Arabic version: MI5 تحذر الجامعات البريطانية بشأن روابط بحثية مع الصين

According to BBC News, MI5 has warned that more than 100 academics linked to British institutions have unwittingly contributed to China’s espionage operations through research funded by China General Technology Research Institute (CGTRI).

MI5 said CGTRI, also sometimes translated as the China Academy of General Technology, has “very strong ties” to China’s Ministry of State Security. The security service said the organisation’s primary purpose was to fund research that directly improves the ministry’s technical capability for espionage.

The projects involved topics including artificial intelligence, cyber-security, covert communications systems and steganography, the hiding of a secret message or file inside an ordinary message or object. MI5 said institutions and individuals may have engaged with CGTRI in good faith because its links to Chinese state security had been obscured.

Universities and academics were strongly advised to immediately review ongoing or planned collaborations with CGTRI. MI5 said the National Security Act, passed in 2023, created an offence of assisting a foreign intelligence service where a person ought reasonably to have known what they were doing.

Security minister Dan Jarvis said he had written to all university vice-chancellors to end relationships with the organisation. Universities UK said it was reviewing the alert, while the Chinese Embassy in London called the accusations “imaginary and purely fabricated”.