How China is trying to silence UK academics

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, how China is trying to silence UK academics.

0:18We knew from the get-go that we were going to be monitored, that our work was going to be heavily scrutinized, and that it would not please the Chinese government. Laura Murphy is a professor of human rights and contemporary slavery at Sheffield Hallam University in the north of England. For 20 years, she's devoted her career to exposing forced labour, any work or service that people are forced to do against their will, usually under threat of punishment. So when she started investigating how the Chinese government was exploiting the country's Uyghur community to mine rare minerals and to make consumer goods for the West, she knew it would prove controversial.

0:57Since 2016-17, the Chinese government had created a big system of internment camps where they started this system of state-imposed forced labour that means that anyone who is requested to work by a government official or through a government programme has no choice but to comply. The Chinese government denies the allegations of forced labour and says their factory is designed to raise people out of poverty. But papers published by Laura and her colleagues told a different story, and their findings went round the world. They were cited by Western governments as well as the United Nations and helped to root out goods made by forced labour from international supply chains.

1:40We show supply chains, we trace them all the way to the Western markets, and so we were naming big international companies as well.

1:52then last year something strange started to happen i started receiving emails from people saying oh journalists and other researchers and people who are you know just curious or people who companies who relied on our research to help them do due diligence were writing to me and calling and saying hey i noticed that your reports are down can you help me get it it was just the beginning. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus. Did fear of losing lucrative Chinese students prompt a British university to censor its staff?

2:28Laura, welcome to Today in Focus and thank you for taking the time to talk to us. Can you just start by telling me how you got interested in China? Well, because of personal life, I've been to China for many years, starting in 2002, I guess. But I didn't start working on China until China's practices in the Uyghur region started to cross with my own work on forced labor. Thousands of Uyghur Muslims in China's western Xinjiang region have been reportedly detained in these so-called re-education camps, where they are forced to renounce their cultural and religious identities. In 2018, it became clear there was a massive system of state-imposed forced labour in the Uyghur region.

3:10And I was one of the few people who had spent a lot of time in the Uyghur region who knew anything about forced labour. And so I just felt like I needed to weigh in on this issue.

3:23And I think most listeners will be aware of the Uyghurs. But could you just give us a very brief summary about the injustices that they suffer? Sure. The Uyghur people are a community who live in the far west of China. They have a vibrant culture, a somewhat independent economy, or at least they used to. But since about 2017, there has been a direct assault on their culture and their lives. The Chinese government had created a big system of internment camps where they put upwards of a million people, upwards of a million Uyghur and other Turkic people. and then they started this system of state-imposed forced labour that means that people are compelled to work because there are directives from the government that say that if you don't participate in what they call poverty alleviation programmes, you can be sent to detention.

4:17Do the Uyghurs get paid at all for this work? In this case of forced labour, Uyghur people do seem to get paid, but we've done some research to try to compare the wages that are being given to the Uyghur people for doing, say, textile work, manufacturing textiles, comparing that against what you might get paid if you were making the same products in Jiangsu or some other province. And what's happening is that Uyghur people are being paid far, far less, less even than the minimum wage in the Uyghur region. And that's by design. A lot of Uyghur people don't want to take these jobs because they want to stay farming or they have other ambitions.

4:51But in these cases, companies and government agents come to people's door and say to them, we're going to assign you to one of these two factories. Which do you want? That's the most choice that they're getting here, right? So what kind of things are the Uyghur people being forced to make? So in the Uyghur region, the Chinese government has invested in the expansion of critical minerals exploration, of cotton production and textile manufacturing. They're also making electronics, home appliances, children's toys, Christmas decorations. Those are being exported to the UK, the US, all these goods are in our homes, on our bodies.

5:33They're the clothes we buy in stores. And yet the Chinese government has denied for the last 10 years that this is a system of forced labour. And what sort of impact has your work had in terms of the industries you've reported on? I've been really impressed by how seriously the trade community has taken the research we've done and how they've used it to improve their due diligence and shift their supply chains. The solar industry, for instance, when we produced our report in 2021, we heard a lot of people say, well, there's nothing we can do. 45 % of the world's polysilicon is made in the Uyghur region.

6:11We are pretty much beholden and moving supply chains isn't easy. But in two years, in fact, the solar industry has really significantly moved their supply chains. Only 25 % of the world's polysilicon is now made in the Uyghur region. For those governments and companies that have demanded that they have untainted supply chains, they have created those supply chains. So it shows you that if a company is demanded, commanded to do this, if there's demand for clean products, they will find a way to move their supply chains. So we've seen a lot of massive changes. Tons of apparel companies are quietly, they don't want to say it out loud because Chinese consumers sometimes will fight them on it.

6:51But a lot of apparel companies have also changed their supply chains. We talk to companies and trade associations all the time who say that the research we do gives them the information they need to do better due diligence. They don't rely on our reports exclusively. They go in and they go to their suppliers. They look at the invoices. They do the work to figure out where they need to change their supply chains. One of my favorite experiences was when somebody sent me a bunch of photos of rubber gloves and other PPE from National Health Service hospitals. And they sent me the pictures of the boxes and said, look at these companies.

7:31Are they engaged in the Uyghur region? And we found that many of the NHS's own suppliers were sourcing products from the Uyghur region. And that led to an amendment to the health care law that said that they couldn't source PPE from the Uyghur region.

7:57So you knew from the outset that your research would be very closely scrutinized by the Chinese government and that they wouldn't like it. How did you prepare for that? That's right. We knew that there would be pushback from all different corners. And so we, from the very beginning, made sure to be heavily footnoted, tons of evidence to show that our points are real. OK. And when did you start to realize that something was going on and that there was a problem? The Chinese government started complaining about the research we did from the very beginning. But in 2022, the university started to get some real pressure from the Chinese government to silence me.

8:37But in those early years, the university was very supportive of my work and sheltered me a great deal from that information. And they chose academic freedom over Chinese students, in fact. And they made calculations that said, OK, here's how much money we're going to lose on this. But for the avoidance of doubt, Sheffield-Hollum stands for academic freedom. But in 2023, I went to work for the U.S. government. I spent a year, a little over a year, working for the Biden administration, helping them implement the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act. And it may be a coincidence, but shortly thereafter, in April of 2024, many different attacks from different fronts confronted the university.

9:17There was a lawsuit, there was a cyber attack, but most importantly, there were interrogations of our staff in Beijing. And when you say staff on the ground in China, why has Sheffield Hallam got staff in China? Sheffield Hallam, like most universities, has a small office in Beijing that does student recruitment. Right. And when you say that these staff members in China were interrogated, what actually happened? So when the Chinese State Security Service agents interrogated the staff in Beijing, they were specifically asking questions about me and my relationship to the Department of Homeland Security and what the university's relationship to the Department of Homeland Security was.

9:57and I learned through the grapevine that this had happened and I called the university I called my chair and said hey what you know what's going on and he he laid it out he said it had been a really aggressive interrogation of the staff there and that it had really given the university pause and they were trying to figure out what to do. Right okay and you can understand of course they've got a duty of care to staff and they have absolutely they have to take that seriously but at what point would in your mind do you think it crossed over into an unreasonable response in terms of what they did?

10:30Well and you know I did think it was it was important that the university pay very careful attention to the safety and security of our staff in China as well as the staff on my own research team some of whom were weaker researchers but by July of last year the university came to us and said we do not want to to publish any more research on China. We were working, our team, my research team, I was, again, still at the government, but the research team was pursuing a project on critical minerals that had significant grant funding and was looking at how Uyghur forced labor was connected to critical minerals.

11:06And we were told that we needed to stop this, that the interrogations had continued. And we later found out through a subject access request where I got all documents related to me that, in fact, the Chinese government, the Chinese security services had explicitly told the university that they needed to stop our research. And what did they actually do in practical terms? The Chinese government made it difficult for the university to be able to carry out their work in China. They turned off their accessibility to their website in China. They turned off their email access so they couldn't communicate with students in China.

11:41They made it so that they couldn't conduct their testing of students who wanted to prepare to come to the UK. Okay. And how did Sheffield-Hellum respond to this? Because so they'd already said that this work that your team was doing was going to have to stop. At this point, you're still working for Biden in the US, aren't you? They told me, don't worry, when you return, your academic freedom will be protected. You will be able to continue your research. We need you back here to be the steward of all this. And I gave them the benefit of the doubt because I did want to return to the university. It's a great place to work, or it was.

12:15And we really wanted to make sure that this work continued and that the great work that we had done at Sheffield Home would be able to continue. And when did you return to Sheffield? So when Joe Biden lost his job, I also lost mine. And so I returned shortly thereafter. My plan was to return on March 1st. But in February, I had a meeting, a pre-return meeting with my chair and other staff, and I was told explicitly that the university would no longer support research or work on China or forced labor. And they told me this was because the university lost its defamation coverage. Its insurers stopped insuring them for defamation.

12:56But internal documents between administrators were consistently going back to this concern about regaining the China's student market. And they put it in black and white. And it was honestly a shock to me. I don't want to sound like I'm naive here. There were always questions about whether it was about the marketization of the university, whether it was about access to the Chinese student market. But I repeatedly gave them the benefit of the doubt. And I understood that these other concerns were real and they were hard to deal with. And so I constantly said, let's try to work out the insurance problem.

13:29Let's try to get some help for the people on the ground in China. Let's try to address whatever new, you know, resource concerns you might have. Well, let's get some new grants. But something, it didn't matter how many times I tried to give them the resources to fix the problems they were naming, they continued to say I couldn't do the work. And I suspected all along that there must be something else. But not only had they eliminated all of the resources and support and research team that I had built up, they also had taken down all of the reports that I had produced previously. Yeah, the ones that people had been emailing you about asking where they'd disappeared to.

14:08How did the university explain that? Here again, the university told me a story that's betrayed by the things that they wrote in their internal documents. So they told me, well, it's standard procedure for us to take old research down from the website and put it into this kind of obscure university research archive. And I went back and looked at the website And I found, no, I mean, tons of research that's older than my research is still up on the website. And my research is buried in this little corner, this hidden corner. And then when I went back and looked at the internal documents, it was clear that the university got a confirmation from state security in China that they would keep the university's full website inaccessible from the Chinese population.

14:54until the university took my websites, my research off of the website. And so they were telling me this thing about how it was about a standard practice when in fact there's just so much evidence to show that they did it at the command of the Chinese government.

15:22Amy Hawkins, welcome back to Today in Focus. Nice to see you again. So you are The Guardian's senior China correspondent and you broke this story about Sheffield Hallam and what happened to Laura. Just give us a little bit of a history lesson on how and why UK universities became so reliant on China. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a product in part of the kind of massive funding cuts, which UK universities have been subjected to by successive governments. So as we all know, domestic student fees went up, but they are still capped. Whereas when it comes to international student fees, universities can charge a lot more.

16:00So universities are very big on recruiting from other countries, particularly in countries like China, where there's a growing middle class who can afford those student fees. And China is an education-obsessed nation. And there's a lot of prestige in China associated with studying overseas, particularly in the UK, the US, Australia. And I think it's also worth bearing in mind that political winds can change really quickly. Well, I think this is going to be a very important moment for British-Chinese relations, which are in a very good state, something of a golden era in our relationship. Trade is growing, investment is growing, the people-to-people contact is increasing, not least with 135 ,000 Chinese students studying here in Britain.

16:43You know, it was only kind of 10 years ago or something that Xi Jinping and David Cameron were having a pint in the pub. I came to the pub for a drink after work and shortly afterwards Mr Cameron and President came in for a drink afterwards. I think it's brilliant. Yeah, come to see the local people, have a drink in the pub. That's what you do in England. It was this kind of golden era of UK-China relations. Lots of British universities are setting up joint ventures, some of which are still going, you know, where they have a UK campus and a China campus. And, you know, these joint ventures take years to set up.

17:25And then by the time they've really got going, the political winds in the UK have changed. And all of a sudden, Chinese students are being treated with suspicion. Receiving any money from Chinese institutions is seen as problematic, whereas before it was just a great investment opportunity. And just how important now is China to the UK university sector? It's hugely important. So as of a couple of years ago, there were over 150 ,000 Chinese students in the UK. And at some universities, such as the University of Manchester, about one-fifth of the total student population come from China. And overall, they contribute about£7 billion to the UK economy every year.

18:06So it is a huge part of the higher education sector, which for a while was seen as a good thing and now is seen by some as being a vulnerability in UK education. Obviously, you're an expert on China. Were you surprised at how easily Sheffield Hallam seemed to have succumbed to pressure from China to shut down this renowned research institute? I think the scale of this case and how clear-cut it is, is surprising. The fact that this was so clearly done at the behest of the Chinese authorities was surprising. But I'm not surprised to hear that the university fell under immense pressure from the commercial interest in China.

18:49And, you know, something that academics across the UK have complained of for years is that it's becoming increasingly hard in UK universities to do work that's perceived as critical of China. Sometimes there are fears of Chinese students in the lessons complaining, there are fears of the university facing consequences in China. There are researchers who are focused on China sometimes and self-censoring because they're concerned about being let back into China to continue their work. And what has Sheffield Hallam admitted that they essentially bowed to political pressure? They say that the reason that they imposed the ban was because of the insurance issue and they have since lifted the ban and apologised and say they're sorting out the insurance issue, they say it wasn't because of commercial interests.

19:38And they haven't really addressed the accusation that they essentially complied with a request from Chinese state security. Yeah. And the police are now involved. Is that right? Yeah. So two campaigners made a referral to the police or made a complaint about Sheffield Hallam to the police under the National Security Act, which is a new national security law in the UK, which criminalises kind of cooperation with foreign powers and they want the police to investigate whether in complying with this request from Chinese state security Sheffield Hallam potentially broke the law. Right. You know, as well saying that the case has been referred to the police who are investigating, the police haven't said anything about that.

20:24Right, okay. So it remains to be seen if they do indeed think that it warrants a criminal investigation. And meanwhile, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee has announced that it will examine Chinese government interference in academia as part of its wider inquiry into the UK's China strategy. And last week, Sheffield Hallam, the Sheffield Hallam branch of the University and College Union, the UCU, as well as the National Executive Committee of the UCU, passed motions calling for a full public inquiry into what happened at Sheffield Hallam. So there's clearly a lot of concern about this. Have other academics come forward in response to your story about Laura?

21:01So since my story was published, a number of academics have come forward and spoken about their experiences in encountering censorship from China. And one person, Andreas Fulda, who's a political scientist at the University of Nottingham, said that as a result of his critical scholarship about China, spoof emails bearing his name were sent to his colleagues announcing his resignation and inviting them to his farewell drinks. And who knows, he sent the emails, but he suspects that it's something to do with the Chinese security services. He's also received death threats to him and his family. And what he told the Guardian was, what I've come to learn is that once you reach a certain perception threshold in the eyes of the Chinese security agencies, you're punished to dissuade yourself from airing your views.

21:50And what do you think this saga reveals about how China is operating at the moment? I think it speaks to a wider trend at the moment, which is China is very, very concerned about its global narrative and how it appears overseas. I think people sometimes think of China as being this big, powerful country with such economic might and there's so much economic influence over us that it doesn't really care what people think but they really do care how people in the west regard it and things like allegations of forced labor which i should add you they absolutely deny they they say that most of the forced labor programs which laura writes about in her research are poverty alleviation programs whereby poor people from xinjiang mostly uyghurs this muslim minority who would otherwise be unemployed are given work opportunities.

22:47And they completely reject the idea that they abuse human rights. They care about their reputation just for its own sake, but also it does have real consequences for them. So a number of countries have passed laws which are trying to root out forced labour in the supply chain, which make it difficult to import products from Xinjiang or put higher burdens on companies that have supply chains linked to Xinjiang or other parts of China. It does make life more difficult for Chinese companies, kind of as evidenced by the fact that one of these companies that was named in a previous report about forced labour in the fashion supply chain had sued Sheffield Hallam University for defamation.

23:28And that lawsuit is ongoing in the UK courts.

23:35Coming up, what will happen to Laura's research on forced labour in China?