Mick Hartley

Some useful investigative reporting from the BBC for a change – China intimidated UK university to ditch human rights research, documents show:

China waged a campaign of harassment and intimidation directed at a UK university to get it to shut down sensitive research into alleged human rights abuses, documents seen by the BBC show.

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.

And 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.

Why? Because Laura Murphy, professor of human rights and contemporary slavery at Sheffield Hallam, was investigating allegations that Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang were subject to forced labour and cultural (if not actual) genocide. Naturally the authorities at Hallam University caved in and told Murphy she couldn’t publish.

In late 2024, following pressure from the Chinese state and a separate defamation law suit against the university, Sheffield Hallam decided not to publish a final piece of research by Prof Murphy and her team into forced labour.

And in early 2025, university administrators told her that she could “not continue with her research into supply chains and forced labour in China”.

She initiated legal action against the university for failing in its duty to protect her academic freedom and she submitted a “subject access request” demanding Sheffield Hallam hand over any relevant internal documents.

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 told the BBC.

She 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.”

With all the unwelcome publicity, the university has now changed tack and apologised to Murphy. She had to threaten legal action first, though.