ACADEMIC ENTANGLEMENTSA British University’s Technology Entanglements with Russia and China
A major British research university’s joint venture campus in China maintains partnerships and close links with entities sanctioned by Britain, the US, EU and others for supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and assisting China’s military modernization and human rights violations. The links to sanctions highlight the risks posed by foreign science, technology and academic partnerships in China in a period of heightened geopolitical rivalry, intensifying technological competition and deepening China-Russia cooperation.
A major British research university’s joint venture campus in China maintains partnerships and close links with entities sanctioned by Britain, the US, EU and others for supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and assisting China’s military modernization and human rights violations, ASPI research has found.
The previously unreported links to sanctions highlight the risks posed by foreign science, technology and academic partnerships in China in a period of heightened geopolitical rivalry, intensifying technological competition and deepening China-Russia cooperation. The joint venture campus’s partnerships cover a range of areas but center on critical technologies, many with both military and civilian applications.
These partnerships include a new China-Russia cooperation center whose Russian co-director is affiliated with a sanctioned Russian government agency; a formal new initiative with a leading Chinese government supercomputing center that was placed on the US federal entity list in 2021 for involvement in China’s military modernization efforts; and a chips school co-founded by a US-sanctioned Chinese government semiconductor research institute. Top staff in China have said the joint campus aims to design and manufacture its own semiconductors.
The joint venture campus, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), was established in 2006 by the University of Liverpool and its partner institution, Xi’an Jiaotong University, a leading Chinese defense university that has supplied the Rocket Force of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and is supervised by China’s defense-industry ministry. Located in Suzhou, a city in Jiangsu province, XJTLU is the largest foreign joint venture university in China and one of many such joint campuses and institutes that have been formed in China with US, European, British, Australian and other foreign partners in recent decades. XJTLU undergraduates typically receive two degrees simultaneously, one from XJTLU and one from the University of Liverpool. XJTLU says on its website, ‘all XJTLU programs are accredited and moderated by the University of Liverpool.’
The University of Liverpool is one of Britain’s top research universities. It is a member of the country’s prestigious Russell Group of research-intensive universities and receives defense, security and intelligence funding from Western governments. In September 2024, for example, the defense ministers of the US, Britain and Australia announced in an official AUKUS communique that the University of Liverpool was an inaugural winner of the AUKUS Electronic Warfare Innovation Prize Challenge.
