controversies over the Covid virus and Huawei.

He and Sir Iain were among nine Britons and four groups put under sanctions by Beijing. In response, the Chinese ambassador was banned from the Palace of Westminster.

It also emerged yesterday that China and India are to receive £1.5billion in climate change funding despite wrecking agreements to reduce global warming. At the COP26 conference this month, wealthier countries agreed to double funding for developing nations to prepare for climate change.

China and India – deemed ‘developing states’ by the UN – received around £700million in 2019. But the pledge made at Glasgow summit could see this rise to £1.5billion – with the British taxpayer footing up to £38million of the bill, the Mail on Sunday reported.