While there has been greater awareness in British universities and better government support in the past years around the risks of research collaboration with Chinese institutions, government guidelines and risks awareness among academics are still “quite narrow,” a committee of MPs heard.
Giving evidence to the Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday during an ad-hoc hearing on UK universities’ engagement with autocracies, Fiona Quimbre, defence and security analyst at RAND Europe, told MPs that the security risk is “much larger” than someone stealing information from the universities and transferred it back to China.
“The current guidelines I think are quite narrow. The reason for that is because I think the risk awareness itself is quite narrow,” Quimbre told MPs, adding that the problem is “much larger.”…