Recently, I visited a university in the UK and struck up a conversation with a woman whose story has stayed with me. She has a PhD; her thesis was on Chinese interference in Britain, and she is now studying for a law degree. When I asked why someone with her qualifications would go back to the start in a different field, she told me that academia had canceled her because of her work on China. She is not famous, which left me wondering why anyone would bother to cancel her at all. If a researcher with no public profile can be driven out for that, then Beijing’s reach into Western life is far greater than most of us have been prepared to admit.
Her case is not an isolated one, as a survey of British China scholars makes plain. The 2025 report begins by declaring that “the study of China in the UK is in crisis,” and it traces the cause to the Chinese Communist Party, which “treats academic disciplines such as economics, history, politics, and sociology as potential vectors of opposition or criticism which could be a threat to regime stability.” The pressure begins with access to China itself. Fifty-eight percent of respondents agreed that researching or speaking publicly on sensitive subjects makes a visa harder to get, and one scholar admitted to avoiding sensitive research for the simple reason that they wanted to keep visiting the country.
Once scholars are made wary at the border, the universities themselves carry the pressure further, and they do so for financial reasons. Sixty-four percent of respondents believed that dependence on fees from Chinese students has shaped how administrators regard relations with the Chinese government, compared with 16 percent who did not. Twenty-two percent had been told directly, or knew a colleague who had been told, that those relations influence university decisions. The testimony behind these figures is concrete. One scholar described evidence that a grant had been refused because the application contained content critical of the CCP.
A second respondent gave an account of a project at another university that was canceled, with its funding returned, following Chinese government pressure on management. A third respondent spoke of a colleague who was quasi-demoted for complaining about police harassment of another colleague’s family in China. Experiences varied, with 38 percent saying administrators’ concern for Beijing has made sensitive research harder and 46 percent saying it has not, but the report nonetheless finds “strong evidence that universities’ financial dependencies are a vector for CCP influence.”
