Britain’s security service did something unusual on Wednesday. It named a foreign organisation in public and told the whole university sector to stop working with it.
In an espionage alert issued on 30 September, MI5 said the China General Technology Research Institute, also translated as the China Academy of General Technology, exists to fund academic research that directly improves the technical capability of China’s Ministry of State Security for espionage. The institute, known as CGTRI, has very strong ties to that intelligence service, MI5 said, a point it deliberately put into the open.
The numbers are what give the warning weight. More than 100 UK-linked academics have contributed to research projects funded through CGTRI, according to MI5, across artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, covert communications and steganography, the practice of hiding messages inside ordinary files. In some cases, the agency acknowledged, the researchers may not have known who was ultimately paying.
Security minister Dan Jarvis wrote to every university vice-chancellor urging them to end all arrangements with the institute. He said the alert exposed attempts by Chinese intelligence to covertly benefit from British academic expertise and undermine UK national security. Many institutions engaged with CGTRI in good faith, MI5 said, because the link back to Chinese state security had been obfuscated.
There is a legal edge to the advice too. The alert reminds universities and researchers of the National Security Act 2023, which created an offence of assisting a foreign intelligence service where a person ought reasonably to have known what they were doing. Institutions that continue to take CGTRI-funded research are being told to get independent legal advice.
The timing will sting for a sector that relies on international collaboration and, for several universities, on Chinese students and partnerships for income. Whether this warning cools UK-China research ties is an open question that the sector will be debating for some time.
MI5’s own alert and the BBC’s reporting carry the details, including the full text of the advice to institutions.