UK-China Transparency is a charitable incorporated organisation (CIO) regulated by the Charity Commission, with charity number 1201902.
Our page on the Register of Charities can be found here. We are never partisan, and do not lobby the public sector for legal changes or policy changes, unless it relates to the promotion of education about UK-China ties and China generally.
We do, in connection to our charitable objects, campaign for existing laws and rules to be enforced wherever they are not being enforced, and we do aggressively promote our factual research to everyone, be it in the private sector, public sector, or ‘third sector’.
Our Trustees
Our three founding trustees – the two listed below and Sam Dunning, who resigned as a trustee in 2025 – along with Andrew Robinson all studied at Jesus College, Cambridge. They were initially united by share interest and concern about the college’s China initiatives.
- Martin Village, one of our founding trustees, has a background in law, including human rights, and is an art dealer and publisher.
- Sir Bernard Silverman, one of our founding trustees, has had a distinguished career in academia and the civil service, formerly serving as Chief Scientific Advisor to the Home Office. He has a particular interest in the study of modern slavery.
- Andrew Robinson read Natural Sciences at Cambridge. He has spent 50 years managing international manufacturing businesses, his work leading him to travel widely in China. Before retiring, using UK technology, he built up the world’s largest manufacturer of cinema screens.
- Andrew Whiteside read physics at Oxford before spending more than 30 years serving as a diplomat in the Foreign Office, for which he worked from Hungary, Italy, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
Bryn Harris read English and Classics at Edinburgh and gained a DPhil in Classics at Oxford before training as a laywer. He is the Chief Legal Counsel at the Free Speech Union.
Howard Zhang was born in Mao-era China, grew up in the early years of Deng’s reform, and left China after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. He lived and worked in Canada in the 1990s, then worked for BBC World Service in London from January 2000 to August 2023, overseeing the BBC’s Chinese Service from 2016-2023 as Head of Service & Chief Editor.
