About UK-China Transparency

UK-China Transparency

UK-China Transparency is a British research organisation that publishes investigative research and a newsletter on ties between the United Kingdom and China. It was founded in 2023 on the premise that the public deserves more and better information about ties between the two countries, and that transparency should be a key pillar of Britain's engagement with China. It is a registered charity, number 1201902, with the Charity Commission for England and Wales. The organisation was set up and is directed by Sam Dunning, a freelance investigative writer and researcher and an associate fellow of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). Although filed in this directory under Beijing, its subject, UK-China Transparency is based in the United Kingdom, and its work concerns the British end of the relationship: universities, technology, politics and business.

Charitable status and purposes

UK-China Transparency is constituted as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation whose only voting members are its charity trustees. Its charitable objects are the advancement, for the public benefit, of education, training and research in the relationships between China and the United Kingdom in education, business and culture, and in good governance, ethics and transparency in such relationships, including research into human rights issues. It pursues those objects by carrying out specific research projects and disseminating appropriate publications. The year 2024 was the first full year of the charity's operation, the year in which it engaged Sam Dunning as its paid director. Its trustees in its first full year were Martin Rowland Village as chair, Dunning himself, Sir Bernard Walter Silverman as treasurer, and Andrew Robinson, who joined in February 2024. Charity Commission records show changes since: Dunning stood down as a trustee on 2 December 2025 while remaining director, and Bryn Ivor Harris became a trustee the same day.

Founding and director

Dunning's path to founding the organisation ran through earlier investigative work on China's influence in Britain. His research on Confucius Institutes, the Chinese government-backed language and culture centres hosted by universities, shaped a debate that led to UK parliamentary scrutiny and changes in government policy, according to his RUSI biography. RUSI describes him as a freelance writer, researcher and producer specialising in China's foreign policy and influence around the world, whose investigative research has been widely published in the UK and internationally, and lists him as an associate fellow of its Military Sciences research group. He set up UK-China Transparency to improve the state of knowledge about ties between China and the UK, conducting and promoting research on technological collaboration, academic partnerships, the Chinese Communist Party's United Front work and other aspects of the relationship.

Research programmes

The charity has restructured its work around five core research programmes: Repression and Surveillance; Strategic Technology; Influence and Engagement; Cyber and Data; and Labour Exploitation. The programmes organise a wide brief. Under Strategic Technology, it investigates the sale of Imagination Technologies and the acquisition of Plessey Semiconductors, and monitors Chinese involvement in UK defence, semiconductor supply chains, venture capital and science and technology research. Under Repression and Surveillance, its major recent work is a report on academic freedom within UK China studies, based on survey data from fifty academics, which its trustees' report says indicates systemic issues of intimidation, self-censorship and career risk. Its trustees have described its focus as critical topics where there has been a lack of information and evidence: intellectual property theft and connections in technology, and interference in academia, communities and politics.

University collaboration research

Universities are the organisation's most developed subject. It has studied connections between Cambridge University and the Chinese military-industrial complex, and a programme to connect data scientists at Imperial College London to the part of that complex focused on designing military unmanned surface vehicles — intelligent gunboats — finding, in the latter case, an overlap between the individuals involved in putting the programme together and networks associated with the United Front in the UK. It places such cases in context: military-related research is, it notes, only a small portion of overall collaboration between British and Chinese scientists, and it runs an ongoing programme collecting and analysing data on visiting researchers and Chinese-domiciled and Chinese-born scientists and students in the UK, and their contributions to the public benefit. As of 2026 it describes itself as the main source of free, publicly available granular data on the number of Chinese science students at doctoral, master's and undergraduate level at British institutions. It also tracks the UK government's intensified regulation of scientific interaction with China, through the Academic Technology Approval Scheme, the Research Collaboration Advice Team, the Export Control Joint Unit, the National Security and Investment Act and the investment security unit in the Cabinet Office.

The Lau China Institute and other investigations

Among its 2024 publications, the charity's research on the Lau China Institute at King's College London — the UK's largest China research centre — showed that more than 99 per cent of its funding derives from a single donor living in the People's Republic of China. It also researched a senior Imperial College professor and the scheme to connect the university's leading data scientists into collaboration with China's leading military marine drone designer, and a Foreign Office interpreter and translator who worked simultaneously for Chinese propaganda and influence agencies. These investigations share a method: assembling documentary evidence about funding, appointments and institutional relationships that is public in principle but scattered in practice, and publishing it in a form that journalists, parliamentarians and university managers can use.

The Mass Translation Project

The Mass Translation Project is the organisation's most distinctive undertaking. Its pilot leveraged artificial intelligence tools and volunteer proofreaders to translate important Chinese-language documents into English, beginning with an internal United Front Work Department textbook used to train Chinese Communist Party cadres in influence work among the Chinese diaspora worldwide. The project addresses a structural problem in British China-watching: much of the documentary record of how the Chinese party-state organises its overseas influence work exists only in Chinese, in documents that are difficult to obtain and slow to translate. By combining machine translation with volunteer human proofreading, the project aims to make such documents available to researchers, journalists and policymakers who could not otherwise read them. The charity maintains an online library of its research materials, hosted on Google Drive and searchable by file and folder name.

Academic freedom and the Cold Crises report

In August 2025 the organisation published a report on academic freedom in UK China studies, titled in coverage "Cold Crises: Academic Freedom and Interference in China Studies in the UK". Based on the experiences of fifty China studies scholars, the report described intimidation, surveillance and financial leverage affecting discussion of China in British universities, and said Chinese students and academics faced pressure to report on politically sensitive conversations; it accused Chinese Students and Scholars Associations of acting as surveillance tools, creating a climate of fear. The report was covered in national media and debated in higher education circles; the Chinese embassy denied claims in it. Its findings fed into a wider British discussion in 2025 and 2026 about coercion and harassment of foreign students, in which England's free speech champion expressed concern and the security service MI5 issued a public alert about academics unknowingly contributing to projects funded by an institute with strong ties to China's intelligence service.

Parliament, media and growth

UK-China Transparency has submitted written evidence to committees of the UK Parliament, including evidence catalogued under the reference DIS0006. Its findings have been covered by the Financial Times, The Guardian and The Times, among others. Its trustees report that in its most recent reported year it significantly expanded its operational capacity, doubling its paid staff, increasing its research output and broadening its advocacy, education and outreach activities, with new regulatory guidance emerging in areas it had investigated, including recommendations on the reduction or termination of Confucius Institute and China Scholarship Council arrangements. A newsletter, published on Substack, carries its shorter-form research and news alongside the longer reports on its website.

Assessment

UK-China Transparency is a young organisation — founded in 2023, with 2024 as its first full year — that has established itself, in its trustees' words, as a key source of information and research in the UK's developing "China knowledge ecosystem". Its niche is documentary transparency: it does not primarily offer opinion about China policy, but evidence about the mechanics of the UK-China relationship — who funds a research centre, who designs a university collaboration, what an internal training textbook says, how many Chinese science students study at British institutions. That evidence has been taken up by national newspapers, parliamentary committees and regulators. Its small scale is part of its record: a handful of trustees, a paid director from 2024, doubled staff in its second full year, and a research output that has punched at national level in the British debate about China.