Recently, I visited a university in the UK and struck up a conversation with a woman whose story has stayed with me. She has a PhD; her thesis was on Chinese interference in Britain, and she is now studying for a law degree. When I asked why someone with her qualifications would go back to the start in a different field, she told me that academia had canceled her because of her work on China. She is not famous, which left me wondering why anyone would bother to cancel her at all. If a researcher with no public profile can be driven out for that, then Beijing’s reach into Western life is far greater than most of us have been prepared to admit.
Her case is not an isolated one, as a survey of British China scholars makes plain. The 2025 report begins by declaring that “the study of China in the UK is in crisis,” and it traces the cause to the Chinese Communist Party, which “treats academic disciplines such as economics, history, politics, and sociology as potential vectors of opposition or criticism which could be a threat to regime stability.” The pressure begins with access to China itself. Fifty-eight percent of respondents agreed that researching or speaking publicly on sensitive subjects makes a visa harder to get, and one scholar admitted to avoiding sensitive research for the simple reason that they wanted to keep visiting the country.
Read Full Article: https://amgreatness.com/2026/10/27/beijings-open-door-how-the-west-let-china-in-and-paid-for-it/
