A little over a year ago, a group of researchers at Sheffield Hallam University in England published a report documenting a Chinese clothing company’s potential ties to forced labor. Members of the British Parliament cited the report ahead of a November debate that criticized China for “slavery and forced labor from another era.”
But Smart Shirts, which is a subsidiary of the manufacturer and makes clothing for major labels, filed a defamation lawsuit. And in December, a British judge delivered a ruling: The case would move forward, which could result in the university’s paying damages.
The preliminary finding in the case against the university is the latest in a series of legal challenges roiling the think tanks and universities that research human rights abuses and security violations by Chinese companies. To stop the unfavorable reports, which have led to political debate and in some cases export restrictions, the companies are firing back with defamation accusations.
Chinese companies have sued or sent threatening legal letters to researchers in the United States, Europe and Australia close to a dozen times in recent years in an attempt to quash negative information, with half of those coming in the past two years. The unusual tactic borrows from a playbook used by corporations and celebrities to discourage damaging news coverage in the media.
The budding legal tactic by Chinese firms could silence critics who shed light on problematic business practices inside one of the most powerful countries in the world, researchers warn. The legal action is having a chilling affect on their work, they say, and in many cases straining the finances of their organizations.
The problem has become so pronounced, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party held a hearing on the issue in September.
The researchers in these cases “are faced with a choice: Be silent and back down against the C.C.P.’s pressure campaign or continue to tell the truth and face the tremendous reputational and financial costs of these lawsuits alone,” the committee’s chair, Representative John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican, said at the hearing.
He added, “The Chinese Communist Party uses the American legal system to silence those who might expose them in America.”
The battle between Chinese companies and critical researchers has escalated as tensions have mounted between the United States and China over trade, technology and territory.
Washington has taken steps to limit China’s access to resources like chips needed for artificial intelligence, and in recent days the Trump administration imposed a 10 percent tariff on all Chinese imports. Beijing countered with measures including limits on the export of rare earth minerals and an antimonopoly investigation into Google.
Over the past decade, researchers — relying primarily on publicly available records and photographs and videos — have documented problematic business practices in China. Those reports have helped show how products made for American and European companies benefited from an epidemic of forced labor by minority ethnic Uyghurs in China. Researchers have also shed light on potential security flaws, raising national security concerns, as well as problematic connections between companies and the government.
Now, Chinese corporations are increasingly hiring Western lawyers to combat those types of reports over allegations of defamation.
One of the first examples occurred in 2019 when Huawei, a Chinese telecommunications giant, threatened to sue the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, an Australian think tank. ASPI had released a report containing allegations that servers provided by Huawei to a coalition of African nations were sending data to Shanghai.
China’s embassy in 2020 gave the Australian government a list of 14 complaints that it wanted addressed to improve relations between the countries. Grievances included Australia’s funding of ASPI, something Huawei had lobbied to stop after its report. (As of 2024, the Australian government continued to fund the organization, according to the group’s latest disclosures.)
Huawei and China’s embassy did not respond to requests for comment.
ASPI remains a target of Chinese company threats over its research into topics including the use of forced labor. The think tank’s legal costs, including staff time on Chinese-related legal matters, have risen from zero in 2018 to 219,000 Australian dollars, nearly 2 percent of its 12.5-million-dollar annual budget.
“It’s mountains of legal letters, hassling, going around saying, ‘We’re going to sue,’” said Danielle Cave, a director at ASPI. “It’s quite stressful, and it’s designed to distract you.”
More recently, companies have issued similar threats to researchers in the United States and Britain.
Eric Sayers, who focuses on U.S.-Chinese technology policy at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, received a letter in September from lawyers demanding that he take down an opinion article he co-wrote about a Chinese drone company, Autel Robotics. The article, which was published by Defense News, a trade publication, said Chinese-made drones posed a national security risk because they could map American infrastructure.
Autel’s representatives called the article “defamatory and damaging” and threatened to sue if it wasn’t removed, although they eventually dropped the matter.
Mr. Sayers posted the letter on X as a warning to other researchers. He wrote that it was what Chinese government “lawfare inside our democracy looks like.”
In May, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University published a report by Anna Puglisi, a researcher who had recently departed. The report said the Chinese government was most likely involved in funding the growth of BGI, a Chinese biotechnology company.
In a June letter, BGI accused Ms. Puglisi of making a defamatory claims and demanded that she retract the report.
“We remain disappointed by Ms. Puglisi’s report, especially the numerous mistakes therein,” BGI said in a statement to The New York Times.
Ms. Puglisi went public with her experience during testimony before the House committee in September.
“Speaking out today may put me in further jeopardy,” Ms. Puglisi told the committee, “but I feel that if we begin to self-censor ourselves because of the actions of an authoritarian regime, we become more like them and less like an open democracy.”
After Ms. Puglisi testified, Dewey Murdick, the executive director of her former think tank at Georgetown, said the organization stood behind her research.
“We conducted a careful review and found no evidence to contradict the report’s findings or conclusions,” he said in a post on LinkedIn. BGI has not taken legal action against Ms. Puglisi.
In England, Sheffield Hallam University researchers contacted Smart Shirts in November 2023 as they prepared the report tying its parent company to forced-labor practices, according to legal documents. After some back-and-forth, during which the company denied the allegations, the university published the report in December.
In a complaint filed with the British High Court that month, Smart Shirts said the report was false and jeopardized its business making shirts for brands like Hugo Boss, Ralph Lauren and Burberry. Smart Shirts said it believed that the allegations “have spread via the grapevine effect” among its customers.
British defamation laws are more favorable to plaintiffs than the laws in the United States are, making Britain a popular place for individuals to sue news outlets and others over things that they write.
The university declined to comment.
In a statement to The Times, Smart Shirts said it welcomed supply chain research, but was disappointed that Sheffield Hallam had published the report without first allowing the company to correct inaccuracies.
“Our suit is aimed at addressing the material damage to our business arising from their misleading report,” the company said. “It is not aimed at suppressing the important work of researchers in general.”
