Britain’s universities have long been hailed as the country’s soft power “crown jewels”. Labour Minister Jacqui Smith this week used the phrase again when revealing a series of MI5 briefings to university leaders about Chinese Communist Party interference. Last week, Ken McCallum, director-general of the Security Service, told universities that China and other states were attempting to influence teaching and research. Given the proximity of the newly approved Chinese “mega-embassy” to the Tower of London, the heavy irony of the “crown jewel” analogy should not go unnoticed. And rather like the embassy, the CCP is no benign entity.

The background to the Government’s announcement is the cruel sentencing of British citizen Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison over national security offences. It is a damning indictment of Keir Starmer’s China visit just two weeks ago, which clearly secured no clemency whatsoever. So this was a good day for the Government to cosplay as hawkish on China. The measures announced include a new centralised way of reporting perceived interference. But will it make any difference?

Chinese interference in UK universities is not a new problem. Five years ago I met with a number of UK vice-chancellors, mainly from Russell Group institutions, to discuss the dependence of higher education institutions on Chinese fees and the resulting impact on academic freedom. With the notable exception of the vice-chancellor of Jesus College, Cambridge — who flatly denied there was any issue — all others readily accepted that they had a problem. “We make a loss on every domestic student” went one plea. “We were simply following Cameron and Osborne’s invitation to engage more deeply,” said another.

The Coalition government’s policy on China was naive, but it doesn’t follow that universities should be given a pass for hurtling into a crippling dependence on the Chinese Communist Party. We have known for decades that handing over leverage would enable Beijing to exert pressure, and we have all had access to the literature surrounding the questionable behaviour of Confucius Institutes. The warning signs were there, but greed and vicious competition between university recruitment departments diverted the collective gaze of the higher education establishment.

Last year, Beijing’s intelligence arm visited Sheffield Hallam’s student recruitment centre in China, threatening to cut off students unless Professor Laura Murphy’s work on forced labour in the critical mineral supply chain was stopped. The university denies complying with this request, but shut down Murphy’s human rights research centre in mysterious circumstances. She subsequently forced disclosure of all university documents mentioning her name, and found eye-watering discussions about the likely consequences for the university business of failing to comply with Beijing’s demands. This story summarises exactly where our posture of naivety has taken us.

Regrettably, the problem is far bigger than dependence. Beijing’s suffocating control of overseas students has turned the institutions charged with keeping an eye on foreign students into nodes for interference. Confucius Institutes masquerade as centres of language learning and cultural exchange. They have long been exposed as much more than that, acting as satellites for embassy activity including espionage, interference and influence activities. That’s without considering the terrifying scale of United Front work, which exists partly to keep overseas Chinese on the CCP’s straight and narrow.

None of this is new. Rishi Sunak promised that he would close Confucius Institutes “on day one” of his premiership, like the United States, Sweden, and Canada have done. He didn’t deliver. Since then, the UK’s Beijing policy has become more naive by the day. Before Starmer’s trip to China, Number Ten was even briefing that it wanted a return to the Cameron-Osborne “golden era” of UK-China relations — a policy Labour had attacked vehemently in Opposition. Those of us worried about Chinese influence on UK higher education therefore had set expectations pretty low.

Today’s announcement therefore comes as a somewhat welcome surprise. But it still barely touches the sides of Beijing’s interference programme. The truth is that Britain has precious little legislation to address the problem of interference. Until and unless China is, like Russia and Iran, put into the Enhanced Tier of the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme, UK security services and police will struggle to identify and punish transgressions.

Britain has little to lose in telling the truth about Beijing’s ambitions. The integrity of its universities rests on the Government doing so.