How China spies on the West

In December last year Oxford University students were offered £15,000 in prize money if they could solve challenges relating to the surveillance and tracking of devices and their users.

‘Huawei welcomes a selection of top-of-the-class students to their 2021 University Challenge’, the invitations read. The company added that the technology would be used for ‘business intelligence’ and ‘security services’.

The invitation to the ‘hackathon’, as Huawei described it, was aimed at data science students, and was relayed by Oxford’s careers service just a few weeks before Christmas. When one student questioned whether it was appropriate for the careers service to be passing this on when Huawei’s technology was implicated in the repression of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, she received a perfunctory reply. ‘We offer an impartial service,’ it said, and it was up to students whether they wanted to engage or not. It referred her to the terms and conditions of the service.