Archived version
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Murphy’s work with Sheffield Hallam’s Helena Kennedy Centre, a human rights institute, began in May 2021, and over three years her team published a series of reports detailing the use of Chinese forced labour in global supply chains.
Murphy had built a team and established its members as leading experts. It secured more than £700,000 in grants to conduct research, which had been consulted by governments and big companies.
Murphy was living in China in the 2000s when she became aware of the repression going on in the country’s vast northwestern Xinjiang region. Living in its capital, Urumqi, she saw how Uighurs, a Muslim ethnic minority, were frequently rounded up and imprisoned for no reason and how young men were targeted repeatedly by police. She had friends who disappeared overnight.
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Murphy was initially lauded by the university for her work. The vice-chancellor at the time, Professor Sir Chris Husbands, wrote to her in May 2021 to congratulate her on a report into forced Uighur labour in the solar energy industry.
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By August 2022, Murphy’s team had published four reports. However, unknown to Murphy — but evident in internal emails — concern was growing.
“As you know, Prof Laura Murphy has now published four reports on forced labour and supply chains in Uighur regions [and] we would want to assert Laura’s right as an academic to undertake serious research without fear or favour. However, we do now know that there are some very direct lines being drawn,” one administrator notes. The email continues, saying that “our Beijing team” has been subject to social media abuse, and that the university is advising those staff to work from home.
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The email notes that “perhaps [it is] not a surprise that the Chinese are drawing direct lines between Laura’s work and the work of the [university]; they wouldn’t remotely understand academic freedom”.
‘Things in Beijing have kicked off’
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Internal emails in April last year show an employee in the university’s Beijing office was subject to three hours of interrogation about some Helena Kennedy Centre research by “national security service” employees. “Basically, things in Beijing have kicked off,” it summarises.
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A May memo headed “crisis management team (China)” states of the interrogation: “The tone was threatening and the message to cease the research activity was made clear.”
By this point, the university’s website had been blocked in China which, administrators noted, meant it could no longer be used as a recruitment tool. There was a fear that the Chinese government would cease to recognise its degrees, affecting its alumni.
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The university was also defending a defamation lawsuit from a Hong Kong-based company that had been named in the team’s research. In short, the China issue had become a huge headache. Or, as one email puts it, “attempting to retain the business [in China] and publish the research are now untenable bedfellows”.
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It was around this time that Murphy, who was on a career break, working for the US Department of Homeland Security as an adviser before returning to Sheffield, got a “distressed call” from a colleague. “She told me, ‘This seems really serious, and the [April] interrogation was about you’.”
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Alarm bells ringing, she consulted experts and, she says, told administrators at Sheffield Hallam that they needed to raise these threats with the government, or with MI5.
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Instead, in August last year, the call finally came from Murphy’s bosses that a report she had secured funding for and lined up to publish on her return to Sheffield Hallam about forced Uighur labour in critical minerals supply chains could not be published with any association with the Sheffield Hallam name. Later on, Murphy says, when it became apparent that would be too complicated they decided it could not be published full stop, and that they would hand back the grant.
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Administrators also later suggested that independent research projects on the subject of China that were not associated with Sheffield Hallam may present a “conflict of interest”, although did not explain exactly what that meant, Murphy says. A proposal for another research project was rejected because, the university told her, their insurance wouldn’t cover it. Internal emails show insurers had told administrators their insurance would no longer cover certain research.
The initial support and commendation she received from Husbands, who stepped down as vice-chancellor in 2023 to be replaced by Liz Mossop, felt long gone.
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“I’m fighting for my academic freedom,” says Murphy, “I’m tired but it’s worth it because this is part of a larger Chinese government campaign to silence what’s happening to the Uighur people.”
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Since Murphy’s case came to light several other academics have reported their own stories of academic repression at UK universities on the subject of China. Many more, The Sunday Times has been told, don’t have the resources to speak out but face the same kind of chilling effect on their academic work at the hands of institutions.
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Last week MI5 warned that Chinese spies had been posing as headhunters on LinkedIn to make contact with MPs. Whether it’s putting pressure on universities or undermining lawmakers, Parton says, the goal is a slow erosion of America from its position as the world’s most important power. Its allies are being targeted too.
“If everyone starts showing a bit of backbone, then the Chinese will back off. They’ll push as hard as they can and until there’s any pushback they’ll keep pushing, but what’s the alternative?” Parton adds.
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Although Murphy intends to keep publishing research on forced labour in China when she returns to Sheffield Hallam, she says the row has taken a toll. All her team lost their jobs when her research was cancelled and the grants were handed back.
She has spent exhausting months trying to find new roles for them, fighting to regain her academic freedoms and to preserve reports that are not yet in the public sphere. “That’s the point of [China’s] interference,” Murphy says, “it’s to slow us down.”
