Blacklisted technology company Huawei has plunged at least £30 million into British universities via research grants and donations.

The Epoch Times can reveal the telecom giant—deemed a national security threat by the United States government—is the biggest China-based donor to higher educational institutions in the UK.

Over the past four years, Huawei and its advanced chip-producing company HiSilicon spent millions of pounds financing expert-led information, technology and communications projects.

One university received £10.7 million in grants since 2017.

The funding has once again sparked concern from critics who say the Beijing bankrolling is putting universities, and the cities where they are based, at risk of “huge” damage.

The revelations come just days after one of Canada’s leading universities said it was cutting ties with Huawei.

The University of Waterloo said it would no longer work with the Chinese tech giant after its contract runs out this year to “safeguard scientific research” at the school, the university’s Vice-President for Research Charmaine Dean said.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service previously warned Canadian academic institutions that research partnerships can be vehicles for espionage, compromising intellectual property and allowing technological advancements to fall into the hands of the Chinese or other regimes.

Dean said in a written statement that ending the university’s partnership with Huawei will leave a gap in research funding that she hopes Canadian businesses and government will help fill.

The £30 million of university funding from the telecoms company has been gathered from analysis by The Epoch Times.

Freedom of Information (FOI) requests sent to over 160 education institutions showed many were taking money from Huawei and its other blacklisted subsidiaries, as well as other Beijing companies accused of crime and human rights abuses.

Of all the British institutions that responded to questions over the sources of their funding, almost all had received grants or donations from Huawei or its companies.

Some universities—including the London School of Economics—refused to answer questions over their Beijing cash sources, meaning the multi-million-pound figure is likely to be significantly higher.

Of those that did respond, the University of Edinburgh confirmed it has received £10,798,369 in research grants from the 5G giant.

From 2017 to 2022, the Scottish university has been relying on Huawei for financial support towards tech projects carried out by its School of Informatics.

Last year Huawei Technologies provided a grant for “research collaboration in cloud-based service assurance.” The university would only say the funding fell between £200,001 and £450,000.

The same year it received a further £222,257 for “advanced research in the area of computer operating systems.”

In 2020, Edinburgh accepted a £4.2 million cash boost from Huawei for its Distributed Data Management and Processing Laboratory.

The tech company has also funded multiple studentships and doctorate students for research in similar fields.

The Imperial College of London, which specialises in science, engineering, medicine, and business, was awarded £18,380,012 from China sources between 2018 and 2022.

Huawei is listed as one of the 20 Beijing-linked organisations putting forward huge cash sums towards research projects.

According to FOI documents, 16 of the university’s projects were funded by the telecoms company in those years.

They included research on big data machine learning, robust articulated hand-tracking algorithms, and secure channel coding.

Huewai also donated unknown sums towards Imperial College’s Academic Salon in Intelligent Communications, AI workshops and seminars, and projects in “next generation data centres.”

As previously revealed by The Epoch Times, the London university also received cash from China National Offshore Oil Corporation—a state-owned oil company accused in the past of having drug-trafficking ties and carrying out human rights abuses in Burma.

The company is also said to have collaborated with the Chinese Communist Party to send employees who practice Falun Gong to labour camps and mind-control facilities unless they renounce their beliefs.

Two of the UK’s most esteemed universities, Cambridge and Oxford, also received significant funding from Huewai.

Over the past four years, the University of Cambridge has pocketed £2.6 million in research grants.

It also accepted an estimated £10 million in donations from the telecoms company, according to FOI documents.

Of those, seven donations fall between £100,000 to £499,000, five between £500,000 to £999,000, and one between £1.2 million to £4.9 million.

Cambridge said those donations went towards computer science, student support, engineering and “millennium mathematics.”

The University of Oxford received funding for only one research grant from Huawei in 2018: a cash sum between £100,000 and £249,000 for a project on AI robustness.

Multiple other universities received smaller but significant donations from Huawei or its chip-producing company HiSilicon.

They include the University of Reading, which in 2021 signed a £50,000 research agreement to “identify the key factors that impacted the 5G programme of Huawei” in the UK.

In 2022, the British government ordered that Huawei technology must be removed from all 5G public networks by the end of 2027.

The UK ban on Huawei in 5G followed guidance from the National Cyber Security Centre that the security of the company’s products—such as equipment used at phone mast sites and telephone exchanges—can no longer be managed owing to the impact of U.S. sanctions.

The firm was listed as a national security threat in 2020, with U.S. companies banned from using subsidies to buy its equipment.

The United States House Intelligence Committee previously warned that Huawei’s telecommunications equipment could be used by the Chinese regime to spy on American citizens.

Mark Sabah, UK and EU director of The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, said universities have put themselves at huge risk by accepting just vast amounts of funding from sources such as Huawei.

“The sheer volume of investment by Chinese companies, which all have ties to the Chinese Communist Party, exposes the risk that British universities have should the government ever choose to enforce who and where donations can come from,” he told The Epoch Times.

“It’s a high-risk strategy by universities and one which could do a huge amount of damage to the higher education sector, as well as to British cities in general.

“Because if universities started losing money and students, they have not made sufficient plans to mitigate the risk of those investments.”

Sabah said the tech giant has not only invested millions in British universities but also other projects including an attempt to run the UK’s 5G network.

He added, “The government rightly stopped that happening due to massive opposition.”

“The next step is to be questioning who is giving money to our higher education institutions, why they are giving money in such numbers, and are those universities putting in place a risk mitigation plan should that funding ever be withdrawn?”