How China is trying to silence UK academics

中国如何试图压制英国学者

Today in Focus

2025-11-12

27 分钟
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How entangled are China and the UK universities sector? Amy Hawkins reports. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/infocus
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  • This is The Guardian.

  • Today, how China is trying to silence UK academics.

  • We knew from the get-go that we were going to be monitored,

  • that our work was going to be heavily scrutinized,

  • and that it would not please the Chinese government.

  • Laura Murphy is a professor of human rights and contemporary slavery at Sheffield Hallam University in the north of England.

  • For 20 years, she's devoted her career to exposing forced labour,

  • any work or service that people are forced to do against their will,

  • usually under threat of punishment.

  • So when she started investigating how the Chinese government was exploiting the country's Uighur community to mine rare minerals and to make consumer goods for the West,

  • she knew it would prove controversial.

  • Since 2016-17,

  • the Chinese government had created a big system of internment camps where they started this system of state and post-force labor that means that anyone who is requested to work by a government official or through a government program has no choice but to comply.

  • The Chinese government denies the allegations of forced labor and says their factory is designed to raise people out of poverty.

  • But papers published by Laura and her colleagues told a different story,

  • and their findings went round the world.

  • They were cited by Western governments, as well as the United Nations,

  • and helped to root out goods made by forced labour from international supply chains.

  • We show supply chains, we trace them all the way to the Western markets,

  • and so we were naming big international companies as well.