It’s Time to Get Loud About Academic Freedom in China

American schools should pull out of partnerships with schools that persecute students.
BY ELI FRIEDMAN 

Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR), where I am an associate professor and director of international programs, recently suspended two student exchange programs with Renmin University in Beijing over concerns about infringements on academic freedom. 

I helped launch these programs in 2013 with the intention of creating opportunities for our students at one of China’s top universities. 

Renmin is home to the School of Labor and Human Resources—a close analogue of ILR in several respects, and widely seen as the country’s premier place to study labor issues.
But after an investigation of Renmin’s treatment of students who spoke up on labor issues, we decided that this partnership was no longer sustainable. 

While our final decision rested on specific violations of academic freedom, it is critically important to view this event in the context of worsening political trends in China. 

The erosion of academic freedom on campuses is directly linked with the increasingly repressive political environment outside universities.
The strategy of quiet diplomacy, adopted by foreign universities and governments alike over the past generation, has failed to generate greater space for academic freedom or political expression.

I saw this quite clearly in my private exchanges with Renmin, which produced no results whatsoever in terms of loosening restrictions on students. 

The lesson the Communist Party has learned is that there are no “red lines”; seemingly no matter how grave the violations, foreign institutions have thus far been unwilling to pass up the real or imagined benefits of engagement.
It was student participation in a labor conflict at Jasic Technologies in Shenzhen this past summer, and Renmin’s subsequent behavior, that spurred our decision. 

In addition to taking steps to prevent students from traveling to Shenzhen, university officials harassed and threatened students who had spoken up on the issue, and then deployed extensive surveillance to keep watch over those deemed as troublemakers. 

Most disturbingly, Renmin University was complicit in the forcible detention of a student who had traveled to Shenzhen, after which school officials threatened her with a yearlong suspension unless she promised to refrain from speaking out.
After weeks of privately expressing our concern and attempting to gain further information from Renmin, it became clear that internal channels had exhausted themselves. 

With no other method to register our fundamental differences, and following extensive internal deliberation and consultation, ILR resorted to suspending the programs.
The erosion of academic freedom on China’s campuses is directly linked with the increasingly repressive political environment outside the universities. 

This dynamic is quite clear with respect to labor issues. 

As I argued in my 2014 book Insurgency Trap, the Chinese state’s unwillingness to allow independent unions has resulted in workplaces where employers are generally free to flout the law. 

The workers at Jasic Technologies initially demanded that they be allowed to form a union under the auspices of the official All-China Federation of Trade Unions, as is their legal right. 

They did so with the hopes of addressing common workplace problems, including underpayment of social insurance and excessive workplace fines.
This simple rights-violation conflict could have been peacefully resolved, and the workers were seemingly committed to proceeding along the legal path of unionization within the official system. But, reversing earlier indications of support, the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Unions deemed their unionization requests illegal in July and the company fired six workers in retaliation.
The nature of the conflict changed dramatically when leftist university students from around the country began showing up in Shenzhen to support the Jasic workers. 

A first police crackdown on July 27 failed to deter the student supporters, and it was not until violent arrests of more than 50 people in late August that the movement was finally crushed.
This conflict quickly became a national security issue, as the state sees alliances between intellectuals and workers as particularly threatening. 

This is in part due to the student-worker alliance that emerged during the 1989 democracy movement. While the Jasic workers were dealt with in the courts, a number of recent university graduates, including prominent feminist activist Yue Xin, were disappeared. 

Responsibility for snuffing out further activism among current students was turned over to their universities. 

Thus, the state’s national security response morphed into a question of academic freedom.
The shocking ferocity of this round of repression is in line with recent trends. 

The state’s targeting of labor activists has accelerated in the past three years, and the impact has then been felt by labor scholars. 

In a notable instance from 2015, Sun Yat-sen University officials shuttered a prominent center for labor research operated jointly with the University of California, Berkeley, falsely claiming that the U.S. government was somehow behind the collaboration.
I personally experienced academic research space closing in December 2015. 

The night before a private research meeting in Guangzhou I had organized with my mother (a former American lecturer at Sun Yat-sen) and several Chinese scholars, the police showed up at my mother’s hotel room. 

They detained and interrogated her for hours, revealing that they had been reading our emails, and demanding that she cancel the event.

I have heard too many stories from my China-based colleagues about rights infringements to list. Common problems include: universities and publishers demanding that research questions and conclusions are in line with the current political orthodoxy, restrictions on traveling abroad for professional conferences, and incessant invitations to “have tea” with security agents.
Political repression is shutting down many more areas of academic inquiry than just labor scholarship. 

As the Chinese state cracks down on an increasing array of social actors, including rights lawyers, feminists, ethnic minorities, and religious minorities—both Muslim and Christian—the related topics become off-limits to academic researchers.
By undermining the autonomy of the academy, the state is similarly debasing the hard work of faculty. 

Academic freedom has been enshrined as a core principle precisely because it is necessary to ensure excellence in the twin missions of the university, namely research and education. 

The Chinese state’s security concerns increasingly appear to conflict with its stated aim of establishing world-class universities.
How should foreign universities respond? 

There is little we can do to directly counter the source of the problem, growing state repression under Xi Jinping. 

But academics worldwide should think carefully about reassessing our points of contact with Chinese universities.
The first step is to squarely face the reality that things on Chinese campuses have become markedly worse in the past five years. 

As well as the political crackdowns on domestic scholars, foreign researchers are frequently denied visas and have their research projects derailed; they are also subject to intense scrutiny and surveillance. 

Restrictions on academic freedom are not new, but they have intensified.
This has a direct impact on the value of academic engagement. 

My school’s situation was perhaps at the extreme end of things, given its labor-specific focus and how sensitive labor issues have become. 

But many other disciplines in the social sciences, humanities, and even natural sciences are likely to experience diminishing returns if scholars cannot freely engage in academic exchange in China.

Foreign institutions and governments must not try to mimic the Chinese state’s increasingly onerous restrictions on who can study what, and where.
Nonetheless, substantive, mutually beneficial exchanges must be built on a foundation of shared values. 

When those values are repeatedly and egregiously violated, as has been the case at a growing number of Chinese universities, scholars and politicians must think seriously about moving beyond the quiet diplomacy model. 

This is a matter not just of principle, but of ensuring academic quality and therefore the reputations of our universities.
Whether or not foreign universities will act in defense of principles they espouse is another question. Many institutions have a huge portfolio of engagements in China, including major financial interests. Faculty governance in the United States and elsewhere has been badly eroded in recent decades, and university administrators are often more concerned with appeasing wealthy donors than with upholding the principle of academic freedom. 

With threats to such freedoms apparent in the United States and other liberal democracies, it is more critical than ever for academics to act on principle and resist such incursions wherever they may appear.

Cornell University suspends ties with China's Renmin over curbs on academic freedom

The Straits Times

Students in a class at Renmin University in Beijing, on May 31, 2013.

BEIJING -- Faculty members at Cornell University said on Monday (Oct 29) that they were cutting ties with a leading Chinese university after reports that it was harassing and intimidating students leading a campaign for workers' rights.
Scholars at Cornell's Industrial and Labour Relations School said they were suspending a six-year-old research and exchange programme with Renmin University in Beijing after the school punished at least a dozen students who joined a nationwide call for better protections for low-income workers in China.
The student activists, who describe themselves as followers of Mao and Marx, say they are fighting to defend the working class and the legacy of communism.
The governing Communist Party, which sees mass movements as a threat, has detained dozens of activists and ordered universities, including Renmin, to help suppress what has become one of the most tenacious student protests in China in years.
Dr Eli Friedman, an associate professor at Cornell who oversees the programme, said Renmin's actions -- including compiling a blacklist of student activists and allowing protesters to be sent home and monitored by national security officials -- represented a "major violation of academic freedom" that Cornell could not tolerate.
"Their complicity in detaining students against their will is a serious red line for us," he added.
Dr Friedman said he expressed his concerns this month to Liu Xiangbo, a vice-director of Renmin's School of Labour and Human Resources.
Liu responded by saying that the students had violated disciplinary standards, according to Dr Friedman.
The decision was a rare rebuke of China's increasingly violent abuses on human rights.
Many US universities, seeking money and a global presence, have compromised on values of free speech in forging partnerships with Chinese schools.
Despite the decision to suspend the programme, which The Financial Times reported on Sunday, Cornell will maintain other academic programmes in China, including a centre in Beijing.
Human rights activists applauded Cornell's decision to halt the programme.
"I'm sure Cornell's decision can have a positive effect on other universities, encouraging them to put principle above making money," said Mr Patrick Poon, a researcher at Amnesty International in Hong Kong.
Officials at Renmin did not respond to a request for comment, but student activists at Renmin praised the move by Cornell.
"We should have academic freedom," said Mr Xiang Junwen, 21, an economics major. 

Mr Xiang has accused the university of trying to intimidate his mother and of monitoring his activities.
The student-led movement for workers' rights began over the summer, when dozens of students converged in the southern province of Guangdong to help a group of factory workers seeking to form a labour union without the party's official backing.
The movement has since spread to college campuses across China, finding support among a small group of students steeped in leftist ideology, who say that workers are being neglected as China embraces capitalism.
The campaign has struggled to survive in the face of repeated efforts by police to crush it.
Several leaders of the effort are still in detention, including Ms Yue Xin, a recent graduate of Peking University in Beijing, who was one of the first to draw attention to the plight of workers in Guangdong.