Colleges Should All Stand Up to China

American universities need to show Beijing—again and again—that they reserve the right to unfettered debate.
By Rory Truex
About five times a year, the U.S. military conducts freedom-of-navigation operations, or FONOPs, in the South China Sea to challenge China’s territorial claims in the area.
American Navy vessels traverse through waters claimed by the Chinese government.
This is how the U.S. government registers its view that those waters are international territory, and that China’s assertion of sovereignty over them is inconsistent with international law.
Americans are witnessing a similar encroachment on territory equally central to our national interest: our own social and political discourse. 
Through a combination of market coercion and intimidation, the Chinese Communist Party is trying to constrain how people in the United States and other Western democracies talk about China.

Freedom-of-speech operations (FOSOPs) 
This encroachment needs a measured response—what we might call freedom-of-speech operations, or FOSOPs for short. 
American universities can take the lead.
They should routinely hold events on the fate of Taiwan, the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, the repression of Uighur Muslims in East Turkestan, and other topics known to be sensitive to the Chinese government.
These events can be organized by students, faculty, or research centers.
They need not originate from a university’s administration.
If anything, the message that FOSOPs send—everything in the United States is subject to open debate, especially on college campuses—is even stronger if the pressure comes from the grass roots.
Last month’s NBA-China spat crystallized the basic problem.
After the Houston Rockets executive Daryl Morey tweeted in support of the Hong Kong protesters, Rockets games and gear were effectively banned in China, costing the team an estimated $10 million to $25 million.
It has become common for the Chinese government to force Western firms and institutions to toe the party line.
Gap, Cambridge University Press, the three largest U.S. airlines, Marriott, and Mercedes-Benz have all had China access threatened over freedom-of-speech issues. 
This list will continue to grow.
Recently, the Chinese state broadcaster CCTV canceled the showing of an Arsenal soccer game because the club’s star, Mesut Özil, had criticized the ongoing crackdown in East Turkestan.
The Chinese government regularly uses coercive tactics to affect discourse on American campuses, including putting pressure on universities that invite politically sensitive speakers.
This is precisely what happened at the University of California at San Diego, which hosted the Dalai Lama as a commencement speaker in 2017.
The Chinese government, which considers the Tibetan religious leader a threat, responded by barring Chinese scholars from visiting UCSD using government funding.
There is also disturbing evidence that the Chinese government is mobilizing overseas Chinese students to protest or disrupt events, primarily through campus chapters of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association. 
These groups exist at more than 150 universities and receive financial support from the Chinese embassy in the United States. 
As Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian reported last year in Foreign Policy, the embassy can exert influence over the chapters’ leadership and activities.
The goal of freedom-of-speech operations is safety in numbers.
Other universities remained largely mum after the Chinese government moved to punish UCSD, effectively inviting Beijing to deploy similar tactics against other schools in the future. 
But imagine if instead there had been an outpouring of events on Tibet or invitations for the Dalai Lama. 
Coordination is key.
An affront to one American university should be taken as an affront to all.
At Princeton, where I teach, we held three FOSOPs in recent weeks: the first on East Turkestan, sponsored by the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions; the second on Hong Kong, sponsored by a student group that promotes U.S.-China relations; and a third on East Turkestan, also sponsored by students. 
These events were not labeled as FOSOPs, of course; I, not the organizers, am applying the term.
The panels occurred independently, organically, and with no real interference or involvement from university administration, other than to ensure the safety and security of our students.
I played a small role in the Hong Kong event, at which I moderated a panel that featured three Hong Kong citizens discussing the ongoing protest movement.
Our China talks usually get about 30 attendees, most of whom are retirees who live nearby.
The Hong Kong panel last month was the biggest China-related event I have attended on our campus.
Our room was at maximum capacity, as was the overflow room we created for the simulcast.
It was clear that mainland-Chinese students and Hong Kong students—two groups whose views on the protests generally diverge—had both mobilized in some way or another.
The event was emotionally charged at the outset.
One Chinese student, apparently sympathetic to the Chinese government’s position, flipped the panel the middle finger after a panelist made a comment about police brutality against Hong Kong protesters.
Several of the audience members from mainland China pressed the panelists on some of the basic realities of the events on the ground.
One student asked if there was actually any evidence of police brutality.
It felt like Chinese students had come to the event just to push the Communist Party line. 
But it was healthy and helpful to have pro-Beijing views expressed and debated publicly, and juxtaposed with the lived experiences of the Hong Kong protesters.
As the panelist Wilfred Chan noted, it is especially important right now to have dialogue between the Hong Kongers and mainland-Chinese communists.
Western university campuses are among the only spaces where this can occur.
Firms, local governments, civic associations, and individuals can create their own freedom-of-speech operations.
Imagine if every NBA player signed a pledge to mention China’s mass detention of Muslims in East Turkestan at press conferences, just for one day. 
Or if American churches reached out to Chinese pastors to give sermons about the repression of China’s Christian community.
There will be pushback from the Chinese government, and some events might be labeled as an affront to “Chinese sovereignty” or “the feelings of the Chinese people”—standard rhetorical devices of the Chinese Communist Party.
University administrators may receive warnings or veiled threats in the short term.
But if this sort of interference is met with more campus events, at more universities and institutions, China’s coercion will be rendered ineffective, and its government would have no choice but to back down.
It is important that while we push to preserve freedom of speech on China at Western institutions, we also push to preserve the rights and freedoms of our students from mainland China.
Anti-China sentiment in the U.S. is at historic highs.
Freedom-of-speech operations should be constructed to encourage dialogue and foster norms of critical citizenship.
Done right, these events can protect Americans’ intellectual territory, and demonstrate the value of our open society. 

Confucius Institutes: Alarming Chinese meddling at UK universities exposed in report

Chinese embassy is coordinating efforts to curb academic freedom
By Patrick Wintour 

‘China is seeking to shape the research agenda or curricula of UK universities,’ says parliamentary report. 

Universities are not adequately responding to the growing risk of China influencing academic freedom in the UK, the foreign affairs select committee has said.
The report, rushed out before parliament is suspended pending the election, finds “alarming evidence” of Chinese interference on UK campuses, adding the activity seeking to restrict academic freedom is coordinated by the Chinese embassy in London.

The report says: “There is clear evidence that autocracies are seeking to shape the research agenda or curricula of UK universities, as well as limit the activities of researchers on university campuses. Not enough is being done to protect academic freedom from financial, political and diplomatic pressure.”
The committee highlighted the role of China-funded Confucius Institutes officials in confiscating papers that mentioned Taiwan at an academic conference, the use of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association as an instrument of political interference and evidence that dissidents active while studying in the UK, such as Ayeshagul Nur Ibrahim, an Uighur Muslim, were being monitoring and her family in China being harassed.
The committee accuses some academic organisations, such as Million Plus, which represents 20 modern universities, of complacency.

Pro-Beijing Bill Rammell, the chair of Million Plus, told the committee he had “not heard one piece of evidence” that substantiated claims of foreign influence in universities.
The committee said the government’s focus was on protecting universities from intellectual property theft and risks arising from joint research projects. 

“This is not enough to protect academic freedom from other types of interference such as financial, political or diplomatic pressure,” the MPs said.
The Foreign Office’s evidence to the committee highlighted the lack of government advice to universities, the report says, adding ministers have not coordinated approaches to the issue, either within Whitehall or with foreign governments such as Australia and the US.
The report points out that a 2019 international education strategy white paper mentions China more than 20 times in the context of boosting education expertise to the Chinese market, but with no mention of security or interference.

The committee concluded: “The battle for university students or trade deals should not outweigh the international standards which have brought freedom and prosperity to the UK and the wider world. The government should provide any strategic advice to universities and not used its key sanction tools such as ‘Magnitsky powers’ to curb interference on human rights grounds.”
Ministers can curb interference through the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act passed 17 months ago, the report said.
However, ministers previously told the committee they could not use the so-called Magnitsky amendment, contained in the act, until the UK had left the EU. 

In June the FCO finally admitted this interpretation was legally incorrect, and the powers could be used independently of the EU while still an EU member.

Tom Tugendhat, the chair of the foreign affairs select committee, says academic freedoms are under threat in the UK. 

The FCO has still to lay the necessary statutory instrument to introduce the power, 17 months after the act became law. 

The foreign affairs select committee pointed out that the power, touted by the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, in pre-Conservative party conference interviews, will be delayed still further by the general election.
The committee, chaired by the Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, also asked the FCO to explain its failure to use sanctions in response to Chinese repression in Hong Kong and East Turkestan.
On the question of Hong Kong, where violent protests continue and local elections are due to be held later this month, the committee has urged the government to assess the reputational damage to the UK of British judges continuing to sit on the Hong Kong court of final appeal. 

The committee warns there is a danger of the UK appearing to be complicit in supporting and participating in a system that is undermining the rule of law.
In a bid to support the protesters, the UK should grant residency to Hong Kong citizens who are British national (overseas) passport holders, the report said.

Tugendhat said hard-won freedoms were under threat in the UK. 

The FCO had been “found wanting in three policy areas: autocracies’ influence on academic freedom; the use of sanctions against autocratic states and their supporters, and the UK’s cooperation with other democracies in responding to autocracies”.

The Nasty Truth Behind Confucius Institutes

They function as organs for dissemination of Chinese Communist propaganda.

By RACHELLE PETERSON
Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) 

Chinese-government-sponsored Confucius Institutes are “a tool for China to spread influence and exercise soft power,” “a known threat to academic freedom,” and “a danger to our national defense and security,” says Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) in a letter sent last week to the University of Missouri and Webster University.
Both institutions host Confucius Institutes, campus centers that teach Chinese language and culture and are funded and partly staffed and overseen by the Chinese government.
Hawley urges the universities to “reconsider” those relationships.
Hawley’s conclusions aren’t just his own personal notions.
He cites FBI director Christopher Wray, who for the last year and a half has publicly warned colleges about Confucius Institutes.
Just last week Wray testified, in response to questioning from Hawley, that Confucius Institutes are “part of China’s soft power strategy and influence” because they “offer a platform to disseminate Chinese government or Chinese Communist Party propaganda, to encourage censorship, to restrict academic freedom.”
Hawley cites Li Changchun, a senior member of the Chinese Communist Party, who famously declared Confucius Institutes “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.” 
He cites North Carolina State University, which canceled an event with the Dalai Lama under pressure from its Confucius Institute. 
And he cites the fact that ever-increasing numbers of American colleges and universities — now 24 of them — have cut ties with their Confucius Institutes. (Hawley also cites an article I wrote, based on my 2017 report Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education.)
Hawley’s concerns, well grounded and substantial, are nothing surprising.
What is surprising are the reactions of Mizzou and Webster. 
After several years of growing evidence that Confucius Institutes are all-round a bad deal for colleges, they are doubling down in defense of their Confucius Institutes.
University of Missouri spokesman Christian Basi assured the public that all Chinese-government-sponsored teachers on its campus are mere “interns” and that Mizzou, having previously been in touch with the FBI, is “doing the proper things to monitor” possible academic espionage.
Basi also says that Mizzou will review its contract for the Confucius Institute before it expires in 2021 but that the university has already “made some changes to policies and procedures.”
Webster University president Elizabeth Stroble went two leaps further.
One day after receiving Hawley’s letter, she dashed off a response, declaring, “We have no reason to believe that the Confucius Institute at Webster University creates the risks described in your letter.” Stroble demanded of Hawley, “If you are aware of evidence that anyone is using the Confucius Institute at Webster University for a nefarious purpose, please share such evidence with us without delay.”
Mizzou and Webster should take Hawley’s concerns more seriously.
Reflexively declaring that all the FBI’s warnings involve some other university somewhere else reflects poorly on Mizzou and Webster’s commitment to safeguard academic freedom and protect their students from propaganda — let alone from espionage.
Mizzou, where professor Melissa Click called for “some muscle over here” to oust a student journalist from a 2015 protest, and whose system president and campus chancellor resigned rather than face down activists’ demands, is probably outstanding example No. 1 of a poorly run public university. 
In the two years following those events, enrollment dropped 35 percent and Mizzou eliminated 400 positions.
That track record doesn’t inspire confidence in Mizzou’s ability to manage the risks of a Confucius Institute.
Webster in particular has a poor track record of keeping tabs on its Confucius Institute.
One year ago the former director of its Confucius Institute was convicted in federal court of embezzling $375,000 from the university.
Deborah Pierce had directed funds to a separate bank account, from which the federal government recovered an additional $160,000.
That kind of outright illegal behavior is rare.
The greater danger is subtle.
Confucius Institutes teach the Chinese government’s preferred version of Chinese culture, a version whitewashed of Muslim Uighurs, 1 million of whom are currently held in concentration camps in East Turkestan.
Confucius Institute teachers, Chinese nationals hired and paid by the Chinese government, are coached to omit the Tiananmen Square massacre and to represent Taiwan as part of China. 
One Chinese staff member at a Confucius Institute told me that if she were asked about Tiananmen Square, she would “show a picture and point out the beautiful architecture.”
The Hanban, the Chinese government agency tasked with overseeing Confucius Institutes, instructs teachers to focus on lessons that result in “deepening friendly relationships with other nations.” That’s not necessarily harmful — but it leaves students with a remarkably one-sided education.
Confucius Institutes are central players in China’s long-term strategy to gain influence in American institutions.
Colleges and universities see them as financial goody bags: free teachers and textbooks plus ancillary funds to offer Chinese classes, study-abroad funding, sponsored trips to China for the university president and other administrators, access to full-tuition-paying Chinese students.
Webster University operates a campus in China. 
Half of all Mizzou’s foreign students come from China.
Any institute that spreads propaganda has no place on American college campuses.
Too many have eagerly accepted China’s funding without protecting academic integrity.
Senator Hawley deserves credit for calling the University of Missouri and Webster University to account.
It’s time for Confucius Institutes to go.

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

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

The patron saint of China's propaganda machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But some faculty members became uncomfortable with the arrangement. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chinese Fifth Column

China is infiltrating US colleges to recruit spies, indoctrinate students

By Eric Shawn 

Born to spy: Chinese students in America

U.S. Intelligence agencies continue to warn of Beijing’s spying activities in the U.S. – including commercial espionage and the stealing of intellectual property.
“The Chinese counter-intelligence threat is more deep, more diverse, more vexing, more challenging, more comprehensive and more concerning than any counterintelligence threat that I can think of," FBI Director Christopher Wray testified at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last week.
And now, lawmakers are also focused on new allegations of China's attempts to influence American academia and public opinion.
A report from the director of National Intelligence is blunt: "China's intelligence services exploit the openness of American society, especially academia and the scientific community..."
"It is widespread and it is dangerous and this is legislation designed to stop that," Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz told Fox News about a bill he has re-introduced, The Stop Higher Education Espionage and Theft Act.
Its goal is to deter the infiltration by China of our country's universities, colleges and research institutions.
"Too many universities, I think, are gullible, are not realizing the magnitude of this threat," Cruz warned. 

"This is a concerted, organized, systematic threat to undermine our universities and undermine our economy and we need to be serious to combat it."
Several current and former Chinese students have been convicted in U.S. courts for espionage.

Chinese spy Ji Chaoqun -- who came to the U.S. on a student visa, attended Illinois Institute of Technology and enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve -- was assigned to provide Chinese intelligence officials with information from background checks on eight American citizens -- some of whom were U.S. defense contractors

Just recently, Ji Chaoqun, who had studied electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology, was arrested and accused of working for Chinese intelligence to recruit spies here in the U.S. 

He is now awaiting trial. 

But it is not just spying that Sen. Cruz is concerned about. 

He is also raising the alarm about a Chinese-backed academic program, The Confucius Institute, that currently operates on about 100 U.S. campuses.
The Institute, financed by Beijing and designed to provide education about the country's culture, is actually indoctrinating American students with regime propaganda. 

The National Association of Scholars published a 184-page study called "Outsourced To China, Confucius Institutes and Soft Power in American Higher Education." 

 It says the Institute suppresses academic freedom, lacks transparency, and is part of China's use of soft power intended to present China in a 'positive' light in order to develop a generation of American students with selective knowledge of a major country.
"I passed into law legislation targeting, in particular, the Confucius Institutes, institutes being funded by the communist government of China," Cruz said. 

"The FBI has raised concerns very specifically about the Confucius Institutes."

At a Senate hearing last year, FBI Director Wray acknowledged that worry.
"We do share concerns about the Confucius Institutes. We have been watching that development for a while. It is just one of the tools that they take advantage of," he said.
The National Association of Scholars is calling on Congress and state legislatures to open investigations to determine "whether Confucius Institutes increase the risks of a foreign government spying or collecting sensitive information."
"The key risk is that the American public and the students hear a one-sided view of what's going on in China," said Rachelle Peterson, policy director of the National Association of Scholars, who authored the study. 

She said the Institutes should all be shut down.
"At these Confucius Institutes, the teachers are hand selected and paid by the Chinese government, the textbooks are being sent over and paid for by the Chinese government, and funding is being provided by the Chinese government," she notes.
"The only way to protect from these type of incursions from the Chinese government is to close down the Institute. There really is no safe way to operate a Confucius Institute that protects academic freedom."
Cruz said its past time to send Beijing an even stronger message than just closing the Institute's doors.
"The Chinese communist government is a dictatorship, it is cruel and repressive. It tortures and murders its citizens, and dictatorships hate sunlight, they hate truth. We are sitting here in my Senate office, over my shoulder here," he said, pointing a large painting of President Ronald Reagan addressing the crowd in Berlin during his famous "Tear down this wall" speech in 1987. 

"This a painting of Ronald Reagan standing before the Brandenburg gate, and up above written in German are the words 'tear down this wall' in the style and graffiti on the Berlin wall. I think those are the most important words said by any leader in modern times."
The senator likens that call for freedom for the millions of people living behind the Iron Curtain, to one that he says is needed to tell Beijing today.
"That's what the Chinese government fears. They fear sunlight, so they spend money trying to stifle academic freedom in our universities and universities shouldn't be willing to sell their academic freedom, they shouldn't be willing to allow the communist government to have control over discussion."
Neither the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C. nor Hanban, a public Chinese institution affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education, responded to requests from Fox News to comment about the allegations. 

But the Confucius Institute U.S. Center defended itself, by issuing a statement that said, in part:

"They are programs... dedicated to the teaching of Mandarin, cultivating Chinese cultural awareness, and facilitating global education... The programs do not teach history, politics, or current affairs... The courses are managed and supervised by U.S. universities which also decide the content, instructors, and textbooks."

But despite that defense, Rachelle Peterson has reservations.

"The American people need to know that what they are hearing about China may not be true. It may be influenced by the Chinese government's P.R. campaign, and even from the halls of academia, which are supposed to be trustworthy and respected, it may even be happening there."
She said at least 15 universities have shut down or are in the process of kicking the Confucius Institutes off their campuses, and more are expected to follow.
Senator Cruz says the University of Texas at Austin turned down Chinese funding.
“Thankfully U.T. made the right decision and said, ‘you know what, we are not going to take the Chinese money,’” he says.
“There is no doubt, in the long term, China is the single greatest geo-political competitor and threat to the United States,” Cruz warns. 

“The tools they are using are espionage and theft, and too many of our university officials are naïve to that threat, and just see free money, without the perils that are attached.”

Honeytrap: 'My Chinese wife is not involved'

Darwin Lord Mayor denies conflict of interest over China agreement

• Concern raised over Confucius Institute posing a danger to academic freedom in the Northern Territory
• Kon Vatskalis's Chinese wife's historic involvement in the institute has been raised as a conflict of interest
• Push for more Chinese money and sex is playing directly into the Chinese Government's long-term power strategy

By Matt Garrick, Rosa Ellen and Mitchell Abram

Chinese honeytrap: Kon Vatskalis and his new wife.

Darwin Lord Mayor Kon Vatskalis has denied his decision to sign a "cooperation agreement" between Darwin City Council and a Chinese district was in any way related to his Chinese wife's historic links to the Chinese Government-run Confucius Institute.
An Australian academic raised concerns about the influence of the institute within Australian universities, including at the Charles Darwin University campus in Darwin's northern suburbs.
Associate Professor Feng Chongyi, of the University of Technology in Sydney, said "it is not appropriate to have that sort of operation on the campus in Australia" and any ties to government leaders could be seen as a risk to "political integrity".
Vatskalis late last month signed a "letter of intent on strengthening cooperation" between his council and the economic powerhouse of Yuexiu District, in Guangzhou, China, "for the purpose of expanding upon the traditional friendship between the two countries and further developing the exchanges and cooperation between the two cities".
The Australian newspaper reported on the agreement earlier this week and said Chinese "media reports cast [the agreement] as falling within Yuexiu's One Belt, One Road economic and cultural exchanges".
The One Belt, One Road Initiative has attracted concern from Australian Government officials because it was being used as a strategy to push China's long-term global influence.

Confucius Institute link 'a worry'
The Confucius Institute is an education organisation promoting Chinese language and culture run by the Chinese Communist Party, and designed as a soft power push to promote the policies of Xi Jinping's Government.
Vatskalis's Chinese wife Amy Yu-Vatskalis lectures in Mandarin at CDU, and was seconded to the university from Hanban, the Confucius Institute's Chinese headquarters, in 2012.
While not employed by the Confucius Institute at CDU, Yu-Vatskalis was understood to attend their speeches and events.
Professor Feng said having China-centric Confucius Institute campus within the Northern Territory's only university posed a risk to "academic freedom, freedom of free speech" and any links to government officials could "compromise political integrity".
He said Yu-Vatskalis's historic links to the Confucius Institute were a "worry" and "absolutely" posed a conflict of interest considering her husband's role as Darwin Lord Mayor.
"If the Government and the family or the relative would work with the Confucius Institute, it will compromise the political integrity of this country," Professor Feng said.
"It means you are part of the Chinese influence network."
Professor Feng said Confucius Institute was part of the Chinese Government's soft power strategy in the Asia Pacific region and promoted the oppressive regime and policies of Xi Jinping.
"If you look at the bigger picture, the overall big picture of the Chinese Government operation, to establish Confucius Institute is part of the so-called [People's Republic of China] United Front strategy, to create friendship between Chinese Government and Australian Government, [and] between the Australian public and the Chinese Government," Professor Feng said.
Chinese-owned Landbridge Group has a 99-year lease for Darwin Port. 

He also said he thought Vatskalis's dealings in China, and his public support for furthering relations with the Chinese was playing into the Chinese Government's long-term strategic plans.
"It will create an environment for the Chinese Government to have harder interest, such like the Darwin Port, and One Belt, One Road initiatives," he said.
The Darwin Port was leased to Chinese company Landbridge for 99 years in 2015, a move also seen by academics as a play into China's long-term strategic aims.

Council 'may not have understood'
In relation to the letter of intent signed in Yuexiu, Vatskalis said the City of Darwin "was not at pressure to sign anything about the Belt Road Initiative".
"It's an issue for the State Government and the Federal Government, I'm staying out of the politics with that," Vatskalis said.
Michael Shoebridge, the Director of Defence and Strategy at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, also raised questions about the agreement between the Darwin City Council and the Chinese municipality.
He said he was concerned the symbolism of the initiative may not have been fully understood by Darwin's council.
Darwin City Council has signed up to a "letter of intent" to develop ties with a powerful district in China. 

"The BRI is a signature strategic, political, and economic initiative by the Chinese State as part of trying to establish strategic and economic dominance, that's what it's about," he told ABC Radio Darwin.
The deal was being used symbolically by the Chinese to apply pressure on Australia.
"To say, hey, a part of Australia is supporting BRI -- and they're doing that because they would love to drive a wedge between the different levels of government in Australia, to put pressure on the Federal Government to change its policy."

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.

Chinese Firm, Taiwanese Partner Steals Trade Secrets From Micron

Indictment is announced alongside wide-ranging initiative to combat Chinese theft of critical U.S. technology
By Aruna Viswanatha, Kate O’Keeffe and Dustin Volz

The indictment, unsealed Thursday, is the latest in a flurry of charges targeting massive Chinese technology theft.

The Justice Department unsealed charges Thursday against a Chinese state-owned firm and its "Taiwan partner" for stealing trade secrets from the U.S.’s largest memory-chip maker, Micron Technology Inc.
The indictment, announced alongside a wide-ranging U.S. initiative to combat Chinese national security threats, is the latest in a flurry of charges targeting Chinese technology theft.
The case, which follows related criminal charges filed by Taiwanese authorities last year, charges United Microelectronics Corp. , a Taiwan semiconductor foundry that is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange; Chinese state-owned Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co.; and three Taiwan nationals.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions also condemned China for clear violations of an accord reached with the Obama administration under which both governments agreed not to support cyberattacks to steal corporate secrets from one another.
“In 2015, China committed publicly that it would not target American companies for economic gain,” Mr. Sessions said. 

“Obviously, that commitment has not been kept.”
According to the indictment, one of the defendants was a former Micron employee in Taiwan who moved to UMC in 2015 and recruited the two other individuals who were charged to join him and bring Micron’s trade secrets with them. 

The ringleader arranged for UMC to partner with Jinhua, where he then went to work, to develop the same technology, the indictment says.
Representatives for Jinhua and the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., didn’t immediately provide comment. 

A lawyer for UMC declined to comment. 

The individuals, who are not in U.S. custody and believed to be overseas, couldn't be located for comment.
Micron praised the indictments in a statement, saying it has invested billions of dollars over decades to develop its intellectual property.
The unsealing of the indictment, obtained in September and made public Thursday, comes just days after the Commerce Department dealt a potentially fatal blow to Jinhua by barring exports and transfers of U.S.-origin technology to the firm, which depends on the technology to produce its own chips. 

Jinhua, a startup backed by $5.7 billion in state funds, is a key part of China’s plan to build a world-class semiconductor industry and wean itself off a dependence on foreign technology.
The Justice Department also filed a civil action to prevent UMC and Jinhua from exporting the allegedly stolen technology to the U.S. to compete with U.S. chip firms. 

“We are not just reacting to the crimes... We are acting to block the defendants from doing more harm to our United States-based company, Micron,” Mr. Sessions said.

Also on Thursday, Mr. Sessions announced a new “China initiative” to better combat theft of trade secrets, bribery, illegal Chinese lobbying and business deals that could give Chinese investors access to critical U.S. technology.
Mr. Sessions said that as part of the initiative, a new working group of Justice Department officials, including the top federal prosecutors from districts in California, Texas and other states, would increase law-enforcement engagement with U.S. universities, where the Justice Department believes Chinese Communist party initiatives target technology and threaten academic freedom.
U.S. officials have stepped up pressure on Beijing over what they describe as a wide-ranging campaign to improperly obtain critical U.S. technology. 

Earlier this week, federal prosecutors unsealed charges against two Chinese intelligence officers and eight others who worked with them on a yearslong campaign to steal information about a commercial aircraft engine being developed by a U.S. and a French firm.
“Taken together, these cases, and many others like them, paint a grim picture of a country bent on stealing its way up the ladder of economic development, and doing so at American expense,” said John Demers, who heads the Justice Department’s national security division.
With a mix of cyberattacks and on-the-ground recruiting, Beijing’s corporate raiding costs the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars annually.

FBI officials say the agency has active economic espionage investigations leading back to China in all 56 FBI field offices that span nearly every industry and sector.
On Thursday, the FBI’s deputy director David Bowdich said China poses one of the “broadest, most complicated and longest-term threats we face,” and highlighted company insiders, students, and academics who share research results with people not authorized to receive them as the types of spies the FBI is concerned about.
The administration’s renewed focus on rooting out Chinese spies in the scientific community has caused concern among Sino-American suspects.

The sharp rhetoric from senior Justice Department officials contrasted with Trump’s description of a “long and very good call” earlier Thursday with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, on topics including trade and North Korea.
The Justice Department action against UMC and Jinhua comes after Micron in December sued the companies in a federal court in California, alleging they stole its talent and trade secrets. 

Jinhua contests the claim and the case is continuing.
Jinhua then sued Micron in January in a court in China’s Fujian province—whose government partly controls Jinhua—and won a temporary order blocking Micron units from selling products in China on which each company claims patents. 

Micron has said Jinhua’s suit was a bogus retaliation measure and has criticized Beijing over its treatment.
Among the files pilfered from Micron are hundreds of pages of documents and large Microsoft Excel spreadsheets containing precise design specifications for the architecture of various dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, products. 

Micron is the only U.S.-based company to manufacture DRAM devices, and the value of the stolen intellectual property was at least $400 million and as high as $8.75 billion, according to the indictment.
Thursday’s allegations also added to a growing consensus that China is in violation of the 2015 bilateral pact between Xi Jinping and then-President Obama on cybertheft. 

Officials said that even if the Micron case wasn’t itself a cyber matter, it involved insiders stealing information with the help of cybertools.
U.S. intelligence officials and several private-sector cybersecurity firms believe the accord led to a light decline in Chinese corporate espionage through hacking, but that the malicious activity has returned since Mr. Trump took office as hostilities over trade and other issues have escalated.
Idaho-based Micron, valued at about $100 billion, owns a 20% to 25% share of the dynamic random access memory industry, a computer technology the Chinese didn’t possess until very recently, Mr. Sessions said.

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.

Gauging China's Influence and Interference in U.S. Higher Ed

Report catalogs complaints and interventions by embassy officials and Chinese students on American campuses. 
By Elizabeth Redden 

Concerns about Chinese government interference in American higher education seem to have become ubiquitous over the past year.
Lawmakers have lambasted universities for hosting Confucius Institutes, outposts for Chinese Communist Party propaganda or intelligence collection, and their complaints have prompted several of the institutes to close.
Congressional committees have held hearings about Chinese espionage efforts to infiltrate U.S. higher education.

The Trump administration in June moved to restrict the duration of visas for Chinese graduate students studying certain sensitive fields. 

Chinese student-spies

President Trump himself told a group of CEOs in August that almost every student from China in the U.S. is a spy.
Western scholarly publishers have blocked access to journal articles within mainland China to comply with government censors. 

And two new reports -- one a scholarly paper based on a survey, the other journalistic-- found that self-censorship is a widespread problem in the China studies field, though the reasons cited for this vary.
It’s in this context that the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars released its report “A Preliminary Study of PRC Political Influence and Interference Activities in American Higher Education” (throughout the report the author uses the acronym for the People's Republic of China in favor of the adjective "Chinese"). 

The study, which is based largely on interviews of more than 180 people, including more than 100 professors, documents alleged attempts to infringe on academic freedom at U.S. universities on the part of both Chinese embassy officials and individual Chinese students over the past two decades.
The study, authored by Anastasya Lloyd-Damnjanovic, a Schwarzman Associate at the Wilson Center for 2017-18, concludes that "over the past two decades, PRC diplomats stationed in the United States have infringed on the academic freedom of American university faculty, students, administrators, and staff by: complaining to universities about invited speakers and events; pressuring and/or offering inducements to faculty whose work involves content deemed sensitive by the PRC authorities … and retaliating against American universities’ cooperative initiatives with PRC partner institutions."

Chinese students, meanwhile, have in various cases infringed on academic freedom by “demanding the removal of research, promotional and decorative materials involving sensitive content from university spaces”; “demanding faculty alter their language or teaching materials involving sensitive content on political rather than evidence-based grounds”; “interrupting and heckling other members of the university community who engage in critical discussion of China”; and “pressuring universities to cancel academic activities involving sensitive content.”
In addition, the report documents cases in which Chinese students have “acted in ways that concerned or intimidated faculty, staff, and other students at American universities,” such as by “monitoring people and activities on campus involving sensitive content”; “probing faculty for information in a suspicious manner”; and “engaging in intimidation, abusive conduct, or harassment of other members of the university community.”
The highly sensitive nature of the subject comes across in Lloyd-Damnjanovic’s methodology section, in which she writes that many potential respondents did not return her emails, or sent back what she described as "curt remarks alleging that the premise of the study was political, alarmist, or racist."
To such responses Lloyd-Damnjanovic countered, “It is essential that studies of PRC influence be conducted in an objective, balanced and responsible fashion. Broad brushes, generalizations and policy in the absence of a substantial empirical foundation are problematic. But to dismiss concerns about PRC influence and interference without even considering whether there is evidence is tantamount to burying one’s head in the sand.”
The Chinese embassy in Washington condemned the report's conclusions Monday, saying, "This allegation of the report you mentioned is totally groundless, full of prejudice, discrimination and hostility."
The following are a few of the specific cases and issues highlighted in the Wilson Center report.

Hosting of speakers and events. 

The report states that "PRC diplomats have since at least the early 1990s made official expressions of displeasure to American universities for hosting certain speakers and events." 

In the cases discussed, which mostly happened at major research universities, Lloyd-Damnjanovic wrote that these requests were seen as "propagandistic" and duly if politely rebuffed. 

But she raised the question of whether smaller institutions more reliant on Chinese students and cooperative initiatives with Chinese universities for revenue would disregard the complaints of embassy officials so easily.

Retaliation and the Dalai Lama. 

The report describes retaliation against universities that play host to speakers the Chinese government doesn’t like. 

Richard Daly, who formerly headed the Maryland China Initiative at the University of Maryland and now works at the Wilson Center -- he wrote the foreword to the report -- said that groups of municipal- and provincial-level PRC officials stopped attending the university’s executive training programs for a period of time after the Dalai Lama gave a speech at Maryland's College Park campus in 2013.
The report also says that executive training programs organized through Maryland’s Office of China Affairs -- a successor office to the Maryland China Initiative -- have “experienced disruptions” since 2017 when a Chinese student, Yang Shuping, gave a controversial commencement speech praising the “fresh air of free speech” in the U.S. 

Maryland's media relations office declined to comment.
The report further describes retaliation against the University of California, San Diego, after it invited the Dalai Lama to give a commencement speech in 2017. 

The report cites faculty members who say they heard from their colleagues at Chinese partner institutions that universities were ordered by a government entity -- believed to be the Ministry of Education -- not to collaborate with UCSD. 

Among other retaliatory actions, a faculty member told Lloyd-Damnjanovic that the ministry blocked funding of a joint research center operated by the University of California's 10 campuses and Fudan University. 

UCSD's media relations office did not comment on the report.

Pressures on faculty. 

The report also describes attempts by embassy officials to pressure or induce U.S.-based faculty who study topics the Chinese government deems sensitive in order to influence their research. 

As one example, the report cites the case of a City University of New York professor, Ming Xia, who said he received a call from an official at China’s New York consulate in 2009 demanding he withdraw from a project to create a documentary about the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. 

“‘We know this movie may give you financial rewards but we can give you much more,’” Xia recalled the official as saying, according to the account in the report, which he confirmed for Inside Higher Ed. 

“He also told me that I would pay the price if I went ahead with the movie and emphasized that [they] are going to do everything [they can] to stop this film.” Xia rejected the officials' request.

Chinese students' reluctance to speak. 

The report details concerns by some professors that their Chinese students feel unable to speak freely about sensitive topics in an American classroom.
Lloyd-Damnjanovic summarized an interview she conducted with Jason McGrath, an associate professor of Asian languages and literatures at the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities campus. McGrath described being “met with silence” when he attempted to facilitate a discussion about a film about corruption in China. 

"Frustrated," Lloyd-Damnjanovic wrote, "McGrath gently scolded the class until a student from the PRC who normally participated spoke up. ‘We’re uncomfortable talking about that because we don’t know who might be listening to us,’ the student said. 

For McGrath, ‘that was the first time that I sort of suddenly had the realization that the students in my class, some of them at least are very aware -- if it’s a large class with a lot of Chinese nationals and they don’t know them all -- that they might be self-censoring what they say because they’re worried about who else in the class might be listening, and who they might be talking to.’”
McGrath confirmed via email this account was accurate. 

Monitoring. 

Lloyd-Damnjanovic wrote that "numerous faculty and students reported experiences in which they felt they were being monitored by students or campus actors who appeared to be from the PRC while engaging in sensitive academic activities." 

For example, she wrote of a case at Harvard University where a faculty member said that two of her colleagues, both visiting scholars from China, "confided in her that they had caught another visiting PRC scholar searching their offices after hours and heard him openly discuss writing periodic reports to the government during the 2016-17 academic year. 

The faculty member’s colleagues said they thought the reports pertained to the political views and activities of ethnically Chinese faculty, visiting scholars and students at Harvard. 

"They warned the faculty member to refrain from discussing sensitive political issues in front of unfamiliar ethnic Chinese," Lloyd-Damnjanovic wrote.

Abuse by Chinese students. 

Lloyd-Damnjanovic's interviewees also described experiencing harassing or abusive behavior on the part of Chinese students. 

In one example, an ethnically Chinese professor identified only by his former affiliation at Indiana University described his experience after speaking on a 2008 panel organized by a student organization, Campaign for Free Tibet.
Lloyd-Damnjanovic wrote, "After the event, the faculty member noticed that he and his background had become a topic of discussion among members of the [Chinese Students and Scholars Association] email Listserv. A week later, the faculty member was walking in the park with his children when someone of student age who appeared to be a PRC national approached, pointed, and called him a 'dog' in Chinese. During a trip to the local farmer’s market several days later, the faculty member noticed someone of student age who appeared to be ethnically Chinese approached with a camera and took a close-up photograph of his son’s face. The faculty member said that the photographic activity made him fear for the safety of his son, a toddler at the time, and for his family."
“It is intimidating,” the faculty member told Lloyd-Damnjanovic. 

“You can never be 100 percent sure it is related to the [Tibet] speaking event, but it happened right after.”

Self-censorship. 

Lloyd-Damnjanovic also asked her faculty interviewees about the issue of self-censorship. 

Varying reasons they gave for self-censorship include concerns about being denied a visa to enter China and the effects that would have on their career and concerns about the safety of their research subjects. 

Some scholars who are Chinese citizens or of ethnic Chinese heritage said they self-censored out of concern for family and friends in China.

The Wilson Center study came out several days after two professors published a paper based on their survey of more than 500 China studies scholars. 

About 68 percent of respondents to that survey identified self-censorship as a problem in the field.
The survey, conducted by Sheena Chestnut Greitens, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, and Rory Truex, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, also documented the real risks China scholars can face in conducting research. 

Greitens and Truex found that about 9 percent of China scholars reported having been “taken for tea” by Chinese government authorities to be interviewed or warned about their research, 26 percent of scholars who conduct archival research reported being denied access and 5 percent reported difficulties obtaining a visa. 

In addition, 2.5 percent -- 14 individual scholars -- reported experiencing temporary detention by police or physical intimidation.