In the latest sign that growing financial vulnerabilities within Britain’s higher-education sector are making it a soft target for Beijing’s campaign to project power beyond its borders, an investigation into claims that Sheffield Hallam University halted research into human-rights abuses in China after alleged pressure from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been referred to counter-terrorism police.
The referral follows an extraordinary sequence of events that began more than two years ago, when the Chinese government first took aim at the university’s Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice (HKC). In 2022, China’s foreign ministry publicly denounced the centre, which houses the research team of Professor Laura Murphy, as being in the “disreputable vanguard of anti-China rhetoric” over its work on forced labour in Xinjiang, which it links to global supply chains for apparel, solar, and cars.
Murphy, a leading specialist in modern slavery, has written extensively on the persecution of the Uyghurs, a Muslim minority subjected to forced labour and mass detention in China’s western province. Her research, and that of colleagues at the HKC, has informed UN discussions on forced labour and helped shape international efforts to exclude goods produced through coercion from global supply chains. Notably, in 2021 the US government cited her team’s findings when implementing the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act, which establishes a rebuttable presumption that goods mined, produced or manufactured wholly or in part in Xinjiang are barred from entry into the US unless clear and convincing evidence proves otherwise.
Beijing’s response was to block Sheffield Hallam’s websites in China — a move the university privately acknowledged had “undoubtedly had a negative impact on recruitment”. In an email dated April 2024, one administrator wrote, “Things in Beijing have kicked off” warning that the situation was likely to deteriorate further.
They were right to be worried. The number of Chinese students at Sheffield Hallam fell from 785 in 2017–18 to 280 in 2021–22, the first full year after pandemic restrictions, and dropped again to just 170 in 2023–24. In a July 2024 internal email, a senior official admitted that “attempting to retain the business in China and publication of the [HKC] research are now untenable bedfellows”.
Two months earlier, three state security officers had visited the university’s Beijing office, where an employee was questioned for two hours about the HKC. According to an internal summary of the meeting, “the tone was threatening and [the] message to cease the research activity was made clear”.
In such circumstances, it was perhaps unsurprising that the university chose to de-escalate — few, after all, are the institutions outside Washington, DC, with the resources or resolve to go toe-to-toe with the Chinese state. By September 2024, the university had informed the Chinese National Security Service that it would not publish a planned report on the risk of Uyghur forced labour in the critical minerals supply chain, and returned the associated grant to Global Rights Compliance, a law foundation in The Hague. “Immediately, relations improved,” an administrator noted.
Five months later, in February 2025, administrators instructed Murphy that she could not continue with her research into supply chains and forced labour in China. The Forced Labour Lab — Murphy’s research group within the HKC — had its website taken down, and her work formally halted.
At this point, Murphy initiated legal action against the university for failing in its duty to protect her academic freedom, and submitted a “subject access request” (SAR) requiring Sheffield Hallam to disclose relevant internal correspondence.
Publicly, the university has maintained that “a combination of administrative issues” made it impossible to continue supporting her work. Its earlier decision, it said, had been “based on our understanding of a complex set of circumstances at the time,” including difficulties “in securing the necessary professional indemnity insurance”. That referred to a lawsuit filed by a Chinese company named in one HKC report, which prompted Sheffield Hallam’s insurer to withdraw cover for work produced by the centre on defamation-risk grounds.
Maybe so. But the documents released under Murphy’s SAR tell a different story. Among the material she obtained were papers showing that officials had, as she puts it, “negotiated directly with a foreign intelligence service to trade my academic freedom for access to the Chinese student market”.
“I’d never seen anything quite so patently explicit about the extent to which a university would go to ensure that they have Chinese student income,” she later told the BBC.
The long-running saga has now attracted the attention of law enforcement. South Yorkshire Police confirmed that the case has been referred to counter-terrorism officers because the “allegations fall under Section 3 of the National Security Act”, which covers conduct intended — or likely — to materially assist a foreign intelligence service operating in the UK, where the person knows or has reason to know that this is the case.
So how did it come to this — a British university being investigated by counter-terror police after, to paraphrase Professor Murphy, trading academic freedom for market access in an authoritarian state?
The roots of the problem lie much closer to home. Over the past decade, Britain’s universities have become ever more dependent on the fees of higher-paying international students. It’s a shift driven less by ambition than by austerity. Tuition fees for UK students have risen by only £250 since David Cameron’s government lifted the cap to £9,000 in 2012. Although Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has now allowed fees to rise with inflation, recent Russell Group research shows that next year’s maximum undergraduate charge will be worth just £6,700 in real terms — around two-thirds of its nominal £9,535 price.
Even in the context of modest “top-up” government teaching grants of around £1,150 per student, that means English universities now lose an average of at least £1,700 on every home undergraduate they educate. According to Universities UK, that equates to a sector-wide shortfall of about £1 billion a year.
The picture is bleaker still at Russell Group universities, where a higher share of courses are “high-cost” STEM subjects. Losses per home student are therefore greater, while the Strategic Priorities Grant (SPG) — intended to offset the cost of teaching such subjects — has fallen sharply in real terms. Between 2018/19 and 2025/26, SPG funding has risen only from £1.29 billion to £1.35 billion, a real-terms decline of 19 per cent.
Nor do research budgets offer relief. A 16 per cent real-terms decrease in quality-related (QR) funding, combined with weaker cost-recovery on research grants, has forced universities to subsidise their own research programmes. As a result, institutional investment in sustaining the UK’s research base has climbed from £3.9 billion in 2016/17 to £6.2 billion in 2023/24.
Faced with these pressures, vice-chancellors — especially at high-tariff institutions — have sought to leverage their global reputations by shifting recruitment pronouncedly towards international students, who typically pay two to three times the fees of home-grown students. At the most selective campuses, the average international tuition fee now stands at £23,750 a year.
The scale of this “international pivot” is captured in the latest enrolment data. In 2023–24, the total number of overseas students enrolled at UK universities stood at 732,285. Although down 4 per cent from the previous year’s record, it’s still a figure that represents 23 per cent of the total student population. Of these, 75,490 were from the EU and 656,795 from outside the EU. During that year, 98,400 students from China began courses in the UK — an 87 per cent increase since 2011/12 (53,000) and the second-largest cohort from any non-EU country after India.
Across all active enrolments, HESA data for the same academic year record 149,885 students from mainland China, 17,250 from Hong Kong, and 530 from Macao. Taken together, these students from greater China now account for just under one-quarter of all international enrolments.
So far, this internationalisation strategy has given universities some much needed breathing space. But as critics have long warned, growing reliance on fees from non-UK students has created a latent risk to institutional autonomy — one captured by an old proverb (English, by the way, not Chinese): he who pays the piper calls the tune.
As long ago as 2019, The Times reported that British intelligence agencies were “concerned that a reliance on Chinese money and students, particularly postgraduates paying up to £50,000 a year in fees, was making some universities particularly vulnerable [to influence and interference by the Chinese government]”.
Four years later, the Intelligence and Security Committee’s 2023 report on China warned that the CCP was actively seeking to “exert control and influence” over the UK’s higher-education sector through the financial dependency created by student fees. According to written evidence from one anonymised source, Beijing has done so “by threatening to withdraw scholarships or funding for Chinese nationals in the UK”.
Meanwhile, a series of incidents in British universities suggests that such pressures have been shaping institutional behaviour for some time, albeit less overtly than in Professor Murphy’s case.
In 2024, University College London barred Associate Professor Michelle Shipworth, of the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources, from teaching a seminar on China to protect the university’s interests and ensure its courses remained “commercially viable” to Chinese students. After receiving a complaint from a Chinese postgraduate that a discussion of modern slavery in China was too “provocative”, senior administrators also blocked her from accessing internal systems and communicating with students.
At Newcastle University, Dr Jo Smith Finley, a reader in Chinese studies, was sanctioned by China in March 2021 in retaliation for UK sanctions on four Chinese officials over human-rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims. While Newcastle publicly defended her and funded her research and conference activities, she later told The Times that the university had limited the visibility of her work, cancelling a Uyghur photo exhibition to avoid political controversy. Management, she said, was forced by financial pressures to walk “a fine line between defending academic freedom and pacifying the authorities in Beijing to protect the recruitment of Chinese students”.
Universities now face … a reckoning between money and liberal ideas
When the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act was passing through Parliament, virtually every British university pressed for “freedom of speech within the law” not to mean all expression that is lawful unless explicitly prohibited, but rather to invite an ECHR-style balancing exercise — one capable of permitting a wide range of restrictions once an institution’s internal EDI policies or the nebulous “rights of others” were weighed against it, effectively allowing them to mark their own homework.
There is, then, a certain grim irony in the fact that, while they lost that battle, universities now face a very different kind of balancing act being thrust upon them: a reckoning between money and liberal ideals. And in a chronically mismanaged Britain, now apparently resigned to pawning its tattered ornaments and threadbare pageantry to the highest bidder in a desperate scramble to survive amid the wastelands of an entirely amoral global capitalism, they’re discovering that it is not they, but the Chinese state, with its thumb pressed firmly on the scales.
