Just over a year ago, a team of researchers at Sheffield Hallam in England published a report that substantiates the potential links of a Chinese clothing company with forced labor. Members of the British Parliament reported the report before a November debate that criticized China for “slavery and forced labor from another era”.
But smart shirts, which are a subsidiary of the manufacturer and making clothes for large labels, filed a defamation lawsuit. And in December, a British judge decided: the case will proceed, which could lead to the university’s compensation.
The preliminary finding in the case against the university is the last one in a series of legal challenges that limit thought tanks and universities investigating human rights violations and security violations by Chinese companies. In order to stop the adverse reports, which have led to political debates and in some cases exports, companies are launching categories of defamation.
Chinese companies have been lawsuit or sent threatening legal letters to researchers in the United States, Europe and Australia near twelve times in recent years in an effort to cancel the negative information, with half of those who have come in the last two years. The unusual tactic is borrowed from a Playbook used by companies and celebrities to discourage the destructive media coverage in the media.
The budding legal tactic of Chinese companies could silence critics who are shed light on problematic business practices in one of the most powerful countries in the world, the researchers warn. Legal energy has a cold effect on their work, they say, and in many cases they turn the finances of their organizations.
The problem has become so intense, the US Representative Selection Committee on the Chinese Communist Party has been listening to the issue in September.
Researchers in these cases “face one option: to silence and return to the CCP pressure campaign or to continue to tell the truth and to face the huge reputation and financial cost of these pipelines only,” Commission President John Moolenaar , A Republican of Michigan, he said during the hearing.
He added: “The Chinese Communist Party uses the US legal system to silence those who could expose them to America.”
The battle between Chinese companies and critical researchers has escalated as tensions have been placed between the United States and China above trade, technology and territory.
Washington has taken steps to limit China’s access to resources such as the chips needed for artificial intelligence and in recent days Trump has imposed a 10 % invoice on all Chinese imports. Beijing has faced measures including the limits for the export of frequent rare land and a contrasting research to Google.
In the last decade, researchers – based mainly on public files and photos and videos – have documented problematic business practices in China. These reports have helped to show how products made for US and European companies have benefited from a forced labor epidemic by minority ethnic Uyghurs in China. Researchers have also shed light on possible security imperfections, increasing national security concerns, as well as problematic relations between companies and government.
Now, Chinese companies are increasingly hiring Western lawyers to combat these types of reports on defamation claims.
One of the first examples occurred in 2019 when Huawei, a Chinese telecommunications giant, threatened to sue the Australian Institute of Strategic Policy, an Australian think tank. ASPI had published a report containing that the servers provided by Huawei to a coalition of African nations sent data to Shanghai.
The Embassy of China in 2020 gave the Australian government a list of 14 complaints that wanted to improve relations between countries. The complaints included ASPI’s funding from Australia, something Huawei had exerted pressure to stop after his report. (Since 2024, the Australian government has continued to finance the organization, according to the latest revelations of the group).
The Huawei and China embassy did not respond to requests for comments.
ASPI remains the target of the Chinese threats of the company on its research on issues, including the use of forced labor. Think Tank legal expenses, including staff time on legal issues related to Chinese, increased from zero in 2018 to Australia’s $ 219,000, almost 2 % of the annual budget of $ 12.5 million.
“They are mountains of legal letters, hitting, saying,” we will sue, “said Danielle Cave, director of ASPI.” He is quite stressful and designed to distract you. “
More recently, companies have issued similar threats to researchers in the United States and Britain.
Eric Sayers, who focuses on the US technological policy on the American Think Tank of the American Institute of Enterprise Institute, received a letter from lawyers in September asking to get an opinion article that co-wrote for a Chinese Drone company, Autel Robotics. The article, published by Defense News, a commercial edition, said Chinese aircraft posed a risk of national security because they could map American infrastructure.
Autel’s representatives called the article “Demonstant and damaging” and threatened to sue if they were not removed, although the matter eventually fell.
Mr Sayers published the letter to X as a warning to other researchers. He wrote that it was the Chinese government “legislation within our democracy”.
In May, the Georgetown University and emerging technology center published an report by Anna Puglisi, a recently departed researcher. The report said that the Chinese government was probably involved in funding the development of BGI, a Chinese biotechnology company.
In a June letter, BGI accused Ms. Puglisi of making defamatory claims and asked to withdraw the report.
“We remain frustrated by Ms Puglisi’s report, especially numerous mistakes,” BGI said in a statement to the New York Times.
Mrs Puglisi went publicly with her experience during the testimony before the House Committee in September.
“Speaking today it can put me at a further danger,” Ms Puglisi told the Commission, “but I feel that if we start to self-rise because of the actions of an authoritarian regime, we become more like they and less as an open democracy.”
Following Ms Puglisi, Dewey Murdick, executive director of the former Think tank in Georgetown, said the organization stood behind her research.
“We carried out a careful review and we did not find any evidence to regret the findings or conclusions of the report,” he said in a place at LinkedIn. BGI has not received legal action against Ms Puglisi.
In England, researchers at the University of Sheffield Hallam contacted smart shirts in November 2023 as they prepared the report linking its parent company with forced work practices, according to legal documents. After some back-and-forth, during which the company denied allegations, the university published the report in December.
In a complaint lodged with the British Supreme Court that month, smart shirts reported that the report was false and jeopardized its activities by making t -shirts such as Hugo Boss, Ralph Lauren and Burberry. Smart shirts said they believed that the claims “have spread through the vine effect” between its customers.
British defamation laws are more favorable to the plaintiffs than laws in the United States, making Britain a popular place for people to sue news agencies and others for the things they write.
The university refused to comment.
In a statement to the Times, Smart Shirts said she welcomed the supply chain research, but was frustrated by the fact that Sheffield Hallam had published the report without allowing the company to correct the inaccuracies.
“Our costume aims to deal with the material damage to our business resulting from their misleading report,” the company said. “It is not aimed at suppressing the important work of researchers in general.”
