Huawei influence at Cambridge University under the scanner: Report
LONDON: Huawei has been accused of infiltrating a Cambridge University research centre after most of its academics were found to have ties with the Chinese tech giant, a UK media report said on Monday.
The Times' newspaper reports that three out of four of the directors at the Cambridge Centre for Chinese Management (CCCM) have ties to Huawei, with its so-called Chief Representative a former senior Huawei vice-president.
Johnny Patterson, policy director of the Hong Kong Watch campaign group, told the newspaper it appeared that the centre had been infiltrated by the company and urged the university to investigate.
The CCCM was launched in 2018 in Shenzhen, a key centre for Chinese innovation.
Its chief representative, Yanping Hu, is a former Huawei senior vice-president, who, it has been reported, is entitled to a special allowance from the State Council.
The State Council, headed by the Chinese Premier, is China's Cabinet.
Perceived academic influence is clearly an issue and just as universities would never take money from tobacco companies to investigate links with cancer so institutions need to be very careful about where they accept their money, said Tom Tugendhat, the Conservative Party MP head of the China Research Group and Chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee.
A fellow Tory MP, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, warned that the British universities had become far too dependent on Chinese money in recent years and that Cambridge was one of the worst offenders.
The government needs to urgently set up an inquiry into the UK's dependency on China across a range of institutions and companies, he said.
According to the media report, around 20 leading British universities had collectively accepted more than 40 million pounds in funding from Huawei and state-owned Chinese companies in recent years.
In 2018, the University of Oxford said that it would no longer accept funding from Huawei.
The Chinese tech giant is banned from providing Britain's 5G infrastructure owing to concerns around national security and its alleged links to Beijing.
In a statement, Huawei said: We are incredibly proud of our relationships with UK universities and any suggestion of impropriety is absurd and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of academic partnerships with businesses from around the world.
Cambridge University is yet to comment on the newspaper report.