The British scientists working for China UK research is powering Beijing's military-industrial complex

Enter Wayne Luk, a computing professor at Imperial College London. Through a complicated network of academic and corporate connections, Luk has become deeply involved in China’s satellite communications programme. His research at Imperial has been funded in part by a £400,000 grant from the “State Key Laboratory” devoted to this field, which works closely with China’s military and is embedded within the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). The latter company is on the US Treasury’s sanctions list because it is deemed to be part of the Chinese “military-industrial complex”.

But Luk’s involvement goes beyond academic research. Together with Niu Xinyu, his former Imperial College PhD student, he also co-founded Kunyun Information Technology, a Shenzhen-based manufacturing company. Luk served for years as its chief scientific officer, and more than 5% of the firm is owned by the Chinese government. By 2018, just a year after its founding, Kunyun was making ultra-fast AI-adapted chips deployed in satellites and navigation systems for the controversial C919 aircraft, which reportedly includes technology stolen from the West by industrial espionage.

If Luk’s story suggests technological collaboration that could help China’s military, Stefan Kittler’s narrative is even more troubling. A computing expert at Surrey University, Kittler has been central to developing surveillance technologies that could significantly enhance our ability to track and identify individuals. And for many years, he has collaborated with researchers at Jiangnan University, where a new lab was recently named in his honour. He had earlier co-founded another Jiangnan lab devoted to “pattern recognition and computational intelligence”.

Once again, that scientific language arguably belies a more hard-nosed reality. For one thing, Kittler has co-authored numerous papers with Jiangnan academics who have also conducted research commissioned by the Chinese military. In 2018, he co-chaired a conference in Beijing on biometric recognition together with Tan Tieniu, a former PhD student at Imperial College who now serves as the secretary of the local Communist Party branch at Nanjing University, which happens to be the base of China’s State Secrecy Academy.

Like with Luk, these technologies aren’t merely there for show. On the contrary, as The Sunday Times reported in 2020, his FaceR2VM project, jointly funded by the UK and China, conducted research aimed at allowing people to be identified from the bumps and ridges on their ears and noses, and by their facial expressions, even if they were wearing a mask. That’s exactly the sort of technology used to follow China’s political dissidents, and minority groups such as the Uyghurs.

Kittler’s relationship with China also extends beyond the lab. In 2016, at a glittering ceremony in Beijing, he was given a “Friendship Award” by the then-vice premier Ma Kai — a prize reserved for “foreign experts who have made outstanding contributions to the country’s economic and social progress”. In January, he is due to teach at a “winter school” alongside his friend Tan Tieniu, sanctioned by the US for his involvement in human rights abuses in Hong Kong.

Not that we should necessarily be surprised. As William Hannas of Georgetown University explains, though Luk and Kittler are hardly unique. Beijing, says the former China expert at the CIA, “has a long track record of appropriating the skills of US scientists” into their service. The same, Hannas adds, is also true of Britain.

On this side of the Atlantic, officials are discretely making similar sounds. Together with the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) recently compiled a list of every research partnership between British and Chinese universities. Speaking on condition of anonymity, sources told me it included some 500 separate projects — of which about 10% were “red flagged” on the grounds they posed a risk to national security or human rights.

But given the concerns over the way the People’s Republic uses technology, fears dating back years, why are British institutions still accepting Chinese cash? The answer, as so often with the university sector, is because otherwise they would go bust. As UKRI reported, joint research with China brought in an extra £440 million between 2007-21, even as Chinese students studying in Britain spent £5.4 billion on tuition fees and accommodation in 2021 alone.

To an extent, such compromises are the bread-and-butter of being in government, especially for a country as eager for foreign investment as Britain. Yet if opposition Conservatives have obvious reasons for scepticism — George Freeman, a research security minister under Rishi Sunak, says it’s vital that Britain “better protect” its intellectual property and research — observers outside Parliament are worried too.

Sam Dunning, the director of China-UK Transparency says that China has “long sought to exploit our open societies and academia to modernise its military”. This, Dunning adds, must stop: even with the imminent reset in Anglo-Chinese relations. Jake Hurfurt of Big Brother Watch makes a similar point, saying it’s “shocking” that a professor such as Kittler would share a platform with a colleague sanctioned for human rights abuse.

Yet if Hurfurt insists that the government must ensure that British research “cannot be exploited by rights-abusing regimes abroad”, change may not be forthcoming. Though neither Luk nor Kittler responded to a request for comment, an Imperial College spokesperson said that the £400,000 grant “was accepted following appropriate due diligence assessment” — and that “we regularly review our policies in line with evolving government legislation and sector guidance and practice, working closely with the appropriate Government departments, and in line with our commitments to UK national security”. The grant ran out at the end of 2022.

Over in Guildford, a University of Surrey spokesperson said that Kittler’s collaborative work had begun “when the British Government was actively soliciting, promoting and encouraging business and academia to engage and collaborate with organisations and institutions in China”. Now that the “geopolitical climate” had changed, the spokesperson continued, the university “had applied rigorous due diligence to all research collaborations” and had sought input from the Cabinet Office’s Research Collaboration Advice Team. All the same, the university stated they were “fully aware” of Kittler’s roles in China, and indeed was proud of its international collaborations.

That, of course, still leaves the one body with authority to impose genuine change: the Government. But here again, we probably shouldn’t expect too much. When the issue was raised in the Commons earlier this month, the relevant minister sounded remarkably vague. Peter Kyle, the science and technology secretary, merely promised that British research was both “world class” and “safe”. When I asked for more details, a Government spokesperson didn’t offer much beyond insisting that Labour was “taking a robust approach to managing risk” by helping universities make “informed decisions”. At the same time, however, he noted that universities were independent bodies, and were therefore free to pursue research partnerships abroad — so long, that is, they complied with “security policies and regulations”.

Given, however, that the spokesperson also emphasised the need for “sustained and pragmatic engagement” with China, anyone hoping for a ban on scientific engagement with the People’s Republic is likely to be left disappointed. Then again, given Starmer’s landmark meeting in Rio, and the desperate need for growth that underpins it, that’s surely unsurprising. “We have to be real,” concedes one Whitehall source. “China isn’t going away.”

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David Rose is UnHerd‘s Investigations Editor.

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