China exploits open societies to undermine free expression and censor opinion
In 1975, as a Durham University freshman embarking on a career as a China specialist, I acted as a contact and facilitator to welcome and assist five students who were the first to “go abroad” from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) after the bloody mayhem of its 10-year-long Cultural Revolution.
These Mao-suited young men and women were my first friends from China. They came to study English. We had a small, effective Chinese studies department at Durham. My course was very academic with little spoken Chinese. This was my chance to help the visitors, and find a conversation partner. Mysterious people who did not reveal much, they had been briefed against succumbing to Western “bourgeois influences” and would not be seen raving at parties, but they never preached their Maoist creed. There were not more than a dozen PRC Chinese students in the entire UK at that time.
What a contrast to now, when we have millions of Chinese students spread across the globe, many causing campus frictions and even violence under the direction of China’s diplomats and the United Front Work Department. The UFWD, a branch of the Communist Party’s global intelligence and influence apparatus akin to the Soviet Union’s Comintern, has even set up Party cells amongst Chinese students.
Last week, a UK parliamentary committee published a detailed, blistering report here on China’s pernicious campus influence activities and chastised our government for not doing enough to combat it. The report describes academic papers being confiscated and events canceled at universities as exalted as the London School of Economics (LSE) on the demand of Chinese officials whose job it is to block criticism of China.
China’s London embassy has bullied university vice-chancellors with threats of withdrawing Chinese students, and has pressured at least one institution to sack top staff at a China studies institute, academics say. At the LSE, professors have recently forced a pause in an academic program funded by a known agent of influence from China. British intelligence is said to be “deeply concerned” about China’s meddling.
Today, officially, we have 106,000 PRC Chinese students registered at UK universities, quintuple the size of the nearest rival, India with 20,000. On campuses in Manchester, London, Bristol and Brighton, I sometimes see more Chinese faces than any others. In America, there are officially around 400,000 Chinese students. In Canada, a scene of PRC-Hong Kong (HK) student clashes and hate campaigns against Tibetan and Uighur minorities from China, there are said to be 140,000 PRC students.
In Australia, 153,000 university students — 10 percent of the total — hail from China, plus large numbers in high school. It is Australia that has had the worst on-campus clashes between PRC and HK students, and Australia and New Zealand that have seen the worst UFWP influence and espionage campaigns, even reaching into their parliaments.
Just this week, a new scandal has erupted in the Czech Republic with reports of secret corrupt payments by China to senior academics at Prague’s revered Charles University, aimed at silencing critics of China there. “In light of current findings, we can see how vulnerable universities are to foreign influence,” said faculty spokesman Jakub Riman.
I have read and heard a lot about protests and counter-protests at campuses around the world recently, over the issues of Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong, democracy and human rights, the persecuted Falungong sect, and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of pro-democracy protesters. Now it is coming closer to our own daily lives. Everywhere.
“Did you hear about what happened in Sheffield?” a PRC student whispered to me at the end of a seminar about Hong Kong at King’s College London (KCL) last month, as tensions flared across the world’s campuses over Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests. “A Chinese student threw a heavy glass bottle and wounded a Hong Konger on the head,” she said. “Many of us oppose this politics, but it is a risk to speak out,” she told me.
Two weeks later, I lectured at Oxford University about my well-known false imprisonment ordeal in China. A Chinese man who claimed to be a “businessman” studying at Oxford attempted, during the Q&A, to belittle and deny my own first-hand, extensively-reported experience of imprisonment and torture in China. He resembled a number of people I have seen trying to skew academic debates on China in our universities. Another, a young female student, tried to say that China’s police, prosecutors and judges were all lovely people really. In the audience, several victims of China’s coercive legal system were living proof that these officials are far from it.
In June, I witnessed an odd scene at a KCL panel event on the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen, when a Chinese youth who did not identify himself stridently denied that the massacre had ever occurred.
Such provocations, directed by Chinese diplomats, are becoming frequent on UK campuses, mirroring a trend across the world. Beijing is exploiting free and open societies to undermine free expression and to censor opinion in overseas academic institutions. University administrators, faculties and publishing houses appear unwilling to fight back, perhaps because they are taking Beijing’s shilling in the form of donations, student fees and research grants. This influence campaign is also undermining think tanks, book publishing, news media, entertainment, sports and major brands. Where does it end?
In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has misused the name of the ancient sage Confucius to help it infiltrate and influence education and opinion abroad. So-called “Confucius Institutes” funded by Beijing have mushroomed in universities and cities across the planet. Around 500 now operate on six continents – though that may be a gross understatement, considering their reach extends into thousands of primary and high schools, not just universities, under the guise of language teaching. They are now starting to be seen by many nations as UWFD outposts, undermining free and objective thinking about China via their “cultural” programs. America has started to kick them out. Essentially, they are tasked to promote the CCP ideology and the PRC dictatorial constitution, and to whitewash China’s repressive practices such as the genocide against the Uighurs. The British Council does not play such a subversive role, nor does Germany’s Goethe Institute or France’s Alliance Francaise. So why should China get away with it? How about some reciprocity?
And why are today’s PRC students so actively supporting Beijing’s interference campaign? It’s not cheap studying and living abroad. Where does their money come from? Who are their parents? From conversations at seminars, I have learned that many are from the new Chinese middle class and support the CCP because they are now comfortable. These families fear the chaos of political change in China. Some have parents in business with murky income sources. Some have parents who are from the CCP establishment, including party officials.
Such support for the CCP is often hypocritical. Many of these students’ parents have sent their children here to gain a toehold and a potential refuge for the day that the Communist regime is toppled. They have taken advantage of “golden visas”, or investment visa schemes. They love to exploit and live in our free and open society, but at the same time they function as fifth columnists and attack it.
If they want to study in our free societies, they should respect our values. Or they should be expelled from the campuses and sent home to the society they are working for.
