When Keir Starmer met his Chinese counterpart earlier this month, he gripped Xi Jinping’s hand and proclaimed the importance of a “strong” bilateral relationship. The meeting marked a warming of relations between the two nations, which have been decidedly frosty since Boris Johnson banned Huawei from our communications networks on security grounds in 2020, with Richard Moore, the head of MI6, also claiming China was his agency’s single biggest priority. Beijing, he said, was busy securing research “of particular interest” to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Perhaps Starmer should have heeded these warnings. For just as Johnson and the spooks understood, China is increasingly exploiting technology for geopolitical ends, using hi-tech heft to project its power and surveil its opponents. And as I can reveal, it has received help — from scientists working here in Britain, even as cash-strapped UK universities have accepted funding for these projects via dubious Chinese sources.

In the early years of the last decade, China reali