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Transnational Repression in the UK (JCHR Report)

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford. In the short time we have, I will take up and apply what she has been saying in relation to one country and one subject. The country is China and the subject is our universities.

I know Chloe Cheung, for example, and these individual cases are appalling, of course. However, they are described as TNR “events”, and I think what is underrated by the Government is the systemic quality of all of this. It is not just one or two, or even several, horrible events: it is working right through the system. Above all, in this country, it is working right through our universities because of the whole-of-state approach that China has to its engagement with this country and other foreign countries.

The problem arises here partly because our universities are so incredibly dependent on Chinese money for their survival and are therefore uncritical of the terms on which they receive that money. Recent figures obtained by UK-China Transparency show that, in Russell group universities, Chinese postgraduate students in STEM subjects now outnumber British postgraduates. Our universities are a very rich ground for CCP intervention. Chinese and now Hong Kong students

are incentivised to report dissident fellow students. Those who report the dissidents are rewarded with a leg-up in their educational careers. In the past five years, 260 Chinese students in this country have applied for asylum because of the problems they faced in this way. I would be very pleased to be corrected if I am wrong, but I have seen no admission of this problem by any vice-chancellor in this country, and that, it seems to me, amounts to complicity.

I will quote a recent article in Times Higher Education by Dr Michael Spence, the provost and president of UCL, where more than 10,000 China nationals are studying. He spoke of the idea that Chinese students might be persecuted in the way that I have described, but, in his view, it is only an idea rather than a reality. He went on to say:

“Ironically, the experience of many of our Chinese students is that anti-China sentiment in the UK has an impact on their ability to speak freely about the positives they see in their country and its culture”.

Well, I think that Dr Spence is setting up an utterly false moral equivalence. It may be true that people here criticise some Chinese attitudes, but they do not threaten them with arrest by national security police and imprisonment back home, or with financial penalties being inflicted on their families. That is what China does to the students that it disparages. I am sorry, I should have said earlier that I should like to join in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Isaac, particularly in this context, because he of course has great experience of universities.

In the article, Dr Spence said his university was

“stamping out a culture of fear”.

I am sorry to say that I think that is almost the reverse of what is going on, and this will continue unless it is, as people now say, “called out”. This is where I beg the Government to give a lead, particularly in light of this report. It is very important that the report’s recommendation of raising China to the enhanced tier happens. However, I am not very optimistic about this, because I have noticed that, with the Government’s mantra of “challenge, compete and co-operate”, the power of money constantly means that the idea of co-operating is always preferred to the idea of challenge.

5.38 pm