Revelation of emails to Imperial College scientists comes amid growing concerns about security risk posed by academic tie-ups with China
A Chinese state-owned company sought to use a partnership with a leading British university in order to access AI technology for potential use in “smart military bases”, the Guardian has learned.
Emails show that China’s Jiangsu Automation Research Institute (Jari) discussed deploying software developed by scientists at Imperial College London for military use.
The company, which is the leading designer of China’s drone warships, shared this objective with two Imperial employees before signing a £3m deal with the university in 2019.
Ministers have spent the past year stepping up warnings about the potential security risk posed by academic collaborations with China, with MI5 telling vice-chancellors in April that hostile states are targeting sensitive research that can “deliver their authoritarian, military and commercial priorities”.
The former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith said: “Our universities are like lambs to the slaughter. They try to believe in independent scientific investigation, but in China it doesn’t work like that. What they’re doing is running a very significant risk.”
The Future Digital Ocean Innovation Centre was to be based at Imperial’s Data Science Institute, under the directorship of Prof Yike Guo. Guo left Imperial in late 2022 to become provost of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
The centre’s stated goals were to advance maritime forecasting, computer vision and intelligent manufacturing “for civilian applications”. However, correspondence sent before the partnership was formalised suggests Jari was also considering military end-uses.
The emails were obtained through freedom of information request by the charity UK-China Transparency.
A Mandarin-language email from Jari’s research director to an Imperial College professor, whose name is redacted, and another Imperial employee, dated November 2018, states that a key Jari objective for the centre is testing whether software developed by Imperial’s Data Science Institute could be integrated into its own “JariPilot” technology to “form a more powerful product”.
Suggested applications are listed as “smart institutes, smart military bases and smart oceans”.
“Our research presents evidence of an attempt to link Imperial College London’s expertise and resources into China’s national military marine combat drone research programmes,” said Sam Dunning, the director of UK-China Transparency, which carried out the investigation.
"Partnerships such as this have taken place across the university sector. They together raise questions about whether British science faculties understand that China has become increasingly authoritarian and militarised under Xi Jinping, and that proper due diligence is required in dealings with this state.”
There appears to have been a launch event for the joint centre in September 2019 and funding from Jari is cited in Imperial’s annual summary in 2021 under prestigious industry grants it attracted.
However, the partnership was ultimately terminated in 2021. Imperial said no research went ahead and the £500,000 of funding that had been received was returned in October 2021 after discussion with government officials.
“Under Imperial’s policies, partnerships and collaborations are subject to due diligence and regular review,” an Imperial spokesperson said. “The decision to terminate the partnership was made after consideration of UK export control legislation and consultation with the government, taking into consideration national security concerns.”
Charles Parton, a China expert at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said the partnership was “clearly highly inappropriate” and should never have been signed off.
“How much effort does it take to work out that Jari is producing military weapons that could be used in future against our naval forces?” Parton said. “These people should have been doing proper due diligence way before this. It’s not good enough, late in the day having signed the contract, to get permission from [government].”
At the time of the deal, Imperial’s Data Science Institute was led by Prof Guo, an internationally recognised AI researcher. A Channel 4 documentary last year revealed that Guo had written eight papers with Chinese collaborators at Shanghai University on missile design and using AI to control fleets of marine combat drones. Guo is no longer affiliated with Imperial.
Imperial received more than £18m in funding from Chinese military-linked institutes and companies between 2017 and 2022, but since then it has been forced to shut down several joint-ventures as government policy on scientific collaboration has hardened.
“Governments of all stripes have taken a long time to understand what the threat is from China and universities for a long period have got away with this,” said Duncan Smith, who has had sanctions imposed on him by China for criticising its government. “There’s been a progressive and slow tightening up, but it’s still not good enough. Universities need to be in lockstep with the security services.”
An Imperial College London spokesperson said: “Imperial takes its national security responsibilities very seriously. We regularly review our policies in line with evolving government guidance and legislation, working closely with the appropriate government departments, and in line with our commitments to UK national security.
“Imperial’s research is open and routinely published in leading international journals and we conduct no classified research on our campuses.”
Guo declined to comment on the Jari partnership, noting that he left Imperial at the end of 2022. Of his previous collaborations, he said that the papers were classified as “basic research” and were written to help advance scientific knowledge in a broad range of fields rather than solving specific, real-world problems.
Huh? China has much better domestic sources of AI tech than anything out of Imperial College.
The British always like to think they're on par with the US in all things, so I guess now they're imagining they're the world leaders in AI and the Chinese want to steal their tech...?
You post a lot of pro-china stuff. Strange.
And the Imperial College of London is one of the top universities on the planet, certainly in the top 10, as are Cambridge and Oxford (shit, those two are probably in the top 3). Pretending otherwise is stupidity.
Clearly the university did have stuff China wanted, otherwise China wouldn't have targeted it. You don't have to be educated at IC to figure that out.
And partaking in American nationalist chest-thumping while at the same time being someone who regularly defends China is pretty interesting. You'd think they'd be mutually exclusive.
Yes, you caught me out as a pro-CCP shill. All hail Xi Jinping, thought leader of the world (please ignore my previous comments calling him a dumbass).
Chinese orgs love signing MOUs. Looking at the underlying story, this looks like bog standard research into computer vision and related topics. If it were the Chinese government wanting to steal stuff, they'd be going after companies. There won't be anything in Imperial College that they won't find already in top Chinese universities, let alone their tech giants.
The CCP - or, better, the China Scholarship Council (CSC) under the rule of the CCP - forces Chinese students and researchers to sign 'loyalty pleadges' before giong abroad saying they "shall consciously safeguard the honor of the motherland, (and) obey the guidance and management of embassies (consulates) abroad." The restrictive scholarship contract requires them to report back to the Chinese embassy on a regular basis, and anyone who violates these conditions is subject to disciplinary action.
In one investigation,
In Sweden, for example, universities have already cancelled the collaboration with the CSC over this practice.
There is ample evidence that China uses scientific collaboration with private companies as well as universities and research organizations for spying. You'll find many independent reports on that as well as of the CCP's intimidation practices of Chinese students who don't comply with the party line, e.g., in Australia and elsewhere. It's easy to find reliable sources on the (Western) web.
Loyalty pledges are kabuki theatre. There's no point talking about them, since the state has plenty of degrees of freedom to force citizens to do what they want, with or without them. And not just the Chinese state; the US just outright decided one day that no US citizen will be allowed to work in the Chinese semiconductor industry, as though citizens are property of the government -- they didn't need no signed loyalty pledges to enforce that.