Chinese speech on American campuses
A student-government resolution at George Washington University would call on administrators to do more to protect Chinese students from political censorship and monitoring on campus.
The student legislation is a response to concerns that the Chinese government’s efforts to tamp down public criticism of its political and human-rights record could chill speech on American campuses.
The measure urges the university to adopt a “public strategy” to protect students, especially those from mainland China, “whose rights to freedom of expression and freedom of association are directly threatened and who face overseas monitoring, intimidation, and coercion.” It also says George Washington should divest its endowment holdings in companies with ties to the Chinese government’s human-rights violations against its Uyghur Muslim minority.
The divestment strategy is a familiar one, dating to a campaign in the 1980s to persuade colleges to sever their connections to South Africa in protest of its policy of apartheid. More recently, campus activists have pushed for divestment from and boycotting of Israel because of its treatment of the Palestinians.
Now it may be a tool against China. In July a U.S. congressman introduced a bill that would require American colleges to divest from Chinese firms under U.S.-government sanctions. Last year Catholic University agreed to audit its endowment for entities with ties to China’s actions against the Uyghurs, and students at several other colleges, including Georgetown University and the Universities of Maryland and of California at Irvine, have passed pro-divestment resolutions.
The George Washington resolution, which failed to win approval from a student-government committee late last month, stands out for the other half of its content: It also urges administrators to adopt policies based on a 12-point code of conduct developed by Human Rights Watch to counter possible Chinese-government interference on American campuses. The advocacy group recommends that colleges actively track incidents of Chinese-government harassment, surveillance, and threats on campus, and put in place mechanisms for responding, such as an ombudsman to whom pressures or threats from the Chinese government could be reported.
Concerns about the Chinese government’s reach onto campuses abroad have mounted in recent years, as more students from China have studied overseas. A Chinese student at the University of Minnesota- Twin Cities was arrested after he returned home in 2019 for posts critical of China’s president, Xi Jinping, that he had made on American social-media platforms while in the United States. Chinese students at McMaster University, in Canada, tried to persuade college administrators to disinvite a Uyghur activist from speaking on campus, and then filmed her talk.
At George Washington a free-speech firestorm erupted in February when an anonymous group of Chinese students put up posters satirizing the Winter Olympic Games in Beijing as a way of criticizing the Chinese government’s human-rights abuses. The university’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association complained about the posters, saying that those who had hung them should be punished and forced to publicly apologize. (Such student groups are often seen as having close ties to the government.)
George Washington’s president, Mark S. Wrighton, initially appeared to agree with the group, and promised he would find out who was responsible. But he soon backtracked, calling the posters “political statements” and saying that the university would neither investigate nor take any action agains the students who had displayed them.
In recent days, messages critical of the Chinese government have appeared on American campuses, including Carnegie Mellon and New York Universities, during a meeting of the Chinese Communist Party’s Congress. A Chinese man appeared to record students at George Washington who were putting up pro-democracy posters, said Rory O’Connor, a Catholic University student and co-founder of the Athenai Institute, a student-led group that has called for American colleges to cut ties with China.
Ian Ching, a member of George Washington’s student Senate who introduced the resolution, said students involved in the postering had helped draft the measure, yet they feared repercussions personally or for their families if they spoke out publicly. He said he expected to reintroduce a version of the legislation, which is co-sponsored by campus chapters of the College Democrats and College Republicans. Could similar efforts be mounted at other institutions?
“They’re in the capital of the U.S., and yet they are afraid of having their home government policing them and spying on them and their fellow students,” said Ching, an international-affairs major from Vancouver, British Columbia. “They just want to be able to fully have an American education.”
