President Xi of China visits Manchester University in 2015. Higher education exports to China now represent the UK’s single largest service-sector export to any countryChina poses a “genuine and real threat to freedom of speech” at British universities, a former minister has warned. Lord Johnson of Marylebone, the prime minister’s younger brother, said Beijing was seeking to influence academic research that touches on its interests, leading academics to self-censor. SponsoredAt a webinar run by Times Higher Education, the former universities minister said: “I think, to my mind, the most important freedom of speech issue facing universities today relates to self-censorship around China ... that is going to be a very, very important, long-running structural question. “And that’s why it’s so important that universities can contract with China in full confidence that they are doing so using a common framework that’s established by the sector and supported by their own

Source: The Times May 12, 2021 16:02 UTC