China Curtails Academic Freedom of Chinese Students and Their Professors in the U.S.

 

For more than a decade, we have witnessed an erosion of political freedoms and civil liberties across the world amidst a democratic backsliding toward autocracy, a system of government in which a single person (the autocrat) possesses absolute power to weaken institutions such as an independent judiciary that sustain the democratic system. At the same time, a surveillance-based economy, and anti-democratic threats this poses have thrived. 

This quote is from the abstract of an article on illiberalism I wrote that was published  August 10, 2020.  In the article I highlight China, where the mass surveillance of its citizenry is the most aggressive and invasive in the world. For example, using a range of personal data accessed by the government, citizens and businesses are supervised, judged, and rated as part of a “social credit system” that gives them “trustworthy” scores. Low scores ban them from any number of activities, including accessing financial markets or travelling by air or train. 

Since he took power in 2012, China’s strongman leader, Xi Jinping, has created  a “ruthless mix of autocracy, technology and dynamism“ to further his agenda, a hybrid form of capitalism enabled by the “institutional advantages” whereby China’s strong one-party state can harness its economic and social resources to meet critical objectives (Xi’s New Economy. Economist, August 15, 2020). A major ingredient in this mix is in “all-seeing Communist Party surveillance” that seeks to maximize the party’s information and control over its citizenry and quickly crunch any dissent. 

While China’s negative influence on academics around the world is a longstanding concern, a most recent move is posing unprecedented threats to Chinese students’ and their teachers’ freedom of expression, as well as their safety and security in U.S. colleges and universities.  As reported by the Wall Street Journal’s Lucy Cramer, China’s new national security law, which prohibits “secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces,” imposed on Hong Kong, is extending China’s surveillance apparatus beyond its borders.   In the 2018- 2019 school year, almost 370,000 Chinese students and 7,000 from Hong Kong were in enrolled in U.S. universities and colleges. Students from China account for more foreign students in the United States than any other country. Many of them take classes on Chinese politics, law, and culture to understand their country and how it is seen in the world. 

Professors who teach Chinese politics and related courses interviewed by the Wall Street Journal including at Princeton University, the Harvard Business School,  the University of Pennsylvania, and Amherst College, reported taking measures to protect their students and themselves such as giving  warnings that their courses may cover  materials considered politically sensitive by China, blind grading, and using codes instead of students’ names to protect their identities. Because during the corona pandemic many courses will be taught online and students from China and Hong Kong will connect with their U.S. courses via video links, some academics fear their classes could be accessed by Chinese authorities. 

Avery Goldstein at the University of Pennsylvania’s political science department reported that he plans to send out the syllabus to students enrolled in his course with a warning that the course may cover sensitive information. He worries that a security breach of his online classes might jeopardize his students’ safety, as well as his own, if he were to travel to China. Rory Truex, an assistant professor who teaches Chinese politics at Princeton, noted that China has always been hostile to academics along with Western journalists and that the new law amps up the hostility.  “If we, as a Chinese teaching community, out of fear stop teaching things like Tiananmen or Xinjiang or whatever sensitive topic the Chinese government doesn’t want us talking about, if we cave, then we’ve lost.” 

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