Kick Confucius Institutes Off Campus

Chinese Propaganda Has No Place on Campus
Universities can’t handle Confucius Institutes responsibly. The state should step in.
BY ANDREAS FULDA

The exasperated expression on the face of Tom Tugendhat, the chairman of the British Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, at a public hearing on the influence of autocracies on U.K. universities gave it away. 

Tugendhat had just asked what could be done to address self-censorship among Chinese students in the United Kingdom or the United States. 

The evasive answers by Alexander Bustamante, the senior vice president and chief compliance and audit officer at the University of California, and Bill Rammell, the vice chancellor at the University of Bedfordshire and chair of MillionPlus, the Association for Modern Universities, were met with a frown and the occasional glance at the chairman’s mobile phone. 

Tugendhat, a former British Army officer and counterintelligence expert, was not having it.
Tugendhat is not the only exasperated one in this discussion. 

Over the last 15 years, one question has come up again and again: the role of Confucius Institutes, funded and run by the Chinese party-state, in extending Chinese censorship to Western universities.
Since 2004, around 550 Confucius Institutes have opened worldwide, with close to 100 in the United States and 29 in the United Kingdom. 

In recent years, however, the enthusiasm with which university leaders around the world have embraced the institutes has soured. 

Increasing numbers of them have been shut. 

That’s partially thanks to the geopolitical shift against an increasingly autocratic Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Xi Jinping’s leadership and partially due to the institutes themselves being no more immune to the CCP’s waves of political repression than any other Chinese state institute—even abroad.
Confucius Institutes repeatedly stray from their publicly declared key task of providing Mandarin Chinese language training and venture into deep ideological territory. 

The institutes’ learning materials distort contemporary Chinese history and omit party-induced humanitarian catastrophes such as the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) entirely. 

At Confucius Institute events, politically sensitive issues like Taiwan, Tibet, and Tiananmen cannot be publicly discussed either. 

In 2014, a conference in Braga, Portugal, that involved both the Confucius Institute headquarters and the Taiwan-based Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange as co-sponsors was unceremoniously interrupted by Confucius Institute headquarters chief Xu Lin. 

And under the conditions of the Seven Don’t Speak directive, mainland Chinese education workers are barred from talking about universal values, freedom of speech, civil society, civil rights, the historical errors of the CCP, official bourgeoisie, and judicial independence—even when overseas.
There is an existing problem of self-censorship among China scholars. 

A recent survey revealed that in the face of increasing CCP censorship, “researchers employ several tactics in the face of such pressures. Almost half — some 48% — of respondents adapted how they describe their project in order to continue doing it, 25% changed the project’s focus, and 15% discontinued a project because of concern for sensitivity — or feasibility as the likelihood of being denied archive access in China made many projects unfeasible.”

Confucius Institutes bring another factor in: the hope of money and the fear of losing it. 

In a report by the Royal United Services Institute on China-U.K. relations, Charles Parton, a former British diplomat and security expert, pointed out that the “problem does not lie primarily with teaching staff. Often, when they meet pressure, they are not backed up by university administrators. 

A number of professors have told the author that vice-chancellors and other administrators have not supported them when they have been subject to pressures which impinge on academic freedom.”
Confucius Institutes at universities can be likened to Perry Link’s “anaconda in the chandelier”—his metaphor for the power of censorship in China. 

While the anaconda may not move, its shadow nevertheless induces fear among staff, students, and university managers alike, and they react accordingly. 

Mindful of the importance of international student recruitment, there is little appetite among university administrators to jeopardize the steady stream of fee-paying international students from mainland China.
Confucius Institutes play a double role: They are both cultural and political organizations. 

When discussing the equally controversial role of Chinese Students and Scholars Associations, student groups with strong ties to the Chinese embassies, the British academic Martin Thorley recently coined the term “latent network.” 

In Thorley’s words, the “latent network is one of multiple forms of power transmission by the Party-state over the periphery. The firewall between the public and the private, typically a far more robust fixture in liberal democracies, must be more permeable in a system where a single institution rules without effective legal oversight.” 

Thorley goes on to explain that “institutions within this network, though not necessarily controlled by the CCP directly in their day-to-day affairs, are dependent on CCP patronage and thus, subject to CCP direction.”
The fate of the Lyon Confucius Institute (LCI) underscores the danger that Confucius Institutes as latent networks pose. 

Following the arrival of an activist director from mainland China in the fall of 2012, an increasingly bitter conflict ensued over curriculum development. 

When LCI Chair of the Board Gregory Lee successfully resisted such attempts to introduce a CCP-style curriculum, the university’s relationship with Hanban, the Confucius Institute headquarters in Beijing, ended acrimoniously, and the LCI was closed. 

Any other global university currently partnering with Confucius Institutes may in the future share Lyon’s fate.
All this points to a critical truth: The decision to host Confucius Institutes on campuses should not be devolved to universities but made by the state.
Unless they’re willing to see the CCP’s grip tighten on their own institutions, governments worldwide should move to ban Confucius Institutes from operating on university campuses. 

Critics call this McCarthyism. 

But such a state intervention would not be undermining but in fact restoring academic autonomy and freedom of speech. 

Nobody is calling for intellectual restrictions or ideological tests for staff — merely for a recognition that money is power and that the CCP is ready to use it. 

Such state intervention would also provide the necessary cover for universities to terminate their existing cooperation agreements with Confucius Institutes without being accused of picking a fight with the CCP.
Opponents of such a state intervention should bear in mind that Confucius Institutes—just like any other cultural organization operating overseas—could still register as civic groups and rent out office space off campus and continue their public relations work. 

This is how Western cultural organizations like the Goethe-Institut, British Council, and Institut Français operate globally. 

Removing Confucius Institutes from universities could be considered an overdue standardization that brings them in line with common global practice.
Following such a ban, Confucius Institutes could also merge with China Cultural Centers, another Chinese cultural organization that operates with more than 30 branches worldwide.
But governments and universities alike should make up for the limited loss of revenue by fully funding Chinese language and contemporary Chinese studies provision. 

If China matters, they should put their money where their mouth is. 

It remains the responsibility of Western educators to proactively engage Chinese students and scholars as individuals and take the lead in introducing domestic students to mainland China, rather than letting the CCP and its outlets own the China story.

China's Subversion Machine

CHINA’S LONG ARM REACHES INTO AMERICAN CAMPUSES
Beijing is stepping up efforts to inject party ideology into student life. 

BY BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN

When Xi Jinping visited Washington on Sept. 24, 2015 on a state visit, hundreds of Chinese students lined the streets for hours, carrying banners and flags to welcome him.
It was a remarkable display of seemingly spontaneous patriotism.
Except it wasn’t entirely spontaneous.
The Chinese Embassy paid students to attend and helped organize the event. 
Working with Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs) at local universities — a Chinese student organization with branches at dozens of schools around the country — government officials from the office of educational affairs at the Chinese Embassy in Washington collected the contact information of about 700 students who had signed up to attend.
Embassy officials communicated with students via WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, during the event and into the night, responding to messages as late as 3 a.m.
According to a Chinese student at George Washington University who attended the event, participants each received about $20 for their effort, distributed through the CSSA a few months later.
This wasn’t an isolated example of paid political mobilization.
A similar arrangement had occurred in February 2012, when Xi visited Washington as vice chairman. In that case, it took almost a year for the embassy to transfer the promised funds to the George Washington CSSA.
In January 2013, the student group sent a message, recently reviewed by Foreign Policy, to its members saying the compensation from Xi’s welcome the previous year was finally available, and they could come pick up the cash at the campus community center if they brought a photo ID. 
The George Washington CSSA did not respond to a request for comment.
And when then-President Hu Jintao visited Chicago in 2011, the University of Wisconsin-Madison CSSA bused in Chinese students, excited about a free trip to the city and a chance to glimpse the president.
The association also surprised the students at the conclusion of the trip with a small cash payment. The CSSA president told students not to speak to the media about the money.
The association did not respond to a request for comment.
The embassy-sponsored welcome parties, which lend an aura of power and popularity to the visiting leaders, are just one example of the close relationship that the Chinese government maintains with Chinese student groups across the United States.
In the past few years, as Xi has strengthened the party’s control over every aspect of Chinese society and sought to extend his power abroad, consular officials have markedly increased their efforts to exert ideological influence over students — leaving some CSSA members wary to speak out against what they see as unwanted government intrusion.
Chinese students at George Washington University line the streets of Washington on Sept. 24, 2015 to welcome Xi Jinping during his state visit.

While many countries, including the United States, fund educational activities abroad, the Chinese government’s direct control over student groups is unique. 
Beijing’s influence over these groups is also beginning to raise questions and concerns among students on American campuses, who fear they will be accused of being agents of espionage.
The growing ties are also concerning U.S. government officials, who are wary of China’s political and economic reach in the United States.
At a security hearing last month, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that American universities are naive about the intelligence risk of Chinese “nontraditional collectors, especially in the academic setting,” and claimed that China poses a “whole-of-society threat.”
Although the extent of Chinese government funding and oversight of these organizations is not entirely clear and appears to vary from group to group, it seems to be more significant than previously known — and growing.
FP spoke to more than a dozen members of the group across the country (including four current or former presidents), was given access to internal messages and documents, and reviewed the publicly available charters of dozens of these groups, in Chinese and English.
All of the students who spoke to FP requested anonymity for fear of potential reprisals.
FP found that CSSAs regularly accept funds from their local consulates and many officially describe themselves as under the “guidance” or “leadership” of the embassy. 
Internal correspondence reviewed by FP also show that consular officials communicate regularly with CSSAs, dividing the groups by region and assigning each region to an embassy contact who is responsible for relaying safety information — and the political directive — to chapter presidents. 
CSSAs explicitly vet their members along ideological lines, excluding those whose views do not align with Communist Party core interests.
The Chinese Embassy did not respond to a request for comment on any of the issues raised in this article.
Chinese Communist Party influence within the United States is a real concern, and the vessels of that influence “should be transparent and it should be disclosed,” says Bill Bishop, author of the influential Sinocism newsletter, which offers insights into Chinese politics and government.
The number of Chinese students studying in the United States has skyrocketed from tens of thousands a decade ago to more than 330,000; nearly one in three international students is Chinese.
Numerous CSSA members, including two current chapter presidents, say that they are uncomfortable with what they felt was growing ideological pressure from the embassy and consulates. 
That pressure has become more apparent since 2016, when the Chinese Ministry of Education issued a directive ordering schools to instill greater patriotism and love for the party in students of every age — including Chinese students studying abroad.
Pressure on CSSAs to promote “patriotic” ideas was particularly acute in October 2017 during the 19th party plenum, the key national planning session held every five years at which top officials are selected and new policies are announced.
Consular officials sent out requests to CSSAs around the country to hold events related to the plenum. One such message, viewed by FP, encouraged groups to organize viewing sessions for their members to watch the opening ceremonies together, and requested that they send photos or reports of the event back to the consulate.
Consular officials also requested that CSSAs across the United States post articles praising Xi’s vision for the country and touting other party propaganda. 
Officials asked groups to organize study sessions to discuss the party pronouncements coming out of the plenum. 
Articles and invitations to plenum-related events appeared on the WeChat accounts of CSSAs at University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, Georgetown University, and other schools around the country.
These and similar requests have troubled some CSSA leaders.
“I really don’t want CSSA to have any relationship more than basic etiquette with the Chinese Consulate,” says the president of a large CSSA at a major university, speaking to FP.
“I try to reject any sponsor from the embassy, financial wise, since I want our club to be able to make our own decisions.”
The student says that the requests feel to him like an attempt to inject a political ideology where it doesn’t belong.
He says he tries to keep the consulate at arm’s length, offering bare minimum compliance with its requests in order to keep up a good relationship.
He does not post the pro-party articles that the consular officials send to him, though he knows other CSSA presidents do.
“I feel like the tendency is that the consulate tries to control CSSAs more and more,” says the CSSA president.
“I don’t think this student group should be involved with government in any way.”
The CSSA president emphasizes that while he is concerned about the increasing control the Chinese government tries to exert over student organizations, he is not deeply alarmed yet.
“The current situation is not that Chinese students don’t have freedom after they come to the United States,” he tells FP.
“If something bad is happening, it has not happened yet.”
But the association president feels he must at least make a show of complying with embassy requests, citing a sense of peer pressure that exists within the CSSA.
A consular official often asks him for evidence of compliance, such as photos or a brief report, to show to superiors, and the student doesn’t want to get the consular officer in trouble.
“The people inside [the consulate], I feel most of them are good, they’re just doing their jobs,” said the student.
“But I do feel like there is an invisible hand behind them, saying they want more than this. Maybe the policymaker is in Beijing, or in D.C.”
The president of a CSSA at a small liberal arts college expresses similar reservations, telling FP that he also chose not to post the articles the consulate had sent him.
“I personally disliked those content. I felt it’s wrong to do it,” the student tells FP.
Chinese consular officials often communicate with CSSA leaders through group chats in the Chinese messaging app WeChat.
Consular officials divide the regions into different umbrellas, with specific officials responsible for certain regions, and then create WeChat groups for the presidents of all the CSSAs in the region, with a consular official also a member of each group. 
This allows officials to communicate announcements and requests directly to dozens of CSSA presidents by sending a single message. 
FP viewed a screenshot of one group that included nearly two dozen regional CSSA presidents receiving messages from a Chinese Consulate official.
The West Coast region has more institutionalized oversight.
An umbrella organization called Southwest CSSA was founded in 2003; the organization itself is not affiliated to any university, and oversees the CSSAs at universities in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Hawaii. 
In some ways the umbrella group functions as a regional office to increase coordination and cooperation among campus CSSAs, holding annual elections from among its member CSSAs for its board of officers, and holding joint events.
But Southwest CSSA’s ties to the consulate are far closer than those of the individual groups at universities. 
Its bylaws state that all presidential candidates must first receive approval from the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles before the election can take place. 
Southwest CSSA sometimes holds events inside the consulate itself.
Southwest CSSA also openly supports party ideology. 
Its stated goals, according to its website, include “promoting the spirit of ‘studying abroad to serve the country’” — a direct quote from a letter Xi Jinping sent to Chinese students studying in Moscow in December.
This letter has been the subject of a major push, with consulates encouraging Chinese students around the world to study and learn from the president’s words. 
Other stated goals include “promoting patriotic feeling” and helping Chinese students “serve the motherland in many ways even while they are studying in America.”
In 2016, Southwest CSSA filed for tax-exempt status as a public charity with the IRS.
According to its tax forms, it reported $107,304 in gifts and contributions, but no money from fundraising or membership dues.
Its list of donors is not publicly available.
Neither Southwest CSSA nor the Los Angeles consulate responded to a request for comment.
Chinese consular funding of CSSAs is widespread, and any CSSA is eligible to apply for government funds.
Many CSSAs tout their relationships and financial ties to Chinese consulates on their websites, usually only in Chinese, omitting this connection from the English translations on the website.
The financial relationship between the Chinese government and the CSSAs is not always well advertised.
In June 2017, the president of the University of Pittsburgh’s CSSA wrote on her Weibo account that the group received $6,000 a year from the Chinese Embassy; she later deleted the post.
Others are more open.
The goals of the Harvard Medical School CSSA, according to its charter, include “loving the motherland” and “uniting” the Chinese students and researchers at Harvard Medical School with the Chinese Embassy “for the prosperity and strength of the motherland.” 
The charter also mentions funds received from the “embassy sponsor.”
Many other CSSAs, from those at small liberal arts colleges to prestigious private universities to major public research institutions, openly accept consular funding as well.
Onlookers wait to catch a glimpse of Hu Jintao in Chicago on Jan. 20, 2011.

In some cases, the consulate deposits the money directly into the personal account of the CSSA treasurer or other officer, rather than the official CSSA account, according to three association members.
A separate, unofficial CSSA bank account is sometimes set up to receive the funds. 
In either case, the university administration may be unaware that the organization is receiving funding from a foreign government. (The Columbia University CSSA was briefly shuttered in 2015 for rules violations; the school administration allowed the group to resume operations within a year.)
Receiving money from a foreign government or officials could trigger the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which is designed as a transparency mechanism for organizations attempting to influence American opinion.
Normally, academic organizations are exempt from FARA registration, says Ben Freeman, the director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the nonprofit Center for International Policy.
That means, for example, that Chinese graduate students studying in the United States on Chinese government scholarships do not have to register.
And FARA only applies to advocacy conducted with the American public in mind, according to Freeman.
“If the Chinese government is paying a Chinese group here to do advocacy to influence other Chinese, that would not trigger FARA,” he says.
But what might trigger registration as a foreign agent is if a Chinese government-funded group attempted to change the behavior of U.S. government officials or to sway American public opinion at large, he says.
In at least one case, the Chinese government, through a local CSSA, appeared to do just that. 
In late 2017, the Wayne State University CSSA in Michigan was involved in an ethics investigation into the local city council after the CSSA offered four scholarships to the Ypsilanti mayor and three other local officials to fund travel to China. 
After the trip took place, it was discovered that the Chinese Consulate had provided the money to persuade Ypsilanti city officials to support a $300 million Chinese-funded development project. 
The Wayne State CSSA did not respond to a request for comment.
Some CSSAs have accepted money directly from high-ranking Chinese government officials.
In February 2017, Hong Lei, a former Chinese foreign ministry spokesman and now a diplomat at the Chinese Consulate in Chicago, made a personal donation to the CSSA at the Washington University in St. Louis, according to an article posted to the group’s WeChat account.
The consulate’s website mentioned his visit to the school, but not the donation.
The association did not respond to a request for comment.
For Chinese students, however, a more important concern is potential political pressure, which can come in the form of explicit ideological vetting.
In a March 2016 message to students announcing upcoming elections, the University of Minnesota CSSA stated that candidates for president who were Communist Party members would receive preferential consideration for the post (FP viewed a copy of the message).
The group’s website states that the group receives “strong financial support” from the Chicago consulate.
In some cases, the CSSAs make the ideological requirements for membership clear.
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville CSSA charter states that members are required to “love the motherland” and to “protect China’s honor and image.” 
The Chinese-language version of the charter, which differs from the English-language version, also states that members must hold Chinese passports; that students or researchers from Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Macau who do not have Chinese passports must uphold the “one-China principle” and support “national unification” in order to be a member; and that ethnic Chinese students without Chinese passports can join if “their heart belongs to the motherland.”
Embassy officials have also coached CSSAs how to respond during a public relations crisis, like what happened at the University of Maryland in May 2017, when Yang Shuping, a Chinese undergraduate, praised American democracy and criticized Chinese government oppression during her commencement address. 
Her remarks went viral on the Chinese internet and Yang became the subject of virulent online attacks from patriotic Chinese netizens.
The University of Maryland CSSA, rather than supporting her, posted a video criticizing her remarks.
Shortly after the incident, an embassy official met with CSSAs from 14 schools from states near the Washington metro area, including the University of Maryland CSSA. 
In the meeting, the official praised the group’s response and encouraged other CSSAs to follow suit, according to typed notes from the meeting reviewed by FP.
The official recommended that CSSAs, if faced with a similar crisis, should contact the embassy as soon as possible and provide a detailed report, issue a public statement immediately, and avoid violence and personal attacks.
In 2017, widespread opposition among Chinese students at the University of California, San Diego over an invitation to the Dalai Lama to give the commencement address sparked suspicion that the Chinese Embassy was behind the protest.
The UC San Diego CSSA issued a strongly worded statement and requested a meeting with the administration, in which it asked university officials to ensure that the Tibetan spiritual leader would not address politics in his speech.
In May 2017, shortly after the Dalai Lama’s visit, Chinese diplomatic officials gave an award to the UC San Diego CSSA at an annual CSSA conference held inside the consulate itself, according to a post on the group’s WeChat account.
The close ties between the student groups and the consulates keep Chinese students mindful that government officials are just one WeChat message away.
One Chinese student at a large university in the south says the CSSA’s links to the embassy bothered them, and that since 2015, the ties have become more obvious. 
“Self-censorship in authoritarian states is usually a state of being constantly careful about what you say and do,” the student says.

Exporting Authoritarianism With Chinese Characteristics

Scholars and political leaders describe increasing concerns about Chinese government influence over teaching and research in the U.S. and Australia.
By Elizabeth Redden

Two times in Kevin Carrico’s six years of teaching he’s been approached by students from China who told him that things they said in his classroom about sensitive subjects somehow made their way to their parents back home.

The first time it happened, when Carrico was teaching at a university in the United States, a student informed him that a presentation he’d given about the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 had been reported to his father in China, where the father held a position in government. “This was a situation where the father’s superiors -- I wasn’t given a lot of specifics -- but his superiors mentioned this to him and raised this as something that [the father] should know about, supposedly,” said Carrico, who’s now a lecturer in Chinese studies at Australia’s Macquarie University.
The second time, which happened after Carrico moved to Australia, a student told him that a class presentation she’d given on self-immolation in Tibet had been reported to her parents in China.

Kevin Carrico

“The only way that this could have been communicated back to China would have been from somebody in the class,” Carrico said. 

“I suppose another possibility is that the files on the student’s computer are somehow corrupted and can be read or monitored, but that’s probably unlikely.”
“It raises really complicated issues about, ethically, what am I supposed to do as somebody who teaches contemporary China issues in an ostensibly free environment, while some of my students may be in a less free environment such that what they say in class could in some cases be communicated back to China,” Carrico continued. 

“Awareness of that could affect student participation, which is part of their grades, and lack of awareness of that could have implications for students and their families.”
“It leaves me with a real dilemma as someone who is dedicated to not censoring what I teach or write about China, but who also doesn’t want to create an environment in which students are worried about what they say in class or are pressured to contribute to discussions that could somehow be risky for them and somehow or other reported back to officials or to family.”
Carrico finds it hard to judge just how big the problem is based on the two instances his students told him about.
“Two is not a lot,” he said, “but at the same time I do feel like it’s two too many.”
In recent years the Chinese government has stepped up its crackdown on domestic dissent at the same time it continues to expand the country's global influence. 

A confluence of events has China studies scholars raising concerns about whether the Chinese Communist Party is exporting its censorship regime abroad, and what the implications are for free discussion and research at universities outside China.
Some of the concerns -- such as academic freedom concerns raised by the Confucius Institutes, centers of Chinese language and cultural education that are funded and staffed by a Chinese government entity and housed on U.S. and other international campuses, or concerns about foreign scholars self-censoring their writings or choices of research topics so they can continue to get visas to China -- are familiar. 

Others have risen to the forefront over the past few months.

In several recent cases, international scholarly publishers have ceded to requests from Chinese censors to block access to selected journal articles in China. 

Cambridge University Press originally agreed to block access in China to more than 300 articles -- mostly on sensitive topics like Tiananmen, Tibet, Taiwan and the Cultural Revolution -- from its prestigious China Quarterly journal before reversing course and reinstating the content after coming under heavy criticism. 

Other Cambridge-published journals, the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Asian Studies, have also reported receiving -- and rebuffing -- requests to block access to some of their articles in China.
The giant publisher Springer Nature has, on the other hand, complied with censorship requests. 

After Financial Times reported that more than 1,000 articles had been removed from the Chinese websites of two political science journals published by Springer Nature, the publisher confirmed that “a small percentage of our content (less than 1 percent) is limited in mainland China” and said it is “required to take account of the local rules and regulations in the countries in which we distribute our published content.” 

Springer Nature described the blocking of content as “deeply regrettable” and said it was necessary so as not to avoid jeopardizing access to the remainder of its published content in China.
Shuping Yang

Beyond the issue of scholarly publishing, Chinese nationalism is also posing challenges to foreign universities that host Chinese students. 

After a student delivered a commencement speech last spring at the University of Maryland, College Park, criticizing air pollution in her home city in China and praising “the fresh air of free speech” she found in the U.S., the student, Shuping Yang, came under heavy criticism on Chinese social media and from some of her Chinese classmates. 

The backlash prompted Yang to apologize and for her university to issue a statement defending her right to free expression.
In another commencement controversy, the Chinese Students and Scholars Association at the University of California, San Diego, led a protest of the university’s choice of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, as this spring’s graduation speaker. 

A nationalistic Chinese newspaper, The Global Times, blasted UCSD for the invitation to the Dalai Lama, whom Beijing considers to be a separatist, and said its chancellor “must bear the consequences for this.” 

In September it came to light that the China Scholarship Council was freezing funding for government-funded scholars headed to UCSD.
Academic exchange between the U.S. and China is arguably as high as it's ever been (even though it is true that the number of Americans studying in China has actually declined in recent years). 

More than 350,000 Chinese students study at American colleges and universities, making up the single largest group of international students by nationality. 

American universities have grown increasingly dependent on the tuition revenue Chinese students bring and welcome the chance to bring more diverse and global perspectives to the classroom.
But there are increasing concerns about whether mainland Chinese students always feel free on American campuses to articulate perspectives that may deviate from Beijing's party line. 

Earlier this year, The New York Times published an article on the links between campus-based chapters of Chinese Students and Scholars Associations and Chinese embassies and consulates and the ways in which the student groups have, in the words of reporter Stephanie Saul, “worked in tandem with Beijing to promote a pro-Chinese agenda and tamp down anti-Chinese speech on Western campuses.”
Wang Dan, a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests who holds a doctorate in history, recently published an op-ed in The New York Times in which he described surveillance of Chinese students and scholars on campuses by some of their compatriots. 

“The Chinese government encourages like-minded Chinese students and scholars in the West to report on Chinese students who participate in politically sensitive activities,” he wrote.
“Chinese students who are seen with political dissidents like me or dare to publicly challenge Chinese government policies can be put on a blacklist. Their families in China can be threatened or punished.”
At a hearing in December on China's foreign influence operations held by the Congressional Executive Commission of China, Senator Angus King, an Independent from Maine who caucuses with Democrats, asked speakers at the hearing about this issue. 

He asked whether there is "any evidence that the Chinese government is recruiting some of those students as agents, either gathering intelligence or otherwise malign activities in our country."
Sophie Richardson testifying.

“We’ve been doing some research for a couple of years on threats to academic freedom from the Chinese government outside China, and a piece of that has involved looking at the realities for students and scholars who are originally from the mainland on campuses in the U.S., Australia and elsewhere,” Sophie Richardson, the China director for Human Rights Watch, said in response to King's question.
"It's not a new pathology that Chinese government officials want to know what those students and scholars are saying in classrooms. One doesn't have a perfect year-on-year data set to say that it’s gotten worse, but it’s certainly a sufficiently real dynamic for people. For example, we have a graduate student who told us about something that he discussed in a closed seminar at a university here, and two days later his parents got visited by the Ministry of Public Security in China asking why their kid had brought up these touchy topics that were embarrassing to China in a classroom in the U.S. So I think that that surveillance is real.”

China’s ‘Long Arm’
The congressional hearing -- which bore the title “The Long Arm of China: Exporting Authoritarianism With Chinese Characteristics” -- was not exclusively focused on academe, but much of the hearing focused on Chinese censorship of academic publications and the Chinese government's efforts to wield influence internationally through academic and other people-to-people exchanges. 

“It seems to me there’s a continuum,” Senator King mused at one point. 

“I mean, we have people-to-people programs, we bring students from other parts of the world here, we have various information about our country that has … a positive narrative. But at some point the question is where does puffery stop and -- um, I don’t know what the right word might be -- but some kind of subversion begin?”

The committee's chair, Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida, said in his opening remarks that the Chinese government is “clearly targeting academia. The Party deems historical analysis and interpretation that do not hew to the Party’s ideological and official story as dangerous and threatening to its legitimacy. Recent reports of the censorship of international scholarly journals illustrate the Chinese government’s direct requests to censor international academic content... Related to this is the proliferation of Confucius Institutes and with them insidious curbs on academic freedom.”

“I think in one sense what distinguishes the Chinese efforts to wield influence in the United States is that they are spending a great deal more money to do that,” Glenn Tiffert, a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, said at the hearing, where he spoke about his research on censorship of two Chinese law journals (a webcast of the full hearing is available here). 

“They have commercial advantages and so they’re able through, for example, Confucius Institutes to promote a particular view of China and to close out discussion of certain topics on campus.”
“China’s not necessarily appealing to hearts and minds,” Tiffert said. 

“It’s appealing to wallets.”
Jonathan Sullivan, the director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham, in the United Kingdom, said in an email interview with Inside Higher Ed that the increasing concerns about Chinese influence over international higher education “are the result of an accumulation of developments and concerning trends in China (and the West).”
“Every sector of Chinese society has tightened under Xi Jinping -- the Party, business, media, internet, [human rights] lawyers, activists, citizen journalists, migrants, Chinese academia,” he said. 

“The expansion of Chinese interests around the world and determination and ability to push back against what it sees as Western hegemony that has acted against China have steadily increased during the same period. At the same time, we have witnessed the erosion of our own values at home via Trump, Brexit, rise of the far right. Taken as a whole, these trends are cause for concern. Although China has long had a censorship regime … there has never been a confluence of these three trends before, i.e., concerted tightening across the board within China, China’s willingness and ability to actively promote its interests in the West, and the erosion of support for core values by our own leaders.”
Carrico, of Macquarie University, added that the "ideological hardening" within China has had implications outside the country.
“People have come to realize that there’s no longer any kind of great firewall between academic practice in China and academic practice outside of China. There is this kind of increasing pressure on academics working outside of China, and ironically, I think this increasing pressure is leading people to realize just how problematic the current system is in China,” he said.

Clashes on Campus

Rowena He

Rowena He, an assistant professor of history at St. Michael’s College, in Vermont, has written that when she was a graduate student in the U.S. and Canada, she dodged questions from college classmates about her research topic -- the Tiananmen Square movement -- and worried about whether she could ever go home and about whether her family members in China would get into trouble. “When my work became better known, angry young Chinese students accused me of lying about historical facts, while thousands of online messages labeled me a ‘national traitor’ who criticized China to get money from ‘the West,’” He wrote in a 2011 op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.
He has also written about the treatment of Grace Wang, who as a freshman at Duke University in 2008 was vilified online and subjected to threats -- her contact information and directions to her parents' apartment in China were posted on the internet -- after she attempted to mediate between pro-Tibet and pro-China protesters on the North Carolina campus.
“In the past decade, I have observed the development of Chinese student nationalism, first as a graduate student, later as a scholar and faculty member, and always as a first-generation Chinese living in Canada and United States,” He, who’s also a researcher with Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, said via email. 

“I experienced firsthand the intimidation of hypernationalist discourse in classrooms, in public lectures, in cyberspace and in daily lives. Some media stories describe such phenomena as ‘cultural conflicts’ that the ‘West’ needs to understand and accommodate; meanwhile, within the academy, many consider these reactions as perspectives of ‘the other,’ which thus should be embraced under the principles of inclusion. This sort of conciliatory approach may come easily to some college administrators who have to deal with budgetary pressures and welcome the tuition from Chinese students.”
“It is particularly disturbing to see that, in contrast to the experiences that I have documented in my studies among the previous generation of Chinese diasporas, such ultranationalism of the new generation did not abate as students matured in societies that offer easy access to information and freedom of speech,” He continued. 

“Instead, it appears that Chinese students are becoming even more assertive and aggressive, taking advantage of the freedom of their host countries, and operating with increasingly open support from the Chinese authorities.”
Concerns about these kinds of issues have been especially acute in Australia, bound up as they are in part of a broader public debate about the extent of Chinese influence over the country's politics.
The head of Australia's domestic intelligence agency warned in October of a need to be "very conscious" of foreign interference in universities, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 

"That can go to a range of issues. It can go to the behavior of foreign students, it can go to the behavior of foreign consular staff in relation to university lecturers, it can go to atmospherics in universities," Duncan Lewis, the intelligence chief, said.

Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop

Australia's foreign minister, Julie Bishop, gave a speech in October in which she urged Chinese students to respect freedom of speech in Australia. 

"This country prides itself on its values of openness and upholding freedom of speech, and if people want to come to Australia, they are our laws," she said.
"We want to ensure that everyone has the advantage of expressing their views, whether they are at university or whether they are visitors," Bishop said.
"We don't want to see freedom of speech curbed in any way involving foreign students or foreign academics."

The comments from top Australian government officials followed a series of incidents in Australia in which lecturers at the country's universities came under fire on social media or in Chinese-language newspapers for things they said or did in the classroom.

In one case, reported on by The Australian, a lecturer at the University of Newcastle came under criticism for using teaching materials that referred to Hong Kong and Taiwan as separate countries (Hong Kong is a special administrative region within China, while under the "one China" policy Taiwan is regarded by the government in Beijing as a breakaway province that will eventually be reunited with the mainland). 

According to a statement from the university, the lecturer agreed to meet with concerned students after class to discuss the materials, which came from a Transparency International report that used the word “countries” to refer to both countries and territories. 

The discussion was “covertly recorded” and released to the media. 

“You have to consider all the students’ feelings … Chinese students are one-third of this classroom; you make us feel uncomfortable … you have to show your respect,” a student is heard saying on the recording. 

The Chinese consulate-general in Sydney reportedly contacted the university about the matter.
In another case, a lecturer at Australian National University apologized after students complained that he had translated a warning against cheating into Mandarin, making it appear as if the warning was targeting Chinese students specifically, according to Chinese media. 

In yet another case, a lecturer at the University of Sydney publicly apologized for using a map in class that showed Chinese-claimed territory as being part of India, according to The Australian.
“Does this mean that all of Australia’s universities recognize all of China’s territorial claims?” asked Clive Hamilton, a professor of public ethics at Charles Stuart University. 

“It’s madness.”
A book by Hamilton about the extent of Chinese government influence on Australian politics and academe is in limbo after its publisher, Allen & Unwin, delayed its publication indefinitely, saying it was concerned about “potential threats to the book and the company from possible [legal] action by Beijing.” 

Hamilton withdrew the book, which is titled Silent Invasion: How China Is Turning Australia Into a Puppet State, and is looking for another publisher.
“I’m very concerned about the message it sends,” Hamilton said. 

“I wonder whether it will scare off other publishers. They’ll see the story and think, ‘OK, let’s be very careful about any books on China or Chinese influence on the West because there might be blowback from Beijing.’ I’m also worried about the message it sends to other authors. Do they look at this case and say, ‘Well, I might have trouble finding a publisher if I’m too critical of the Chinese Communist Party, so I’ll tone down my criticism or stay away from controversial areas, like the Tiananmen Square massacre’?”
Hamilton said the large influx of Chinese students into Australia -- he calculated for his book that proportionally there are five times as many Chinese students in Australia as in the U.S. -- has made Australian university leaders anxious about causing any offense to the Chinese government and potentially cutting off the substantial flow of tuition revenue from the mainland.
“I think it would be frightening for many university administrators to face up to how dependent they’ve become on a foreign source of money that doesn’t share basic Western values -- or the founding values of Western universities, let’s put it that way," Hamilton said.

Looking for Evidence

David Shambaugh

David Shambaugh, the Gaston Sigur Professor of Asian Studies, Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University and the author of a book on increasing Chinese assertiveness on the global stage, emphasized the importance of being highly empirical in discussing these issues. 

"I am aware of no empirical evidence of Chinese interference with normal academic activity inside the United States," he said via email. 

"Unlike Australia -- where there have been multiple recent reports of monitoring of lecturers in the classroom, intimidation and silencing of Chinese students in class, detentions of Australian academics traveling in China, and general monitoring of China-related activities on campuses by the Chinese Students and Scholars Association -- I am aware of no evidence of any such actions or activities in the United States. These activities may occur in the future, but so far they have not. I have informally polled a number of my Chinese studies colleagues in U.S. universities, and they also report no such activities."
What has happened, he said, is, that the Chinese Embassy and consulates liaise with Chinese Students and Scholars Associations on U.S. campuses. 

And “Chinese individuals do occasionally make comments and challenge public speakers at university events -- but this is part of free speech and not out of the ordinary,” he said.
Other things that have happened, he said, include the social media attacks on the students at Duke and Maryland, retaliation against universities that have hosted the Dalai Lama, and the refusal of China to grant visas to certain U.S. scholars.
“The other thing to mention is that [over] the past six to seven years it has become increasingly much more difficult for American (and other foreign) scholars to conduct social science research in China, either individually or in collaboration with Chinese scholars. This has entirely to do with the increasingly strict and repressive political atmosphere in the country, whereby the authorities are on the lookout against alleged ‘foreign hostile forces.’ A dark political cloud has descended over Chinese academe in recent years -- and this has negatively affected opportunities for normal scholarly research and collaboration.”
Sen. Marco Rubio

At the mid-December congressional hearing on Chinese foreign influence activities, Senator Rubio asked the witnesses whether they were willing to share if they have experienced any intimidation as a result of the work they have done on this topic.
“Personally, I have not to date within the United States,” replied Tiffert, of Stanford. 

“In China working on the topics that I work on, I come under significant pressure, and the informants and people that I speak to also do, and I think that goes with the territory and it’s well recognized among people who work on modern China and contemporary issues in China.”
He continued, “I have to say that in the classroom I’ve not experienced any negative activity or any of the personal outrage that we’ve seen at other universities, say, in Australia. In my teaching I’ve been spared that. I’ve found Chinese students to be extremely thoughtful and even open-minded about issues that are passionately felt at home.”
“But there definitely is the danger -- and early-career academics are highly conscious of this -- there’s always the possibility that a minority might express unhappiness or outrage at something that is taught because it’s different than the way they’ve been taught it and that produces unwelcome controversy … Because of the decline of tenure, faculty become risk averse. They don’t want to cause controversy because they’re also concerned that their universities might not adequately support them in the event that the Chinese Students and Scholars Association or even a smaller group of students takes issue with something they said in the classroom. And so there’s a self-censorship, a chilling of speech, that occurs as well.”

A Set of Standards?
What, if anything, can universities and scholarly publishers do about some of these issues?
Scholars have urged publishers to stand together in resisting Chinese requests that they actively censor they content for the China market, and an online petition calling for a peer review boycott of publications that censor their content in China has garnered more than 1,000 signatures.
“This is an issue that is only going to occur over and over with the Chinese authorities, and [that] foreign journal editors and publishers need to anticipate and take a united stand on,” said Shambaugh, of George Washington University.
“My own view is that all publishers need to take a very principled [stance] and adopt the simple position in favor of freedom of speech and publishing over a position of (a) craven financial gain, or (b) the argument that it’s better to have a large number of journals available to Chinese readers than none at all (my view is none at all if China tries to ban a single one).”
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, the Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, and editor of the Cambridge-published Journal of Asian Studies, added that scholarly publishers have leverage they can use.
“The reason why I'm particularly distressed about the situation with Springer,” he said, “is that with the desire to compete internationally, the Chinese authorities actually really care about the journal Nature" -- a premier scientific journal published by Springer.
“It would be seen as problematic, I think, to scientists to be operating in a university setting that didn't have access to that sort of premier publication. I think Springer had more to bargain with because of the prestige of that publication. But on the other hand, they're a private company, so they were less beholden to the interest of academics and less concerned, I think, to the damage that could be done to their brand within intellectual circles,” Wasserstrom said.
After the Cambridge Press decision to censor content -- which was quickly reversed -- James A. Millward, a professor of history at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, published an open letter in Medium criticizing the censorship and characterizing Cambridge's concession as “akin to The New York Times or The Economist letting the Chinese Communist Party determine what articles go into their publications  --  something they have never done.”
“It wasn’t decrying Chinese censorship so much as it was decrying non-Chinese institutions going along with it and actively abetting it,” Millward said of the letter.

“I have a history of visa bannings related to work on Xinjiang, along with a bunch of other scholars, and I’ve always been upset at the sort of weak reaction of my own and other universities to that kind of thing and the fear of what will happen, what will China do to us if we actually stand up and say, ‘boo.’” (Millward was one of a group of contributors to a book on China's Xinjiang region who were unable to get visas to China after the book was published. He has since been able to return, he said, but only after jumping through extra hoops.)
"We need some open statements or standards, guidelines, about how these situations should be dealt with, and we don't really have that," Millward said.
"There's this kind of general sense of what academic freedom is and so on and so forth, but universities just want to go forth alone."
In the congressional hearing last month, the final question, which came from Senator Rubio, had to do with just this issue.
“Are any of you aware of efforts, whether it’s in academia or entertainment or anywhere, for universities, for example, to come together and confront this threat to academic freedom, establish some level of standards about what they will and will not do in the universities, a collective effort to affirmatively say, ‘We don’t care if you’re going to deny us trips and access to the marketplace or even to students or to exchanges or the ability to have campuses in the mainland; we are not going to allow you to pressure and undermine academic freedom’?” Rubio asked.
Among the witnesses who replied was Richardson, from Human Rights Watch.
“Just by chance I happened to spend Sunday morning with a group of China-focused U.S. academics, and this issue dominated our conversation,” she said.
“I think it’s fair to say that there’s enormous interest in having some sort of set of principles or code of conduct, but I think there’s also a recognition of how difficult it would be to get institutions to sign on to that for fears about loss of funding or the desires of fund-raisers or administrators versus the interests of faculty. But I think there is momentum to capitalize on.”

CHINA’S OPERATION AUSTRALIA

The party line: The Chinese Communist Party is waging a covert campaign of influence in Australia and while loyalists are rewarded, dissidents live in fear.
By Nick McKenzie, Richard Baker, Sashka Koloff and Chris Uhlmann


University student Tony Chang had suspected for months that he was being secretly monitored, but it was a panicked phone call from a family member in China that confirmed his fears.
It was June 2015 and Chang’s parents had just been approached by state security agents in Shenyang in north-eastern China and invited to a meeting at a tea house.
It would not be a cordial catch-up.
As Chang later detailed in a sworn statement to Australian immigration authorities, three agents warned his parents about their son’s involvement in the Chinese democracy movement in Australia. The agents “pressed the point that my parents must ask me to stop what I am taking part in and keep a low profile,” the statement said.

From a Brisbane share house littered with books and unwashed plates, the Queensland University of Technology student told a Fairfax Media-Four Corners investigation that the agents had intelligence about his plans to participate in a protest in Brisbane on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and also during the Dalai Lama’s visit to Australia.
Chang’s activities in Brisbane meant that his terrified father in China feared that he too was being “watched and tracked”.
His father, a cautious, apolitical man, had already spent years worrying about his unruly son.
In 2008, when Chang was 14, he was arrested for hanging Taiwan independence banners on street poles in Shenyang.
His family was forced to call on Communist Party contacts to ensure Chang was released after several hours of questioning.

Tony Chang awaits questioning in a police station in China in 2008.

After Chang was questioned again in 2014 for dissident activities, he decided it was no longer safe to remain in China.
He applied for an Australian student visa.
The June 2015 approach to his parents back in China was the second time in two months that security agents had warned Chang’s family to rein in his anti-communist activism in Australia.
These threats helped convince the Australian government to grant Chang a protection visa.
Chang’s treatment as a teen is typical of the way the party-state deals with dissidents inside China. But the monitoring of the student in Brisbane and his decision to speak out about the threats to his parents in Shenyang, despite the risk it poses to them, provides a rare insight into something much less well known: the opaque campaign of control and influence being waged by the Chinese Communist Party inside Australia.

Tony Chang in Brisbane in 2017.

Part of this campaign involves attempts to influence Australian politicians via political donors closely aligned with the Communist Party – something that causes serious concern to Australia’s security agency, ASIO.
But the one million ethnic Chinese living in Australia are also targets of the Communist Party’s influence operations.
On university campuses, in the Chinese-language media and in some community groups, the party is mounting an influence-and-control operation among its diaspora that is far greater in scale and, at its worst, much nastier, than any other nation deploys.
In China, it’s known as qiaowu.
The recent chief of Australia’s diplomatic service, Peter Varghese, who is now chancellor at the Queensland University, told Fairfax Media and Four Corners that China’s approach to influence building is deeply concerning, not least because it is being run by an authoritarian one-party state with geopolitical ambitions that may not be in Australia’s interest.
“The more transparent that process [of China’s influencing building in Australia] is, the better placed we are to make a judgment as to whether it is acceptable or not acceptable and whether it is covert or overt,” Varghese says.
“This is an issue ASIO would need to keep a very close eye on, in terms of any efforts to infiltrate or subvert our system which go beyond accepted laws and accepted norms.”
The depth of the concern at the highest levels of the defence and intelligence establishment can be measured in recent public statements by the departing Defence Force Chief and the director general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation.
Australia’s domestic spy chief Duncan Lewis warned Parliament that Chinese interference in Australia was occurring on “an unprecedented scale”.
“And this has the potential to cause serious harm to the nation's sovereignty, the integrity of our political system, our national security capabilities, our economy and other interests,” Lewis said.
A China expert, Swinburne professor John Fitzgerald, agrees.
“Members of the Chinese community in Australia deserve the same rights and privileges as all other Australians, not to be hectored, lectured at, monitored, policed, reported on and told what they may and may not think.”

The coercion category
The definitive text on Beijing’s overseas influence operations is Qiaowu: Extra-Territorial Policies for the Overseas Chinese by China expert James To.
Citing primary documents, To concludes the policies are designed to “legitimise and protect the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power” and maintain influence over critical “social, economic and political resources”.
Those already amenable to Beijing, such as many student group members, are “guided” – often by Chinese embassy officials – and given various benefits as a means of “behavioural control and manipulation,” To says.
Those regarded as hostile, such as Tony Chang, are subjected to “techniques of inclusion or coercion.”
Australian academic Dr Feng Chongyi is another who falls into the “coercion” category.
In March, Feng travelled to China to engage in what he calls the “sensitive work” of interviewing human rights lawyers and scholars across China.
Feng expected to be closely watched and harassed when he arrived in Beijing but accepted it simply as an irritating feature of his job.
“It’s an open secret that our telephone is tapped, we are followed everywhere.”
“But that is a little thing that we have to accept if we want to work in China,” the University of Technology Sydney China scholar and democracy activist tells Fairfax Media and Four Corners.
Feng is a small, energetic man who has retained his Communist Party membership in the hope that he will live long enough to see some results from what has become his life’s mission: democratising China.
But he is also a realist, which meant he was initially unconcerned when, on March 20 and after he’d arrived in the city of Kunming, he was approached by agents from the Ministry of State Security. Feng was driven to a hotel three hours away to be questioned.
He expected the matter to end there but, a day later, he realised he was being followed by security agents to the sprawling port city of Guangzhou.
There he was told his interrogation would continue.
“That’s the time when I really realised something serious is happening,” he recalls.

Dr Feng Chongyi in 2017.

Big trouble
In a Guangzhou hotel room, the security agents subjected Dr Feng to daily six-hour questioning sessions, all of it video-taped.
Many of the questions were about his activities in Sydney, including the content of his lectures at UTS, the people in his Australian network of Communist Party critics, and his successful efforts to stop a concert glorifying the Communist Party founder Chairman Mao Zedong.
Then the agents turned their attention to Feng’s family, asking him specific questions to show him that his wife and daughter were also being closely watched. 
He describes this change in tactics as a means of getting him to fully submit to his inquisitors’ demands.
It is the only part of his story that the wily academic hesitates to recall, as if emotion might overtake him.
“I can suffer this or that but I’ll not allow my wife and my daughter and my other family members [to] suffer from my activities,” he says.
“That is the thing that’s quite fearful in my mind.”
When his inquisitors demanded Feng take a lie detector test on March 23, he called his wife who told him to make a run for it.
A few hours later, after midnight, Feng crept out of his hotel, hoping to board a 4am flight.
But as he sought to check in, an airport official told him he could not leave China because he was suspected of endangering state security.
“At that point, my wife told my daughter that I was in deep trouble,” says Feng.
Feng’s daughter immediately called a foreign affairs specialist in the Australian government and asked for help.
Feng’s questioning continued for six more days until his daughter was contacted by an Australian government official and told Feng would be permitted to board a flight back to Australia.
In his final interrogation session, the MSS agents presented Feng with a document to sign that forbade him from publicly discussing his ordeal. 
But by then, his detention had already been covered by several Australian media outlets.
When Feng landed at Sydney airport on April 1, a small group of supporters was waiting for him with banners.
Feng believes his treatment in China was designed to send other academics, along with his supporters in the Chinese Australian community, a message to “stay away from sensitive issues or sensitive topics”.
“Otherwise they can get you into big trouble, detention or other punishment.”

Campus patriots
Mostly though, the Communist Party’s influence on Australian university campuses takes a subtler form, and works through the Chinese Students and Scholars Associations.
The Communist Party targeted these patriotic associations after the Tiananmen Square student uprising as a way of maintaining control over overseas students.
In Australia, which has 100,000 Chinese students, the associations are “sponsored” by Chinese embassy and consular officials.
Lupin Lu, an amiable 23-year-old communications student who is president of the Canberra University Students and Scholars Association, explains to Fairfax Media and Four Corners how Chinese embassy officials played an active role in organising a large student rally to welcome Li Keqiang when he visited Australia in March.
On the day, the rally had two shifts, the first starting at 5am.
Lu insists it was students rather than the embassy calling the shots.
“I wouldn’t really call it helping,” she insists of the embassy’s role, while confirming it provided flags, transport, food, a lawyer and certificates for students that would help them find jobs back in China.
“It’s more sponsoring,” Lu explains.

Li Keqiang and Malcolm Turnbull in 2017.

Lu says her fellow students are willing to assemble at 5am to welcome Li because of their pride at China’s economic rise.
Other factors are an early education system that extols the virtues of the Communist Party and the reality that positive connections with the government can help a person land a job in China.
Federal police officers still describe with awe events in 2008 at the Olympic torch rally, when hundreds of chartered buses entered Canberra from NSW and Victoria, delivering 10,000 Chinese university students “to protect the torch”.
“If the Aussie embassy in London issued a similar call to arms to Australian students in London, there would be two students and a dog,” an officer says.
Lu had another way of motivating her fellow students to assemble before dawn: she stressed the importance of blocking out anti-communist protesters.
Would she go so far as to alert the embassy if a human rights protest was being organised by dissident Chinese students?
“I would, definitely, just to keep all the students safe,” she says. “And to do it for China as well.”

Going viral
The extent to which this student nationalism is directed and monitored from Beijing, and what this means for academic freedoms, is uncertain.
Last year, ANU Emeritus Professor and the founding director of the Australian centre on China in the World, Geremie Barme, was so concerned he wrote a lengthy letter to Chancellor Gareth Evans.

Barme’s fears were sparked by a series of viral nationalistic videos created and posted by a Chinese ANU student, Lei Xiying.
One of Lei’s videos, “If you want to change China, you’ll have to get through me first”, attracted more than 15 million hits.
“I would opine that Mr Lei is an agent for government opinion carving out a career in China’s repressive media environment for political gain,” wrote Barme.
The ANU defended the student’s activities on free speech grounds, but Barme said the university was ignoring Lei’s sponsorship by an authoritarian government that routinely threatens scholars and journalists.
“Make no mistake, it is officially sanctioned propaganda,” Barme said.
He urged the university to confront the issue by debating it openly.
His supporters say that request was ignored.
Real media
A gracious host, Sam Feng is in a gregarious mood when he invites us to the headquarters of Pacific Times, the once proudly independent community Chinese-language newspaper he founded in the 1980s.
Over Chinese tea, Feng scoffs at suggestions that his paper is involved in financial dealings with an arm of the Chinese Communist Party that shapes its coverage.
“It is false. It is fake … They don’t need to do that,” says Feng, while insisting that questions of bias should be directed to Western media outlets whose coverage supports the US version of the world. “We are real media,” Feng explains of his small team of staff.
But corporate records suggest his paper is less independent than he claims.
Subsidiaries of the Communist Party’s overseas propaganda outlet, the Chinese News Service, own a 60 per cent stake to Feng’s 40 per cent in a Melbourne company, the Australian Chinese Culture Group Pty Ltd.
The results of this joint-venture deal appear evident in the newspaper’s content, vast chunks of which are supplied direct from Beijing where propaganda authorities control the media.
Academic Feng Chongyi describes Pacific Times as one of several Australian Chinese-language media outlets that have forgone any semblance of editorial independence in exchange for deals offered by the Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus.
“It used to be quite independent or autonomous,” he says, “but ... you can see the newspaper now is almost identical [to] other newspapers that exclusively focus on the positive side of China.”
In a backroom in Sam Feng’s West Melbourne headquarters is evidence suggesting his Beijing dealings extend beyond what is placed in his newspaper.
A well-placed source leaked to Fairfax Media photos of dozens of placards resting against a wall of the room.
“We Against Vain Excuse for Interfering in South China Sea,” reads one of the placards.
To a casual observer, the placards would barely warrant a glance.
But along with other information provided by the source, they point towards what Australian security officials suspect: that the Chinese Communist Party has had a hand in encouraging protests in Australia.
“The Chinese would find it unacceptable if Australia was to organise protests in China against any particular issue,” says former DFAT chief Peter Varghese.
“Likewise, we should consider it unacceptable for a foreign government to be [encouraging], organising, orchestrating or bankrolling protests on issues that are ultimately matters for the Australian community or the Australian government.”
The placards stored at Pacific Times were handed out to hundreds of protesters who marched in Melbourne on July 23, 2016, to oppose an international tribunal ruling – supported by Australia – that rejected Beijing's claim over much of the South China Sea.
Of Pacific Times owner Sam Feng, the source says the newspaper owner seeks to keep the Chinese Communist Party onside for commercial reasons: “He is a nationalist. But he just cares about business.”
A review of the corporate records of other large Chinese Australian media players reveals the involvement of Communist Party-controlled companies. 
Those who turn down offers to become the party’s publishing partners and seek to print independent news face the prospect of threats, intimidation and economic sabotage.

Overseas forces
Don Ma, who owns the independent Vision China Times in Sydney and Melbourne, tells Fairfax Media and Four Corners that 10 of his advertisers have been threatened by Chinese officials to pull their advertising.
All acquiesced, including a migration and travel company whose Beijing office was visited by the Ministry of State Security every day for two weeks until they cut ties with the paper.
Ma is happy to speak publicly because he has already been blocked from travelling to China.
His journalists, though, request their names and images not be used when we visit Ma’s Sydney and Melbourne offices.
They are fearful of retribution.
Ex-DFAT chief Peter Varghese and Swinburne Professor Fitzgerald says Australia should require more accountability and transparency around the way the Communist Party and its proxies are operating in the media and on university campuses.
Fitzgerald warns Communist Party influence operations in Australia not only risk dividing the Chinese community, but sparking hostility between it and other Australians.
“The Chinese community is the greatest asset we have in this country for managing what are going to be complex relations with China over the next decades – in fact for centuries to come – and we need them to help us in managing this relationship.
“If suspicion is sown about where their loyalties lie then we lose one of our greatest assets in this country now.”
The Vision China Times’ Don Ma has not only endured economic sabotage from the Communist Party but a campaign of vilification from pro-Beijing members of the local Chinese community.
Yet he keeps publishing, not only because he embraces freedom of the press but because many members of the disparate Chinese community urge him to keep doing so.
“The media here, almost all the Chinese media, was being controlled by overseas forces,” says Ma.
“This is harmful to the Australian society. It is also harmful to the next generation of Chinese. Therefore, I felt I wanted to invest in a truly independent media that fits in with Australian values.”

Chinese Fifth Column: The Enemy Within

Ban Official Chinese Student Organizations Abroad

• Chinese embassies finance the student organizations, including through dinners, parties and travel.
• The manner in which the CSSA controls speech of not only Chinese students, but Chinese dissidents, professors, and even the Dalai Lama, means that CSSA erodes the richness of critical Chinese and other voices, decreasing the diversity of viewpoints available on campus.
• Student members of the CSSA have been accused of espionage; this includes in Canada, and through its chapter in Belgium, from which student spies sent agents to the U.K., France, Netherlands, and Germany.

By Anders Corr

Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSA) seek to monitor and control the speech of Chinese students and professors in Australia, according to a report on June 3. 

Similar monitoring and control by student organizations was reported in the United States in May. Chinese student organizations not only curtail free speech, but prescribe correct speech, for example a CSSA demonstration welcoming Li Keqiang in Australia, and protests against a Dalai Lama speech at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and against a presentation on human rights at Columbia University in New York City. 

The groups have launched similar interventions at Duke University in North Carolina, and in the United Kingdom. 

In May, a Chinese graduate student, Yang Shuping, gave a commencement speech at the University of Maryland in support of clean air and freedom of speech. 

The local CSSA denounced her in a video with multiple Chinese students praising China. 

State-controlled media in China condemned her, Chinese netizen complaints went viral, and likely intimidated, she apologized.

Four student volunteers take an oath before entering the Lunar Palace 1, a laboratory simulating a lunar-like environment, for an initial 60-day stay, in Beijing on May 10, 2017. Four postgraduate students from the capital's astronautics research university Beihang entered the 160-square-metre (1,720-square-foot) cabin -- dubbed the 'Yuegong-1', or 'Lunar Palace' -- on May 10, as Beijing prepares for its long-term goal of putting humans on the moon. 

This type of control and influence of Chinese students abroad has persisted since at least the late 1980s. 

Today, there are about 150 chapters of the CSSA. All of them are officially recognized by the Chinese government.

Student members of the CSSA have been accused of espionage. 

This includes in Canada, and through its chapter in Belgium, from which student spies sent agents to the U.K., France, Netherlands, and Germany.

The targets of infiltration were large laboratories and universities. 

One student intern in France was convicted in 2005 for “database intrusion”, spent just two months in prison, and became an instant hero.
Humorously, at least one chapter of the CSSA considers “political revolutions” to be within its mandate. 

The CSSA at Michigan Technological University has a constitution that admits its connection to the Chinese embassy, and states, “However, C.S.S.A. will not participate in any political revolutions, unless in special conditions.”
Chinese embassies finance the student organizations, including through dinners, parties and travel. 

One chapter copied embassy text to its website.

Columbia University disbanded its chapter of the CSSA in 2015. 

Its website stated one of its missions as, “facilitating the perceptions of China's peaceful rise.”
Embassies attempt to handpick officers, and in the case of the Cambridge University chapter, supported the suspension of a CSSA election to keep its favored president, Chang Feifan, in place for an additional term. 

This resulted in the university disbanding the organization until it held an election, which she lost after reportedly breaking the rules against bribery by bringing up to 100 people out to formal dinners. That was one bright moment in the history of the CSSA.
Such government intervention, propaganda and strictures on freedom of speech are contrary to the principles of academic freedom. 

In Monash, Australia, the leader of a Chinese student group had an aggressive encounter with a campus pharmacy that resulted in the removal of the Epoch Times, a newspaper run by a Chinese spiritual and dissident group, the Falun Gong. 

A lecturer was suspended because of an exam question about a common Chinese saying that Chinese officials only tell the truth when they are drunk or careless. 

Similar to the saying, in vino veritas, the question nevertheless offended Chinese students. 

Firing the instructor will cause other professors to walk on eggshells not to offend Chinese students, resulting in increasingly antiseptic instruction devoid of anything that might offend. 

That will decrease learning, and increase doldrums, for all students. 

In the case of the Dalai Lama speech, UCSD caved to the CSSA and promised an apolitical speech. 

To proscribe a topic in the speech of the Dalai Lama, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, is laughable for an institution of higher learning that purports to academic freedom. 

In the case of the Maryland student, the CSSA response, in conjunction with other state responses, bordered on harassment given the power that the Chinese state has on her and her family in China. She likely apologized from a sense of duress. 

There was no “safe space” for her thoughts in Maryland despite our constitutional right to freedom of speech. 

Her sad example has a chilling effect on other Chinese students who might wish to express their true thoughts while abroad.
The manner in which the CSSA controls speech of not only Chinese students, but Chinese dissidents, professors, and even the Dalai Lama, means that CSSA erodes the richness of critical Chinese and other voices, decreasing the diversity of viewpoints available on campus.

Restrictions on freedom of speech is an issue for which all students who want diversity should demand redress. 

Legitimate student-led organizations should oppose state-influenced organizations like the CSSA not because it is Chinese, but because it represses free thought and does not, because it may not, represent the diversity of Chinese perspectives. 

If a Chinese student organization does not represent the full diversity of Chinese perspectives, it is not simply Chinese, it is more particular. 

In this case, its messaging represents the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). 

There is a big difference between China and the party. 

Not labeling the CSSA for what it is, is not truth in advertising.

The fifth column: Local Chinese Americans greet the Chinese Navy vessels in San Diego on December 6, 2016 during Chinese Navy four day visit to California. 

These authoritarian and ultimately coercive organizations should be banned or curtailed by not only university rules, which are likely to be lax due to revenues from full tuition paid by Chinese students, but by law, in order to protect the freedoms of our democracies, the academic independence of our universities, and the personal freedom of Chinese students studying abroad. 

Protecting these freedoms is a protection for hundreds of thousands of Chinese students, including 329,000 Chinese students who study in the U.S., and 150,000 in Australia.
If Chinese students in our democracies do not feel free to speak their minds, they are akin to second-class citizens. 

That is an ethical corruption of diversity, and of our egalitarian and democratic principles. 

Whatever the Chinese Embassy tells the students in the CSSA to say about their organization, they are better off without it. 

Ask one privately over a large bottle of beer or three. 

And, don’t believe the CCP hype.