(TibetanReview.net, Nov03’25) – China carried out a campaign of threats and intimidation lasting more than two years in attempts to get a university in the UK to shut down sensitive research into alleged human rights abuses, reported bbc.com and theguardian.com Nov 3, citing documentary evidence. The university itself is accused of having initially succumbed to China’s pressure for the sake of access to the Chinese student market.
The report said Sheffield Hallam University staff in China were threatened by individuals described by them as being from China’s National Security Service who demanded the research being done in Sheffield be halted.
Access to the university’s websites from China was blocked, impeding its ability to recruit Chinese students, in a campaign of threats and intimidation lasting more than two years.
The Chinese government action was stated to have led university officials to say, in an internal email from Jul 2024, that “attempting to retain the business in China and publication of the research are now untenable bedfellows”.
The research in question was the work of a team led by Laura Murphy, professor of human rights and contemporary slavery at Sheffield Hallam, into allegations that Uyghur Muslims in the north-western region of Xinjiang were subject to forced labour.
Murphy is one of best-known professors at the university’s Helena Kennedy Centre for International Justice (HKC), a leading research institution focused on human rights, noted theguardian.com Nov 3 report.
Following pressure from the Chinese state and a separate defamation lawsuit against the university, Sheffield Hallam decided, in late 2024, not to publish a final piece of research by Prof Murphy and her team into forced labour in China.
And in early 2025, university administrators told her that she could “not continue with her research into supply chains and forced labour in China”, the bbc.com report said.
She sued the university for failing in its duty to protect her academic freedom and submitted a “subject access request” demanding that Sheffield Hallam hand over any relevant internal documents.
And the documents she obtained showed the university “had negotiated directly with a foreign intelligence service to trade my academic freedom for access to the Chinese student market,” she has told the BBC.
She has added: “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.”
In October, Sheffield Hallam said it was lifting the ban on Murphy’s work on China and forced labour, and apologised, said theguardian.com report.
The general secretary of the University and College Union, Jo Grady, has said “it is incredibly worrying that Sheffield Hallam appears to have attempted to silence its own professor on behalf of a foreign government”.
Also, a government spokesperson has told the BBC that “any attempt by a foreign state to intimidate, harass or harm individuals in the UK will not be tolerated, and the government has made this clear to Beijing after learning of this case”.