The cancellation of a panel at Columbia U. takes place against the backdrop of escalating tensions between Hong Kong residents and mainland China.Creative Commons
A panel at Columbia University focusing on human-rights violations by the Chinese Communist Party was abruptly canceled last week amid scheduling conflicts and, panelists say, concern about counterprotests by Chinese students.
The panel, “Panopticism With Chinese Characteristics: Human-Rights Violations by the Chinese Communist Party and How They Affect the World,” was to be hosted jointly by the Columbia and New York Universities’ chapters of Amnesty International and by the Lion Rock Café, a group of students from Hong Kong. Moderated by a survivor of the 1989 Tiananmen Square violence, the panel was to discuss China’s reliance on “an extensive matrix of digital surveillance systems, optimized for maximum social control,” according to an event description.
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The cancellation of a panel at Columbia U. takes place against the backdrop of escalating tensions between Hong Kong residents and mainland China.Creative Commons
A panel at Columbia University focusing on human-rights violations by the Chinese Communist Party was abruptly canceled last week amid scheduling conflicts and, panelists say, concern about counterprotests by Chinese students.
The panel, “Panopticism With Chinese Characteristics: Human-Rights Violations by the Chinese Communist Party and How They Affect the World,” was to be hosted jointly by the Columbia and New York Universities’ chapters of Amnesty International and by the Lion Rock Café, a group of students from Hong Kong. Moderated by a survivor of the 1989 Tiananmen Square violence, the panel was to discuss China’s reliance on “an extensive matrix of digital surveillance systems, optimized for maximum social control,” according to an event description.
The cancellation took place against the backdrop of escalating tensions between Hong Kong residents and mainland China that have increased in recent months as the Chinese government has revealed plans to extradite dissidents from Hong Kong, which is under Chinese rule but maintains autonomy and more rights for its citizens than the mainland does. Student protesters from each side of the conflict clashed on Monday night ahead of an NYU Law event about human rights in Hong Kong, according to reports from NYU’s Washington Square News.
Teng Biao, a human-rights lawyer and scholar who was to serve on the Columbia panel, wrote in a now-viral tweet that the incident marked “an extreme insult to free speech in this country.”
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[Thread] A Chinese student group, likely CSSA, threatened Columbia University to cancel a panel discussion on #humanrights in #hongkong#tibet#EastTurkestan#Uyghurs and #China. And they successfully blocked the discussion. An extreme insult to free speech in this country.
The panel was originally slated to be held at Columbia’s Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life, but the request to host the event there wasn’t funneled through proper channels, according to the Columbia Spectator. The plan then changed to hold it at Columbia’s Prentis Hall. A Columbia official told The Chronicle that the cancellation was due to event organizers’ failure to follow university room-reservation policies.
“The subsequent effort to move the panel to Columbia on a short timeline appears to have resulted in a failure to engage Columbia’s standard procedures for holding events. Those procedures apply uniformly to all of our many student groups,” the official said. “Should Columbia’s chapter of Amnesty International want to reschedule the event, the proposed panel discussion will be welcomed at Columbia once the required procedures are met.”
In a statement, the executive board of Columbia’s Amnesty chapter said it had decided to postpone the event due to “logistical headwinds.” On the day of the event, Columbia officials told the board that a Chinese-student organization had told its adviser it would protest the panel. Because campus security was not scheduled to staff the panel, the Amnesty group decided to reschedule the event for next semester, with the same speakers.
“Now that we know how politically sensitive the event is perceived on Columbia’s Morningside Campus, we anticipate reorganizing the event and undertaking the necessary measures to ensure that Public Safety is present to guarantee the security of all participants,” the statement read.
The panelists on Friday released a statement condemning the cancellation and citing a half-dozen “similar incidents of blatant vandalism, hate speech, and physical assaults from pro-Beijing Chinese students” on campuses across America. They include incidents at the University of Maryland at College Park, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of California at San Diego.
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“We’re extremely concerned that American universities, safe havens that welcome all from around the world, beacons of freedom, independence, and truth, have become battlefields and fallen victim to the dictatorship that is the Chinese government,” the statement said.
Undue Influence
Teng, the panelist, said that based on conversations with students, he believes the event was canceled because of pressure from a Chinese-student group, which he suspects is Columbia’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association.
CSSA chapters exist at about 150 American institutions and serve as a cultural touchpoint for Chinese students studying abroad, allowing them to network with one another and host Chinese cultural events, according to reporting in Foreign Policy, which also found that Georgetown University’s CSSA had accepted substantial funding from the Chinese government.
The student groups appear to be autonomous, Teng said, but “actually they get money for funding from the Chinese consulate, and they are directed or even controlled by the Chinese consulate.”
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CSSAs, Teng said, are charged with preventing sensitive issues from being discussed and monitoring Chinese students and scholars in the United States. Those who publicly dissent from pro-Chinese views, he said, are reported to the consulate.
In Canada, McMaster University stripped its CSSA of student-organization status after a CSSA member reported a talk by a Uighur activist to the consulate. McMaster’s student union claimed the CSSA had endangered students by reporting the talk, and the organization lost an appeal of its status earlier this month. A lawyer for the CSSA told the South China Morning Post that the ruling had been based on “conjecture, speculation, and biased assumptions.”
Attempts to contact the CSSA at NYU went unanswered.
Dorjee Tseten, executive director of Students for a Free Tibet and a panelist, said that such incidents reflect undue influence of the Chinese government on student activism.
“It is very difficult to link all the dots, but at the same time we are seeing it’s a pattern that is happening,” Tseten said.
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Silencing Discourse
One panelist, Rushan Abbas, a former pro-democracy student activist and executive director of the Campaign for Uyghurs, said the event last week had gone through several venue changes, but she didn’t find out it had been canceled until after she arrived in New York City.
She faulted Columbia for canceling the event and described the university’s explanation— that it stemmed from a failure to follow room-reservation protocol — as a “lame excuse” that had the effect of hampering free expression. “This is a way of Chinese Communist government influencing our system, our universities around the world,” she said.
“I was born and raised in China. I went to university there. This is something that we should only expect to experience in an authoritarian system and a regime like China,” Abbas said.
It is not the first time that Columbia has attracted criticism for its handling of events that run afoul of the sensitivities of foreign governments. Last spring, Columbia drew national attention for postponing an event on freedom of expression in Turkey. A university official cited “irregularities in the planning” of that panel, which was rescheduled for several weeks later.
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Lion Rock Café, a group of students from Hong Kong that was listed as a cosponsor of last week’s event, posted about the incident on a public Facebook event page.
The group wrote that it suspected a group of Chinese-student protesters would “create uncontrollable clashes” at the event, and decided to cancel the event to ensure attendees’ safety. “This does not mean we are bowing down to the evil power” of the Chinese Communist Party, the group wrote. “We are not afraid of suppression, especially when our brothers and sisters in Hong Kong are continuously being assaulted, injured, and killed.”
Stuart Chen-Hayes, a professor at the City University of New York’s Lehman College, tweeted an offer to host the panel at his institution. “We back #freespeech and won’t be intimidated as NYC’s public university,” he wrote.
A Lion Rock Café representative did not return a call from The Chronicle. Columbia’s Amnesty International chapter also did not respond to a request for comment.
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Robert Quinn, executive director of the Scholars at Risk Network, a nonprofit group based at NYU, said he didn’t know enough about the specifics of Thursday’s event to comment on it, but noted that in general “there have been efforts to frustrate discourse on U.S. campuses about issues which displease” the Chinese Communist Party.
“While U.S. universities have a responsibility to safeguard the security and well-being of individuals in campus spaces, and understandably take that responsibility seriously, they also have a responsibility to safeguard academic freedom and should take that responsibility equally seriously,” Quinn wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “If the event is canceled based only on the possibility (or even likelihood) of a counter-event or verbal protest outside the venue, then the university has abdicated its responsibility.”
Correction (11/20/2019, 1:16 a.m.): This article originally misstated the result of efforts to contact the CSSA chapter at NYU. The efforts went unanswered, not answered. The article has been corrected.
Correction (11/20/2019, 9:13 a.m.): This article originally misstated the location of the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life. It is at Columbia University, not NYU. The article has been corrected.
Megan Zahneis, a senior reporter for The Chronicle, writes about faculty and the academic workplace. Follow her on Twitter @meganzahneis, or email her at megan.zahneis@chronicle.com.