When Keir Starmer met his Chinese counterpart earlier this month, he gripped Xi Jinping’s hand and proclaimed the importance of a “strong” bilateral relationship. The meeting marked a warming of relations between the two nations, which have been decidedly frosty since Boris Johnson banned Huawei from our communications networks on security grounds in 2020, with Richard Moore, the head of MI6, also claiming China was his agency’s single biggest priority. Beijing, he said, was busy securing research “of particular interest” to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Perhaps Starmer should have heeded these warnings. For just as Johnson and the spooks understood, China is increasingly exploiting technology for geopolitical ends, using hi-tech heft to project its power and surveil its opponents. And as I can reveal, it has received help — from scientists working here in Britain, even as cash-strapped UK universities have accepted funding for these projects via dubious Chinese sources.
In the early years of the last decade, China realised it had a problem. America was investing heavily in space-based communications systems. There are civilian applications for this technology, but it also benefits the military: as demonstrated by Elon Musk’s Starlink, described by one Ukrainian officer as “the essential backbone” of battlefield communication. And as the Americans rushed ahead, China felt it was falling behind. So, in 2016, it announced a technical project of epic proportions: the Space-Ground Integrated Information Network (SGIIN). It was a project designed to comprehensively integrate space-based information networks and mobile communication systems by 2030. It has a clear dual-use potential: civilian applications with significant military implications.
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”.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeThe govt clearly has a lot on its plate. Top priority is Non Crime Hate Incidents. Once all those threats to democracy are eliminated, then they can start investigating research theft and sabotage.
Perhaps it’s not such a good idea to be sucking from the tits of foreign investment.
Only a military coup can save this country, but there is no army, no noble officers
More silly shrieking EU. And… “this country”? How many countries have you already claimed to be a citizen of?
Again… What’s your problem, Lad? Be friendly or take Prozac, they say it helps.
Unlike in France
France is a country that lost all its wars after Napoleon cut off the nation’s balls.
Hitler did the same thing to Germany.
But who cut off Britain’s balls, Britain, perhaps the greatest nation in the world, which has always been an example of stoicism and heroism?
England cut it’s balls off by not coming to terms that it no longer has a Empire since the 1950, S
Now in a completely delusional state resulting in terms of global influence in military , economic and Geo political matters
Truth be told you now a 2nd division Country
Who is bordering on relegation to 3rd Nation Status
In fact in Reality that exactly your status as far as The EU is concerned
You voted for it ,accept and appreciate your greatly diminished position
Refuse to do so then the slope of your decline merely gets steeper and slippery
Enjoy the fall tis the sudden bump at the bottom of the slide
That you have to really worry about cause you ain’t ever going to stand tall again
Of course the EU is made up of a bunce of third, fourth and fifth rate states, and Ireland
Well then How did Ireland manage to rid itself of the English yoke
And Afghanistan force you to runaway not once or twice but
Three times
You are Paper Tigers indeed
Oh, let’s hope our dance-with-the-dragon whose nature is untamable, doesn’t “burn” us too much in the event of a souring of International relations eh ?
My loathing of these quislings knows no bounds.
As Orwell pointed out the left wing middle class despise patriotism, British culture and physical courage. This ethos has spread to much of the middle class and then there is greed as well.
It’s true you need to avoid leaving silly doors open.
Allowing Grindr, which operates off the same geolocation as the military, to be briefly sold to China- thereby harvesting easy Kompromat on closeted staffers & military on bases – was a disaster.
I worked with an academic who was solicited by china. He said that he would go to one of many huge scientific complexes and there would be all kinds of expensive unused equipment.
For a few weeks each summer a cadre of science workers (let’s not call them scientists) asked him to coordinate experiments and produce organisation so they could learn to do novel scientific investigations.
Ultimately, I assume they were paying him well, or very well. Sadly he couldn’t even get a worthy or long tenure lectureship in the UK, but he was an exceptional thinker and came up with start up company level ideas.
Why on earth do we pay academics so badly? I left the UK for the same reason as a less exceptional engineer and scientist. But by God I wouldn’t ever work with or for China. But if they have the cash, the needy and morally reprehensible will come, there’s no doubt that the UK has under invested for years, it’s not complicated by any stretch. Just INVEST!
The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we hang them.
And may I add not only so
But have us manufacture the rope
In one of their Sweatshops on a Zero Hours contract
How to write adequately a series of groans and howls? No idea you will just have to imagine them . Is there nothing more important than money?
As in Australia also, powerful decision makers pretending to be exercising the duties of government are doing anything but. They are colluding with other self interested parties, operating beyond the view of ordinary mortals and, it would seem, of the media with its duty to hold power to account – that’s a laugh! – in order to sell off the country’s assets, at our loss and to their considerable gain. Happening now. Under our noses. No redress. Snouts. Trough. Too late.
Thank you David. What’s the problem if England is a vessel of the US.
Thanks as by that comment you have merely confirmed what I only
Too well already know
But more importantly you have reinforced my commitment to Scottish Independence
Along with once Free and when so once more a proud and free Scotland who then can partake of BRI and join BRICS
If that were the case today then our vast resources and capabilities in
Renewables would truly be surging
Ahead at Pace
Not to speak off if that Scotland decided to go for HS rail that within
2 to 3 Yrs Scotland would be operating more than 300 Kms
Of 5th generation HS rail infrastructure and rolling stock
And when we dwell upon such
Any care to explain under the most
Excellence of English Governance and Administrative Genius has been deployed to deliver HS 2 to which Scotland contributes 11 %
To the costs without any benefit to Scotland and denies excellence in 1st generation HS rail Technology
Delivered at Bargain basement prices and with phenomial Speed from start to finish cutting journey time that would have The HS 2 from London to Birmingham
From current to 43 mins
God save the King
Rule Britannia
Land of Hope and Glory
Better together
Preserve the Precious Union of Scotland and England
And the Outstanding Best in the World State pension
The most depressing thing about all this is just how cheap western scientists are, they can be bought for little more than pennies. I would add that it is not China, it is the Chinese Communist Party, It would help to emphasize this by using the term Zhongnanhai ( their compound in Beijing) in the same way we use Downing Street or the Oval Office.