She Accused a Chinese Billionaire of Rape. The Chinese Internet Turned Against Her.

Liu Jingyao, a college student, describes what it’s like to be slut-shamed by 800 million Chinese.

By Li Yuan

Liu Jingyao, a student at the University of Minnesota, has accused the Chinese billionaire Richard Liu of rape.

MINNEAPOLIS — When Liu Jingyao introduced herself, in the lobby of her apartment building, I didn’t recognize her. 

It was a puzzling feeling. 

For an entire year, photos of her had blanketed the Chinese internet. 

Like tens of millions of other Chinese, I had watched and rewatched surveillance video of her in this very building. 

She was one of the most talked about and mysterious women in China, and I thought I knew what she looked like.
In the video, she wanders the halls of a mazelike building, with a man trailing along. 

They get in and out of several elevators. 

She seems unsure about how to get to her apartment. 

She wears striking waist-length hair and a long, dark knit dress. 

She doesn’t look glamorous, exactly, but for a 21-year-old college junior, she is dressed smartly.
But on a morning in early August, she greeted me in a loosefitting checkered dress. 

Now 22, she looked pale and nervous. 

Her lips were chapped. 

She invited me upstairs, and began an intense conversation that continued for 18 straight hours.
In the summer of 2018, Ms. Liu, a student at the University of Minnesota, alleged that the billionaire founder of one of China’s largest companies, JD.com, followed her back to her apartment and raped her. 

The executive, known as Liu Qiangdong in China and Richard Liu in the English-speaking world, was arrested by Minneapolis police and released within 24 hours. (He and Ms. Liu are not related.) 

He insisted that the sex was consensual, and prosecutors declined to charge him. 

In April, Ms. Liu accused Liu of rape in a Minnesota civil court, seeking more than $50,000 in damages.
But hers is not a typical #MeToo story. 

After her name became common knowledge on the Chinese internet, Ms. Liu was widely called a slut, a whore, a liar, a gold digger and many other things.

It may be difficult for Westerners to grasp the scale and intensity of her online shaming. 

But the Monica Lewinsky frenzy is a good comparison, had it taken place in the era of Twitter and YouTube in a country with 800 million internet users and no independent news media. 

When Ms. Liu and I met, it was the first time she had ever spoken to an English-language publication about what she has endured.

The rapist: Liu Qiangdong, the founder and chief executive of JD.com, in Davos, Switzerland, in 2018.

‘A feeling that someone is watching me’
In her apartment, a 500-square-foot studio, Ms. Liu showed me photos of trips she had taken to Morocco, Greece and Spain, before all that had happened. 

She looked different then. 

Her eyes were brighter, and her smile looked unreserved.
She said she had thrown away half of her cosmetics and no longer wore makeup. 

Like many young Chinese, she used to like designer clothes and handbags; now she mostly wears Muji, the inexpensive Japanese brand whose style reputation in China might be described as dowdy and demure.
When Ms. Liu transferred to the university a year ago, she chose the high-floor apartment for its view of a nearby park and a water tower known to locals as the Witch’s Hat. 

Now, she said, she keeps the blinds down day and night. 

“I always have a feeling that someone is watching me from outside,” she said. 

“I want to be as inconspicuous as possible.”
It’s an understandable concern, given the social-media attention directed at Ms. Liu, which has been vast and often vicious. 

On Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, her case has been one of the most popular topics of the last two years.
“The woman is a slut,” one commenter said. 

“The woman looks disgusting,” commented another. 

“It was obvious that they disagreed on the price,” added a third. 

“Looks like the woman set up the whole thing.” 

And one suggested that Mr. Liu was the actual victim, writing, “Look at the woman’s build, I absolutely believe that Liu Qiangdong was raped.”
These are just a few of the 8,500 comments on a single Weibo post, which was retweeted 14,000 times and liked by 95,000 users. 

Now imagine this, and worse, at scale, for months and months.
Many of the most active hashtags related to the case, including #RichardLiulawsuit and #RichardLiusexualassault, have been disabled on Weibo. 

But even less popular hashtags regarding the case get an astonishing amount of attention. 

One, which has to do with a denial that Liu was getting divorced, has 170 million views. 

Another, which concerns a defamation lawsuit Liu filed against a Chinese blogger, has 130 million views.

A hashtag about a pretrial hearing in September has logged 110 million views.
Followers of the case quickly translate legal documents into Chinese and add subtitles to police audio and video. 

In some ways, Ms. Liu has become a figure as polarizing as President Trump. 

In July, the morning after the Minneapolis police released a report on the case, I got into a debate with a friend, and I suggested that she might want to read the document first before jumping to conclusions. 

My friend, an accomplished career woman and busy mother, replied that she had indeed read it — all 149 pages, in English, overnight, purely out of curiosity.
Ms. Liu’s case is attracting so much attention because she is accusing one of the country’s most powerful men of behavior that has long been ignored. 

Sexual harassment and assault are widespread in China, and elites face little scrutiny. 

The workings of government and the private lives of national leaders are off-limits to the news media. 

Self-made tech tycoons are widely admired celebrities.
Among this class of billionaires, Liu is one of the most high-profile. 

Born in a village in the eastern province of Jiangsu, he likes to recount how his family was able to afford meat only once or twice a year, and how he went to college with $70 raised by his fellow villagers. 

He founded JD.com in the early days of Chinese e-commerce, and turned the company into a logistics colossus. 

Liu became an entrepreneurial icon, known for putting on a helmet and JD.com’s red uniform to personally make deliveries on a three-wheeled electric bike one day a year.
Liu only got more famous in 2015, when he married a 21-year-old student and internet celebrity named Zhang Zetian. 

By the summer of 2018, when he traveled to Minnesota, he was worth an estimated $7.5 billion.

27 toasts of wine
Ms. Liu grew up in Beijing, introverted and intense, the only child of an affluent family. 

Her father was a businessman, and her mother, Ms. Liu said, was strict and quick to scold or punish her physically. 

She only allowed Ms. Liu to wear her hair short. 

Today, Ms. Liu’s waist-length cut is an act of rebellion.
In 2016, she went to a liberal arts college in Minnesota to study literature, while also practicing piano two and half hours a day. 

She dreamed of becoming a diplomat or a professor of linguistics, but she was also interested in business. 

She transferred to the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management in August 2018, where a professor recruited her to volunteer with a program for visiting international executives. 

One of them was Liu.
Every morning, Ms. Liu got up early and took the executive visitors jogging. 

On the fifth day, she was invited to a group dinner at a Japanese restaurant. 

When Ms. Liu arrived, she found that she was the only volunteer — and the only woman — at a table of about a dozen middle-aged Chinese men. 

Surveillance video shows that one of the men directed her to sit next to Liu, the most accomplished and wealthiest member of the group. 

At Chinese business dinners, it is common for pretty young women to be placed next to powerful men to laugh at their lewd jokes.
In the next two hours, according to the police, members of the party raised their glasses of red wine in at least 27 toasts. 

Ms. Liu drank 19 times. 

The man sitting across from her passed out on the table and had to be carried away.
After dinner, Ms. Liu left in a limousine with Liu and two of his female assistants. 

They drove to a house rented by one of the executives, but Ms. Liu didn’t want to go in. 

The chauffeur, whose name is redacted in police reports, later told officers that he saw Ms. Liu and Liu talking in front of his car. 

“Then he grabbed her arm, kind of overpower her and bring her to my car in the back,” the chauffeur said, according to a transcript. 

“I look in my mirror and this guy was all over this girl.” 

Then, he said, one of Liu’s assistants pushed the mirror up to obscure the chauffeur’s view. 

The chauffeur told the police that he didn’t hear anyone saying “stop” or “no," or cry for help.
Liu went with Ms. Liu to her apartment. 

A few hours later, a friend of hers reported to the police that Ms. Liu had told him, via a messaging app, that she had been raped.
A spokesman for Liu denied that account, saying, “The evidence released by the Minneapolis Police Department, including the written police report and surveillance video, does not support the accusations that have been made.”
When I met with Ms. Liu, she said that she seldom left her apartment anymore and that she spends most of her time cooking, drawing, playing piano, watching Japanese soap operas and struggling with whether to check Chinese social-media platforms. 

Each night, she double-checked her door lock before going to bed. 

On her nightstand were a canister of pepper spray and a stun gun that she purchased after that evening.
Ms. Liu said she had a recurring nightmare: a man forcing her down and sitting on top of her. 

Her psychiatrist told her that it was a common symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Ms. Liu seldom ventures outside her apartment. She spends most of her time cooking, drawing, playing piano and debating whether to check Chinese social media.

She said that during nights of insomnia, she would replay in her head how she should have handled the situation differently. 

She would try not to be intimidated by how powerful Liu was. 

She would definitely drink less. 

She would definitely not tell the police, when they arrived, “Yes, I was raped, but not that kind of rape.” 

Or wait two days before telling her parents that she was the woman in the biggest news of the week in China. 

Or wait five days before getting a lawyer. 

Or use the word “money” when telling Liu’s lawyer what she wanted, in addition to an apology, when the English word she meant to use was the more neutral “compensation.”
“I was such a fool,” she said. 

“I was such a coward. I messed it up.”

One woman versus the Chinese internet
In 2018, encouraged by the #MeToo movement elsewhere in the world, more than 50 Chinese women came forward with their stories of being sexually harassed or assaulted. 

The men accused included professors, journalists and NGO organizers. 

Some lost their jobs or resigned.
But the fledgling movement started to lose its momentum just around the time of Ms. Liu’s allegation. 

Men who had been publicly accused were starting to sue their accusers for defamation. 

#MeToo victims faced criticism from even the most liberal-minded corners in China. 

Most important of all, the Chinese government — distrustful of independent social movements — clamped down on public discussion of gender issues.
Online allegations of sexual misconduct were one of the most heavily censored topics on WeChat, China’s biggest social-media platform, in 2018, according to WeChatscope, a research project at the University of Hong Kong. 

The hashtags #MeToo and #Woyeshi — a Mandarin translation — were banned. 

Some of the WeChat accounts that voiced support for Ms. Liu were deleted. 

WeChat is owned by Tencent, which is also the biggest shareholder of JD.com.
Ms. Liu’s experiences illustrate how Chinese society treats women who dare to speak up about sexual assault. 

Victims need to be seen as perfect to win any sympathy from the public, or they’ll be subject to immense slut-shaming. 

Younger women who sleep with older and powerful men, willingly or unwillingly, face even more public distain.

Ms. Liu keeps pepper spray and a stun gun on her nightstand.

In December 2018, Minneapolis prosecutors decided not to charge Liu with sexual assault because they did not find enough evidence to pursue a case against him. 

They made the announcement without meeting with Ms. Liu. 

She said that when she heard the news, she felt “as if the sky had fallen.” 

But what came next on the Chinese internet was much worse.
One major Chinese news site posted an article headlined, “Richard Liu’s Attorney: Everything Happened in the Room was Voluntary. Woman Repeatedly Asked for Money.” 

The story featured a lengthy statement from one of Liu’s lawyers, but nothing from Ms. Liu’s side. 

It got 14,000 comments. 

A well-respected former writer for the Southern Weekly, the country’s most liberal-leaning newspaper, shared the article on Weibo with the comment, “Richard Liu isn’t guilty legally though he is morally. The woman is a cheap slut. She’s inviting humiliation.”

A few days after Ms. Liu filed her lawsuit, in April 2019, a heavily edited video surfaced on the Chinese internet. 

It was titled “Proof of a Gold Digger Trap?” and was cut to give the impression that Ms. Liu had invited Liu to her apartment for sex. 

It was posted to Weibo by an account that had never posted anything before. 

One of Liu’s Chinese lawyers wrote online that the video was “authentic,” and it was viewed more than 54 million times. 

Numerous Chinese websites published articles saying Ms. Liu had escorted Liu into her room.
Separately, one of China’s most influential newspapers published an edited audio clip, in which Ms. Liu can be heard asking Liu’s lawyer for an apology and money. 

News of the recording was reposted widely. 

Taken together, the video and audio clip seemed to turn the whole of the Chinese internet against Ms. Liu.
In Minneapolis, I asked her to estimate what proportion of news consumers in China believed her. Initially, she said 30 percent. 

Thinking about it longer, Ms. Liu said that there were probably just three types of people in her corner: women who have been sexually assaulted, feminists and people who know her. 

“Definitely not 30 percent,” she said, a little defeated. 

“Ten percent at best.”
Then Ms. Liu grew agitated. 

“I didn’t want to report to the police in the first place because I knew this would happen,” she said. “People would look at me and say, ‘There are too many holes in her story. She said she was drunk, but the way she walked in the video didn’t show it at all.’ But I didn’t say that I was so dead drunk that I couldn’t move.”
She kept talking. 

“They said that I was pretending when I couldn’t find my apartment in the building. But if I were a real gold digger, why would I take a man running around in the building for 15 minutes to find my door? They questioned why I would take a man home in the middle of the night. But it was my home, and he was Richard Liu! Who would have thought he would do that?”

“I didn’t want to report to the police in the first place because I knew this would happen,” Ms. Liu said. “People would look at me and say, ‘There are too many holes in her story.'”

‘The Price of Shame’
Ms. Liu said she felt powerless — that she couldn’t make the public see how scary it was for a 21-year-old to sit among a group of powerful middle-aged men, and how she couldn’t make the most powerful among them leave her alone. 

Ms. Liu couldn’t make them see how creepy it was that a 45-year-old billionaire, who mingled with the Davos elite, followed a young woman around an apartment building that mostly housed students. She was angry at Liu’s two assistants and the other executives at the dinner: She saw them as complicit, but barely any public outrage had been directed at them.
She continues to hide in her apartment with her two Yorkshire terriers, waiting for developments in her lawsuit against Liu. 

Her parents are working in China. 

Her boyfriend has had visa trouble and can’t visit. 

Ms. Liu uses a pseudonym when ordering takeout food and Ubers, for fear that she’ll encounter a Chinese person who recognizes her name.
During our long conversation, I asked Ms. Liu whether she thought her experience was similar to that of Monica Lewinsky. 

“Of course not,” she said quickly. 

“I would never sleep with a married man voluntarily.” 

A week later, I sent her a link to Ms. Lewinsky’s TED Talk, titled “The Price of Shame,” in which she argues for a more compassionate social-media environment. 

“Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop,” Ms. Lewinsky says.
“We’re so similar!” Ms. Liu told me a day later. 

“I truly admire her that after all that, she can still live a positive life. Extraordinary!” 

Then she added, “I’m such a loser that I don’t even dare to read the police report.”
But Ms. Liu has, she said, turned out to be more resilient than she at first expected. 

True, she said, she suffers from PTSD and is sometimes suicidal. 

But she’s determined to pursue the case. 

She said she would not settle, because she would never agree to signing a nondisclosure agreement. 

If she won, she said, she would donate all the money to Chinese feminists who have been supportive of her — except for $1,000, which she would keep for herself.
She spent money on a flight to New York to find a lawyer. 

And she wants compensation, she said, for the clothes and bedsheets that were destroyed.
“If I had known I could endure so much,” she said, “I would not have hesitated about reporting to the police.”

MIT terminates funding and research links with China’s Huawei and ZTE

• The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is terminating all research and funding links with Chinese tech companies Huawei and ZTE in light of federal investigations regarding violations of sanction restrictions.
• MIT is one of several prestigious academic institutions in the U.S. to announce an end to ties with Huawei.

By Shirley Tay

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is terminating all research and funding links with Chinese tech firms Huawei and ZTE in light of recent U.S. federal probes, according to a letter from university officials.
MIT is one of several prestigious academic institutions in the U.S. to announce an end to ties with Huawei. 

Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Minnesota have cut all future research collaborations with the Chinese telecom company as well, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post.
“MIT is not accepting new engagements or renewing existing ones with Huawei and ZTE or their respective subsidiaries due to federal investigations regarding violations of sanction restrictions,” MIT Associate Provost Richard Lester and Vice President for Research Maria Zuber wrote in a letter to the faculty on Wednesday.
In a 2017 presentation by Huawei, MIT was cited as a collaborator in the Huawei Innovation Research Program. 

The program is a global initiative “to identify and support world-class, full-time faculty members pursuing innovation of mutual interest,” the SCMP reported the tech giant as saying.
The halt in funding to Huawei and ZTE comes at a time of heightening tensions between the U.S. and China.
U.S. lawmakers have said ZTE and Huawei equipment may represent national security risks, alleging that the companies’ products could support Chinese espionage. 

In January, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Huawei with violating U.S. sanctions against Iran and stealing trade secrets from U.S. telecom T-Mobile.
Huawei and ZTE, however, are not the only international entities affected by a halt in partnerships with the university.
MIT’s plans to cut ties with Huawei and ZTE is part of a bigger plan to ramp up its internal evaluation of international partners, the letter to faculty said.
“Engagements with certain countries — currently China, Russia and Saudi Arabia — merit additional faculty and administrative review beyond the usual evaluations that all international projects receive,” the MIT officials wrote.
MIT’s “elevated-risk” review process will pay special attention to “intellectual property, export controls, data security and access, economic competitiveness, national security, and political, civil and human rights,” the letter said.
ZTE declined to comment and Huawei did not immediately reply to CNBC’s emailed request for comment about MIT’s decision.

American Colleges Hosted an Important Part of China’s Propaganda Set-Up. Now They’re Bailing Out.

Congress has demanded more scrutiny of Confucius Institutes.
By DAN SPINELLI

The patron saint of China's propaganda machine

When the University of Minnesota established a Confucius Institute, or center for Chinese language learning, in September 2008, it quickly turned into one of China’s overseas success stories. 

With its efforts to promote the study of Chinese among students “from preschool to 12th grade,” the Minnesota center won plaudits from Hanban, a Chinese government organization that oversees the institutes and China’s other international language partnerships. 

Three years after its opening, the Minnesota outpost was named a Confucius Institute of the Year and between 2014 and 2018, China contributed more than $1.2 million toward the Minnesota center’s operation, according to a report in the Minnesota Daily student newspaper.
In June, the university will cut ties with Hanban, and Minnesota’s Confucius Institute will close. University officials cited a desire to refocus “our China-related activities through a strengthened and enhanced China Center,” spokesperson Katrinna Dodge said in an email to Mother Jones. 

In doing this, Minnesota joins the ranks of roughly a dozen other American colleges that have abandoned their partnerships with Hanban amid increasing criticism of Beijing’s growing authoritarianism and hostility to free speech. 

“Most agreements establishing Confucius Institutes feature nondisclosure clauses and unacceptable concessions to the political aims and practices of the government of China,” the American Association of University Professors concluded in a 2014 report, which said the centers “function as an arm of the Chinese state and are allowed to ignore academic freedom.”
Beijing first imported Confucius Institutes to American universities in 2004, offering generous subsidies and even staff, but the centers have attracted controversy from the start. 

As retired Communist Party bigwig Li Changchun once said, these institutes are “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.” 

Marshall Sahlins, a University of Chicago anthropologist, called them “academic malware” with propaganda objectives “as old as the imperial era.” 

Many scholars and lawmakers wanted nothing to do with the institutes, which use an authoritarian government’s money to bankroll hundreds of classes and programs at colleges, high schools, and elementary schools. 

Now, as tensions between the US and China have increased, the White House, lawmakers from both parties, and the intelligence community have singled out Confucius Institutes as a nefarious symbol of China’s creeping influence.
In a January Senate hearing, FBI Director Christopher Wray said China posed a threat “more deep, more diverse, more vexing, more challenging, more comprehensive, and more concerning than any counterintelligence threat I can think of.” 

He acknowledged last year that federal agents had targeted some Confucius Institutes with “appropriate investigative steps” over concerns of improper Chinese influence. 

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) introduced a bill last month that would require Confucius Institutes to register with the Justice Department as foreign agents, which quickly gained bipartisan support, and the most recent defense appropriations bill restricts schools with Confucius Institutes from receiving Pentagon language grants. “
“Foreign governments should not be funding student organizations on the campuses of democratic societies,” says Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, who examined Chinese influence in American higher education for a November report. 

“And certainly not the foreign government of authoritarian countries.”
In addition to citing concerns about transparency and censorship, lawmakers have also identified a glaring discrepancy between the freedoms afforded to Confucius Institutes in the United States and China’s crackdown on a similar slate of American-run centers abroad. 

In February, a bipartisan report from the Senate Homeland Security subcommittee on investigations identified “over 80 instances in the past four years” in which China interfered with State Department efforts to set up and access “American Cultural Centers” at Chinese universities. 

The US chose to stop funding the program last year amid continuing obstacles put in place by China. 

The report also noted that “nearly 70 percent” of US schools neglected to report Hanban contributions to the Department of Education, despite a requirement that postsecondary institutions report foreign gifts above a certain threshold.
Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), the subcommittee’s top Democrat, released a statement with the report that compared China’s influence activities with Russia’s efforts to intervene in the 2016 presidential election. 

“Given what our country experienced during the 2016 election and what we’re preparing to grapple with in 2020,” he said, “it is critical that we be vigilant in combatting foreign efforts to influence American public opinion.”
Diamond does not consider Confucius Institutes a security issue on par with China’s increasing surveillance of its own citizens or its widespread theft of intellectual property, but he argues that unless contracts with Hanban are made public, and assurances put in place to ensure American law governs the centers, the agreements “should be terminated.” 

Gao Qing, a Chinese agent who directed George Mason University’s Confucius Institute and now runs a nonprofit in Washington, DC, that advocates for these centers nationwide, wrote in an email to Mother Jones that Confucius Institutes are meant to offer “apolitical educational programs” and not “engage with any political activity and do not teach politics and policies.”
Confucius, the ancient philosopher whose teachings fell out of favor after the Communist Revolution, became the perfect symbol for China’s renaissance when fifteen years ago, government officials formed a Chinese language-learning center in Seoul. 

More than a century after China ceded control of the Korean peninsula to Japan—and with it, wider influence over the Asia-Pacific region—Beijing was mounting a comeback in its own backyard. 

Who better to adorn the name of its signature foreign influence project than Confucius, a philosopher with a name much easier to market overseas than Marx or Mao.
In the United States, interest in learning Chinese had been rising, but a shortage of qualified instructors left school administrators searching for help. 

By 2008, only 3 percent of elementary schools with language programs taught Chinese. 

After planting roots in South Korea, in 2004, Chinese officials unveiled their first US outpost at the University of Maryland. 

Between 1991 and 1994, Annapolis had slashed funding for state universities by nearly 20 percent, resulting in dramatic cuts at College Park, the University of Maryland’s flagship site. 

Administrators eliminated eight departments and 23 degree programs, according to the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit education news site, so an infusion of Chinese funding looked even more appealing. 

But some faculty members became uncomfortable with the arrangement. 

David Prager Branner, then an associate professor of Chinese, told Mother Jones the agreement to accept funding from the Chinese government constituted a “betrayal of the University’s primary obligation: cultivating young minds and teaching them to cultivate themselves.”
“I imagine the prestige of having the first such Institute in the United States, plus generous (as we were told) funding, more than made up in their minds for the failure to apply normal academic standards,” he wrote in an email. 

He noted that the influx of new instructors with their Hanban-approved textbook “were not even vetted by the University’s own Chinese language faculty.” 

In an email to Mother Jones, a Maryland spokeswoman sent a statement from Donna Wiseman, the university’s Confucius Institute director: “As part of our partnership with Hanban, we are responsible for making decisions about the programs we offer to the community and the extracurricular activities we coordinate on campus.”“
The partnership is a tricky one, as administrators at the College of William and Mary discovered when the Dalai Lama received an invitation to speak on campus seven years ago. 

As the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, whose land has been under China’s control for centuries, the Dalai Lama is considered a “wolf in monk’s robes” by the Chinese government. 

His appearance at any American university would upset Chinese officials, but especially so at William and Mary, which months earlier had established its own Confucius Institute. 

Ahead of the visit, a university administrator flew to Beijing and briefed Hanban leaders as part of what two knowledgeable sources described as a tense, difficult conversation that included pushback from Chinese officials. 

Nonetheless, the visit went on as planned and the university’s Confucius Institute remains in operation with continuing support from Hanban.
The dust-up was awkward, but ultimately inconsequential for the university. 

Occasional controversies over transparency and improper influence, experts say, largely depend on administrators’ care in reviewing contracts and removing any questionable language from their agreements. 

Qing says Confucius Institutes “affirm the primacy of US law,” but Hanban’s website includes a set of bylaws that several administrators around the country found concerning. 

One line implies that Chinese law, with its noticeably weaker free speech protections, would ultimately govern Confucius Institutes on US soil. 

A current Confucius Institute director at an American college, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about the partnership, said this part of the agreement had “to be watered down” for his school to participate. 

The Chinese officials did not object, he said, and seemed almost to expect the pushback. 

“Some of these nuances take time to learn,” he told Mother Jones. 

“Somebody may, without realizing it, sign the template thinking that’s the way to go forward.”

When George Washington University was first considering whether to form a Confucius Institute, faculty members were put off by a provision in Hanban’s generic agreement that its partners respect the “One China” principle which maintains that Taiwan is part of the People’s Republic of China. 

The US formally adopted this policy in 1979, but the provision still concerned administrators who interpreted it as a backdoor way to stifle academic discourse about Taiwan. 

The university ultimately agreed to a contract, years later, when the provision was no longer required.
A common criticism lodged against Hanban is the secrecy of its contracts. 

“At most Institutes, the terms of agreement are hidden,” a report from the conservative National Association of Scholars found in 2017. 

The key to keeping institutes free of undue influence, several administrators and experts reiterated, involves vetting the contracts more rigorously. 

No matter how innocuous a single institute may be, now that President Trump’s foreign policy has appeared to settle on an adversarial approach to Beijing, it is likely that they will become increasingly isolated. 

Sen. Marco Rubio, one of the most persistent critics of China in Congress, expressed a growing Washington consensus when he asked during a Senate hearing this year whether China had become “the most significant counterintelligence threat this nation has faced, perhaps in its history but certainly in the last quarter century.”