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The university’s joint venture campus in China maintains partnerships and close links with entities sanctioned by Britain, the US, EU and others for supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and assisting China’s military modernisation and human rights violations, an investigation by the Australian Strategic Research Institute (ASPI) has found.
The previously unreported links to sanctions highlight the risks posed by foreign science, technology and academic partnerships in China in a period of heightened geopolitical rivalry, intensifying technological competition and deepening China-Russia cooperation. The joint venture campus’s partnerships cover a range of areas but centre on critical technologies, many with both military and civilian applications.
These partnerships include a new China-Russia cooperation centre whose Russian co-director is affiliated with a sanctioned Russian government agency; a formal new initiative with a leading Chinese government supercomputing centre that was placed on the US federal entity list in 2021 for involvement in China’s military modernisation efforts; and a chips school co-founded by a US-sanctioned Chinese government semiconductor research institute. Top staff in China have said the joint campus aims to design and manufacture its own semiconductors.
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The joint venture campus, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), was established in 2006 by the University of Liverpool and its partner institution, Xi’an Jiaotong University, a leading Chinese defence university that has supplied the Rocket Force of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and is supervised by China’s defence-industry ministry. Located in Suzhou, a city in Jiangsu province, XJTLU is the largest foreign joint venture university in China and one of many such joint campuses and institutes that have been formed in China with US, European, British, Australian and other foreign partners in recent decades.
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The University of Liverpool is one of Britain’s top research universities. It is a member of the country’s prestigious Russell Group of research-intensive universities and receives defence, security and intelligence funding from Western governments. In September 2024, for example, the defence ministers of the US, Britain and Australia announced in an official AUKUS communique that the University of Liverpool was an inaugural winner of the AUKUS Electronic Warfare Innovation Prize Challenge.
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XJTLU has become a research powerhouse, with around 25,000 students and 1,000 academic staff members. It houses several provincial and municipal key research institutes, including a national supercomputing centre, a robotics research institute, and an advanced semiconductor research institute that partners with smart-city company China Huaxin.
In 2024, XJTLU received funding from the PLA’s National University of Defense Technology for a research project called ‘Deep Learning-based Adversarial Sample Defense Technology for Communication Signal Modulation Recognition’. In 2025, an XJTLU research team set a new global record in an international competition in quantum-resistant cryptography. Researchers from the University of Liverpool also collaborate with XJTLU researchers on topics such as radar and autonomous driving.
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In April 2025, XJTLU launched a research partnership with the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, one of seven Chinese supercomputing groups added to the US federal entity list in 2021 due to their involvement in China’s military modernisation efforts.
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XJTLU’s School of CHIPS, which focuses on research and development for advanced computing chips, was co-founded in 2019 by a Chinese government research institute, the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, that was placed on the US federal entity list in 2024 for acting against US national security and foreign policy interests. The dean of the XJTLU School of CHIPS, Wei Chen, said in 2024 his goal was for XJTLU to design and manufacture its own semiconductors.
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Sugon, a Chinese supercomputer manufacturer that co-established XJTLU’s School of AI and Advanced Computing in 2018, was added to the US federal entity list in 2019 due to the ‘publicly acknowledged’ military end uses of its high-performance computers.
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XJTLU also hosts a joint lab with iFlytek, a Chinese technology company added to the US federal entity list in 2019 for its role in the Chinese government’s high-tech surveillance regime targeting Muslim minorities in China’s Xinjiang region.
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The University of Liverpool website, which has a dedicated page for the XJTLU partnership and related news, does not mention the China-Russia centre, XJTLU’s joint lab with iFlytek, XJTLU’s new partnership with the supercomputing centre in Wuxi, or the school’s aspirations to make its own semiconductors in China.
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Britain itself has a range of sanctions targeting Russia, including some that prohibit the provision of professional and business services ‘to a person connected with Russia’ and which apply to ‘any UK persons anywhere.’ The British government also placed research and innovation sanctions on Russia in 2022. This included pausing British public funds being spent on projects ‘with a Russian dimension’ and ceasing collaborative projects with Russia. At that time the British government also commissioned an assessment to ‘isolate and freeze activities which benefit the Russian regime’.
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In addition to its success in winning an inaugural AUKUS electronic-warfare innovation prize, the University of Liverpool has active grants from the European Commission and US government, including grants from the US Air Force and FBI.
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The XJTLU China-Russia centre’s Russian co-director, Artem Semenov, is an adviser to the Moscow regional government and a member of the public advisory council of Rossotrudnichestvo, a humanitarian and cultural agency under the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The EU sanctioned Rossotrudnichestvo in 2022, describing it as ‘the main state agency projecting the Kremlin’s soft power and hybrid influence,’ adding that it acted as an ‘umbrella organization for a network of Russian compatriots and agents of influence, and it funds various public diplomacy and propaganda projects, consolidating the activities of pro-Russian players and disseminating the Kremlin’s narratives.’
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A former Russian senator and current adviser to the Moscow regional government, Olga Zabralova, led the Russian government delegation that attended the centre’s launch. Zabralova is sanctioned by Britain, the US, the EU, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Ukraine, Australia, New Zealand and Monaco. She was a member of the Russian Federation Council that ratified the government’s decision to annex parts of occupied Ukraine. XJTLU hosted Zabralova and her delegation at X-Bar, the student activity and recreation centre.
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In a written response to questions from ASPI, a University of Liverpool spokesperson said, ‘The University of Liverpool has no involvement in XJTLU’s Centre for China-Russia Humanitarian Cooperation and Development, nor with the companies mentioned ...’
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