UK taxpayers may be funding research for China’s defence project
EXPERTS fear British taxpayers could be inadvertently contributing to funding the Chinese defence programme, after millions of pounds of public funds were poured into technology research undertaken in collaboration with controversial Chinese universities known for their military links.
The UK’S Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) distributed more than £6.5 million to British universities including Manchester
for studies undertaken with these controversial Chinese institutions, according to disclosures on academic papers.
While the research programmes focused on technologies that could be used for civilian purposes, experts have warned they also have the potential to be used for military applications, prompting fears that tax-payer-funded research could be exploited by Beijing.
In two cases, researchers even stated on their grant application forms that the technologies they were looking at could have “both civilian and military applications” or be used for “military controlling”. The disclosure comes days after The Daily Telegraph revealed that Huawei has also backed a string of research projects linking British universities with Chinese defence institutions, which focused on these so-called “dual use” technologies. Huawei denies any wrongdoing. Experts have now warned the studies funded by the EPSRC may be part of a worrying pattern of partnerships between British universities and Chinese universities that are known for their strong military ties – and that they could be used to fuel China’s controversial surveillance regime and its ambition to become the world’s most powerful military force by 2049.
Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, said the collaborations were “tantamount to transfer of technologies to the Chinese government”, and accused the EPSRC and British universities of “living in a naive world”.
“You cannot say there is any [Chinese] institution that is safe from the reach of that government.”
The EPSRC defended the payments. Executive chair Professor Dame Lynn
Gladden said: “These grants were fully consistent with government policy. All UK funding was directed to fund research by UK universities.”
A spokesman added that it allocates funding to projects rather than individual papers “through the lens of the quality of academic research”, and it is for individual universities to decide who they work with, as long as there is no legal breach and the other universities cover their own costs.
A Telegraph investigation identified seven papers that were undertaken by British institutions in partnership with
Chinese universities, as part of research programmes that accessed EPSRC grants totalling £6,637,875.
Two of the papers were co-authored by researchers at China’s so-called ‘Seven Sons of National Defence’, universities tasked with developing their defence programme, and three were undertaken with the in-house academy for the People’s Liberation Army. Of the money dished out by the EPSRC, £305,891 went to Manchester for research with Beihang University – an institution sanctioned by America for its work on rockets and drones.