How China bought Cambridge

One of the first places Professor Stephen Toope visited as Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University was the Chinese embassy in London. He posed for photographs with ambassador Liu Xiaoming and the two men discussed furthering the ‘golden era’ of China-UK relations. Shortly after that 2017 meeting, Toope told Xinhua, China’s state news agency: ‘There will be more opportunities to engage actively with China, a country with an extraordinarily growing influence which a university like Cambridge must pay attention to.’

Fast forward three and a half years and the shine has come off the ‘golden era’. But word has been slow to reach Cambridge, where Professor Toope continues his headlong pursuit of Chinese money. China is adept at directing funding towards areas of research which it sees as strategically important and it has targeted a range of British institutions. Few have allowed themselves to be so comprehensively compromised as Cambridge.

The university has begun work on a new home for the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. It is retrofitting the city’s old telephone exchange at 1 Regent Street, turning it into the ultimate low-energybuilding at a cost of £12.8 million. The building is called Entopia (a play on ‘energy’ and ‘utopia’), a name coined by Lei Zhang, a Chinese billionaire, whose opaque Shanghai-based renewable energy company, Envision, is providing just under half the funds.

When Mr Zhang is not building wind turbines, he is a member of the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp parliament, and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a party advisory body. In March, while Toope was welcoming ‘the most sustainable premises in the University of Cambridge estate’, the NPC was endorsing a law to neuter Hong Kong’s electoral system, snuffing the last signs of life out of democracy in the former British colony.

A month earlier, it was reported that Cambridge’s Department of Engineering had received a ‘generous gift’ from the Chinese company Tencent to help fund research into futuristic quantum computers.