The security alert issued by MI5 regarding a Chinese state-owned conglomerate accused of conducting espionage in the UK reveals the extent to which British intelligence remains concerned about Beijing’s influence, and risks casting a shadow over UK-China cooperation at a time when the bilateral relationship is enjoying a revival.

The UK’s domestic security service on Wednesday warned researchers and academics to cease work with the China Academy of General Technology (CAGT), an organisation MI5 described as a “significant threat”.

The CAGT, which is also known as the China General Technology Research Institute, is accused of paying UK academics working in sensitive fields such as artificial intelligence and cybersecurity for “research that directly improves MSS technical capability for espionage”. The MSS is China’s Ministry of State Security, its intelligence agency.

China’s approach to intelligence gathering involves hoovering up vast amounts of data, often from unsuspecting individuals who believe they are participating in normal research or consultancy work.

This year the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre warned businesses about Beijing-backed attempts to hack into everyday devices such as wifi routers.

Last year, MI5 issued another China-related security alert, warning parliamentarians about approaches from two LinkedIn profiles thought to be linked to Chinese intelligence.

Wednesday’s alert said academic institutions or researchers should be aware of the 2023 National Security Act, which makes it an offence to engage in conduct that is likely to materially assist a foreign intelligence agency. The warning is likely to send a chill through the UK’s cash-strapped higher education institutions, which have for years turned to China for funding and collaboration opportunities.

The UK is one of the leading countries to partner with China’s higher education sector. In May, China’s education ministry announced 219 new transnational education partnerships, with more than one-fifth of the approvals being with British universities. That puts the UK at the top of the list of partner countries, ahead of Russia, France and Italy.

Chinese students are also the largest group of non-EU international students in the UK, generating around £600m per year for the higher education sector.

But there has been growing concern in the UK that partnerships with China pose a risk to national security. The 2023 Intelligence and Security Committee report on China said that UK academic institutions “provide a rich feeding ground for China to achieve both political influence and economic advantage” and flagged the risk of China “directing or stealing UK academic research in order to build, or short-cut to, Chinese expertise”.

In this case, MI5 said that more than 100 academics linked to the UK had contributed to projects funded by the MSS via the front company. The areas of interest were AI, cybersecurity and steganography, the embedding of data in pictures online.

Sam Goodman, senior policy director at the China Strategic Risks Institute, said that UK academics were “between a rock and a hard place” when trying to navigate areas of advanced interest that could be of interest to Chinese intelligence.

“There is a lack of a coherent steer from government on something like AI. It isn’t particularly clear on AI at this juncture what levels of collaboration we can have with the Chinese,” Goodman said.

Analysts argue that the UK should do more to highlight which areas are of potentially dual-use interest to Chinese intelligence and provide more guidance to universities and academics.

“It’s all very well issuing these warnings,” says Charles Parton, a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. “Actually far more important, surely, is a consideration of which technologies can be co-operated with China, and which can’t”. He said that naming specific Chinese companies as a risk would not help UK researchers to do due diligence on every potential partnership. “The Chinese are not stupid. If they want to hide the orign of someone, they’ll do it,” Parton said.

Meia Nouwens, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, also said that more clarity was needed on the UK side to help guide researchers working in sensitive fields.

Nouwens said: “A problem has been that in the past there hasn’t been a great deal of discussion of what areas of research constitute a national security risk. Without understanding the limits are of what the UK seeks to protect, it is impossible to have a conversation about managing risk”.

The MI5 alert specifically accused the China Academy of General Technology of being a front for China’s intelligence. But any research institution in China is ultimately controlled by the Chinese communist party. “Research institutes that are conducting research on areas of strategic interest for China such as technology will have oversight from the Party-state,” Nouwens notes.

That does not mean that any collaboration with Chinese educational institutions is inherently dangerous. But it does mean that UK academics working in sensitive fields will feel increasingly uneasy about working with the country that has financially underpinned the UK’s higher education sector for decades.