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A weapons expert at UK's Imperial College who has long received research funding from the British Ministry of Defence and advised it on a number of "critical weapons of destruction" has had frequent interactions with China over the past nearly one decade and is likely to visit the country soon, according to a new investigative report.
The weapons expert Clive Woodley may visit China in July to chair the International Conference on Defence Technology, in an attempt to cosy up with Beijing, especially the Chinese Communist Party's military, said the report in Radio Free Asia which has cited a British website. The conference will focus on the latest discoveries in sensitive military technology. The conference will be co-chaired by China's most prominent defence scientists, Feng Changgen of Beijing Institute of Technology and Li Baoming of Nanjing University. Both are Communist Party members who have devoted their careers to China's military, Radio Free Asia reported. According to the media report, since 2014, Woodley had gone to China seven times. He has attended the conferences conducted by the Chinese-state owned companies and backed by the research institutions. Since 2014, he had eight papers published in Chinese journals or co-authored with Chinese scientists working with Chinese arms manufacturers, the most recent one in 2021. It further says that Woodley's most recent conference with China took place around mid-October in 2021 in Jinan Shandong, hosted by the Shandong Institute of Nonmetallic Materials (53), one of China's top military research centres, and Qi Xiaoliang, director and secretary of the institute, held a grand opening ceremony for the meeting. A few weeks after Woodley's visit, MI6 chief Richard Moore in a speech had said that the threat from China was now his agency's "single biggest priority" and warned of large scale espionage operations targeting experts like Woodley and research that is of interest to China. Meanwhile, the RFA report cited another former MI6 officer as saying: "The fact there have not just one or two talks but a consistent and continuing pattern of meeting and contact is deeply concerning. I can't think of another case where a British lecturer has visited China many times to talk about weapons technology, nor written papers about it in Chinese journals," he said. Mi6 officer further claimed that Woodley might be unaware of the fact that the Chinese regime may have tried to steal the data from his laptop, according to Radio Free Asia. Tom Tugendhat, a co-chair of the China Research Group, an organisation of Tory MPs, has also voiced concerns about the integrity of UK military secrets after it was reported that a British weapons expert had given talks in China. He said, "This case raises serious concerns about the integrity of our military secrets and the level of cooperation between a British expert and a potentially hostile state." According to the British publication, as the scale of the strategic threat China poses becomes clearer, it may just be that Woodley's friendships could have endangered the rest of the UK. (ANI)
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