Even as China seeks to elevate its universities to among the world’s best, its Communist government has asserted ever-tightening control of higher education, imposing a more ideological curriculum, cracking down on dissident students and scholars, and trampling on academic freedom.
A new report from the Scholars at Risk Network, an international group that protects scholars and supports academic freedom worldwide, depicts the contradiction between China’s global aspirations and its rising authoritarianism. “While China continues to stoke its ambitions for developing more world-class universities,” the authors write, “respect for academic freedom and other human rights essential to quality higher education lags behind, leaving scholars and students at risk, and the country’s goals in the balance.”
Recent attention has focused on the impact of Chinese nationalism on American and other Western universities, with warnings of academic espionage and Chinese spies, and the report examines those pressures on institutions and individuals working in China and with Chinese partners. But it also shines a light on the effect of threats to academic freedom on Chinese higher education itself, detailing tactics to silence and intimidate students and professors and a climate of surveillance and self-censorship.
To be a world-class university, you have got to have the widest notion of academic freedom.
Over the past 70 years of Communist Party control, Chinese higher education has gone through cycles of engagement and openness followed by periods of repression and more-assertive government control: The shuttering of universities during the Cultural Revolution was followed by great investment in science and research in the 1970s and ’80s; after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown came a boom in Chinese students studying overseas.
However, many China experts see the period covered by Scholars at Risk — from late 2012, when President Xi Jinping took office, through the present day — as different, a new normal. “I don’t see this as part of a cycle,” said Andrew J. Nathan, a professor of Chinese politics at Columbia University. “This feels long term, and we’re at risk of it undermining Chinese scholarship.”
Just months after Xi came to power, a government directive barred the discussion of seven controversial subjects from college classrooms, including press freedom, judicial independence, and the historic mistakes of the Communist Party. To ensure that professors and students toed the line, authorities increased classroom surveillance through high-tech methods like closed-circuit cameras and low-tech means like student informants. The Scholars at Risk report quotes a professor who was about to make a sensitive comment and stopped short. “I have to be careful because I don’t want to cause trouble,” he said, and pointed at a classroom camera.
While many lecturers may have self-censored, the report details a number of cases in which professors were reprimanded or even fired for expressing controversial views, in and out of the classroom. Zhao Si-yun, deputy head of the School of Literature at the Zhejiang University of Media and Communications, was disciplined for remarks he made at a freshman-welcoming ceremony in 2018, in which he criticized the Chinese school system for failing to nurture students’ creativity and innovation. This year, Tsinghua University suspended Xu Zhangrun, an internationally prominent constitutional-law scholar, for a series of essays he published that were critical of Communist Party leadership.
When Peking University fired Xia Yeliang as an economics professor, officials said it was for poor teaching, but emails later suggested that he had been dismissed because of his political activism. Now, said Xia, who was fired in 2013, “they just come out and say that you’re teaching bad ideas.”
The report notes that academics who are members of China’s ethnic minority groups may be especially vulnerable. Rahile Dawut, an ethnographer and professor at Xinjiang University, went missing in December 2017 and is thought to be in a re-education camp for Uighurs, a Muslim minority. Ilham Tohti, a writer and economist, is serving a life sentence in prison after advocating for the Uighurs’ peaceful resistance to Chinese policies.
Expressing political views can also land students in hot water. Student activists campaigning for better labor conditions for factory workers, for example, were arrested, and the police confiscated their phones and computers.
To control the spread of potentially sensitive ideas, the government has barred publications by certain scholars in China and even sought to censor foreign academic publishers. Several publishers, including Cambridge University Press and Springer Nature, blocked access within China to hundreds of journal articles at the government’s request. (Cambridge later lifted the restrictions.)
Even as the Chinese government has sought to suppress certain subjects, it has elevated others. Some 40 universities now host centers on Xi Jinping Thought, the report says, and there are government grants available for research related to the political doctrine espoused by the Chinese president. Teng Biao, a legal scholar, told Scholars at Risk researchers that some academics may be “neglecting or declining” to take on projects on other, touchier topics. “Scholars know there are taboos that should not be touched,” Teng said, “and this is why the academic quality” of research is so low.
Because higher education is seen as furthering nationalistic aims, even Chinese academics who don’t engage in sensitive research can feel caught in the middle, said Yangyang Cheng, a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University and a frequent writer on science and her native China. “Scientists as a profession are not supposed to pledge allegiance to the state,” Cheng said. “We are not soldiers. Our work is not dictated by our ethnicity or our citizenship.”
The government actions don’t just affect Chinese students and scholars, the report notes. Travel and visa restrictions have prevented Chinese academics from leaving the country and foreign researchers from visiting. (The U.S. government has also tightened visa rules for students and researchers from China.) Chinese universities have become less willing to sponsor international scholars doing research in areas deemed sensitive, and so those who want to do on-the-ground work may avoid such subjects.
Academics who do go to China may find their access to certain research limited. A survey of 500 scholars who study China found that one in four had been denied access to archival material in the past decade.
If the current environment has affected the decisions of individual researchers, by and large, it has so far not had an impact on the partnerships American and other foreign universities have at the institutional level in China. There are more than 1,000 Sino-foreign educational partnerships at the undergraduate level, including nine full joint-venture campuses. Scholars at Risk, however, identifies a handful of instances in which foreign universities have reconsidered plans or terminated existing programs in China.
Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, for example, canceled two exchange programs with Renmin University last year after reports that the Chinese institution had punished student activists. In 2016 the University of Notre Dame abandoned plans to open a joint liberal-arts college with Zhejiang University. And the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, called off plans for a China campus just two months after the project was announced, in the fall of 2017. Students and faculty members at the Dutch university had protested Chinese restrictions on academic freedom.
The long arm of the Chinese government extends beyond national borders. The report documents incidents when, through formal government intervention or informal student protest, China has sought to silence unfavorable opinions on foreign campuses. In 2017 the Chinese-student association at the University of California at San Diego protested the decision to invite the Dalai Lama to be the commencement speaker. Though the university went ahead with the speech, the Chinese government later canceled state-funded academic exchanges with UCSD. More recently, Chinese students at McMaster University, in Canada, disrupted a lecture by a Uighur activist, allegedly after consulting with the Chinese Embassy.
Chinese students and scholars studying and working abroad may also be subject to restrictions on critical speech. The Scholars at Risk report includes the story of a Chinese student at an American university who was detained by security officials when she returned home after graduation. The officials seemed aware of email and social-media accounts she had used anonymously to post critical views, leading the student to suspect her friends were informing on her.
Is the evidence cataloged by Scholars at Risk an argument that American colleges should disengage from China? Not so, said Robert Quinn, the group’s founder and executive director. “We need to expand beyond the false binary of stay or go.”
Instead, the report offers a series of recommendations for academics, foreign universities, and others who work in China or with Chinese students and scholars. (It also includes recommendations for those in China.) Among them: advocate for the academic freedom of Chinese students and researchers, both in China and abroad; ensure that partnerships with Chinese universities include safeguards for academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and other core educational values; and demand that academic freedom be factored in to international higher-education rankings.
“To be a world-class university, you have got to have the widest notion of academic freedom,” Quinn said. “I don’t think that should be debatable.”
Even as the Chinese government seeks to limit dissent in academe, it has invested in its universities, increased international engagement, and tried to burnish the reputation of its higher-education system. Its universities, as the report notes, are “both a point of national pride and an essential element of China’s continuing development and international competitiveness.”
Could the muffling of critical thought hamper those ambitions? Not so far. In the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, released this month, Tsinghua and Peking ranked Nos. 23 and No. 24.
Clarification (9/24/2019, 1:50 p.m.): Yangyang Cheng was identified as a researcher at Fermilab; she is based at Fermilab but is a postdoctoral researcher for Cornell. The article has been updated to reflect this.
Karin Fischer writes about international education, colleges and the economy, and other issues. She’s on Twitter @karinfischer, and her email address is karin.fischer@chronicle.com.
