More than £12 million in funding was handed to the University of Edinburgh by organisations with affiliations to the Chinese military over the past five years, a report has revealed.
The money includes at least £10m from Huawei Technologies, the controversial tech firm banned from Britain's 5G networks.
The university received between £12.7m and £13.8m from five Chinese entities between 2017 to 2022, according to the report from think-tank Civitas, with 96 per cent of the financing coming from companies with links to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Overall, around a third of all Chinese funding to UK universities had links to the Chinese military.
Five other Scottish universities also provided information to researchers showing they accepted funding from Chinese companies – a combined total of more than £15m.
The authors of the report, “The Strategic Dependence of UK Universities on China – and where should they turn next?”, warned the academic partnerships “are not in the interests of Scotland, Scottish students, or the United Kingdom's national security". They called for the UK’s sanctions list to be aligned with that of the US and for the end of academic collaborations with universities in China’s “Seven Sons of National Defence” alliance.
The report found the University of Glasgow received a total of £1.6m in research grants from ten separate Chinese entities between 2017 and 2021. This includes £264,988 from Chinese defence entities subjected to US sanctions at time of funding, in addition to £446,639 from Huawei Technologies, and a further £10,000 from Chinese hypersonic missile technology testing institute, the China Aerodynamics Research and Development Centre.
