Chinese Peril

China Is an Underrated Threat to the World

By John Mauldin

Chinese occupying forces in Hong Kong

In Hong Kong, somewhere between 1–2 million people (out of a 7+ million population) have taken to the streets protesting an extradition bill proposed by Beijing.
These protests have been ongoing and persistent. 

That the extradition bill has now been withdrawn is seemingly not enough to satisfy Hongkongers.
And then came the furor over the NBA. 

The general manager of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey, tweeted out a small and rather innocuous message of support for the Hong Kong protesters.
(Note that Twitter is not allowed inside of China. This should have been a non-event. Almost any NBA referee would have overseen it as no harm, no foul.)
But it set off a furor within China. 

Contracts were cancelled, and the government demanded Morey be fired.

Think About That for a Second
Some low-level bureaucrat pressured businesses to cancel contracts and then demanded an American organization tell one of its members to fire one of its employees who had exercised what we think of as free speech over here.
Note that NBA basketball is one of China’s most popular sports. 

China is a growing market and moneymaker for the NBA. 

To his credit, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver defended the right of free speech and said there was “no chance” the league would discipline Morey over that tweet.
This was business as usual from the Chinese perspective. 

It is something every American company that does business in China has to deal with.
You don’t criticize the Chinese government. 

You block access to information the government wants hidden. 

You use maps that are Chinese-government approved. 

The list goes on and on.
The key “tell” is that the Chinese actually expected a reaction and felt they had the right to dictate to US companies and organizations, which because of prior acquiescence on the part of companies and organizations, led them to believe they would be successful.
Most of their “arm-twisting” is done behind closed doors and out of the view of the public. 

This was not…

This Is the Underlying Problem with China
The United States and the rest of the West are not dealing with 1.3 billion Chinese citizens and human beings. 

The country is run by the Chinese Communist Party, which controls almost every facet of life for everyone there.
Over the last three or four years, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with China’s ambitions.
There has been a surge of research pointing to the fact that the Chinese military has openly planned to be the dominant world power by 2049. 

And while many of these documents have been withdrawn, there is no doubt that they were written.
I have talked to people who have been in the libraries and read them in China. 

This desire for dominance has always been a latent force but one that was convenient to ignore, except that now we can no longer ignore it.
There’s a growing consensus that behind the Chinese economic colossus is a threat to not just the United States and other Western democracies, but the very concepts of free speech and personal liberty, not to mention property rights and the rule of law that we consider the foundations of civilization.
If something so utterly meaningless as a tweet about Hong Kong rises to the level that it requires “thought control” then what is next?

China’s Most Dangerous Profession

Jung Chang is one of the most celebrated chroniclers of modern China. Her life spotlights the threat that writing still holds for the country’s rulers.

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

Jung Chang at the Times Chelte​nham literary festival.

If you grew up in China in the 1950s and ’60s, as Jung Chang did, the last thing you aspired to be was a writer. 

“Writing was the most dangerous profession,” she told me recently.
In fact, writing was taken so seriously that most of the violent purges engineered by the Chinese Communist Party’s demigod leader, Mao Zedong—including the Cultural Revolution—began with an attack on some article or play or piece of literary criticism on the grounds of its alleged bourgeois or anti-Mao characteristics. 

There would be an opening salvo written by a Maoist acolyte, after which everybody who was anybody in China would line up in an Orwellian exercise of ritual denunciation of the isolated and defenseless writer. 

From there, the campaign would expand to claim hundreds of thousands of victims. 

“No parents would tell their child, ‘Become a writer,’” Chang said.
Of course, Chang did become a writer, leaving China to study in Britain in 1978, and over time a celebrated chronicler of the modern Chinese experience in the English language, one of the first from China itself to overturn some of the romantic-revolutionary conceptions of Mao and his era that had a remarkably long life in the West. 

Her first book, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China—a memoir of her grandmother, her mother, and herself living through China’s tragically turbulent 20th century—sold 10 million copies and was probably the most widely read personal account ever to come directly out of the belly of the Chinese beast. 

She followed that up 12 years later with a contentious, blistering, 800-page treatment of Mao himself, co-written with her husband, the historian Jon Halliday; then came an eye-opening revisionist biography of the Empress Dowager Cixi, a sinister villain in the eyes of most previous historians, a progressive feminist hero to Chang.
Her role as a writer who explained China to the West has dissipated somewhat—as China has grown in importance and as news coverage of the country and its impact on the world has increased. 

There are also now an array of writers from China, many of them living in the West, who have created a specifically Chinese voice that is accessible to foreigners in English (as well as a litany of other languages), with much of their best work, be it novels, memoirs, or journalism, banned in their motherland. 

In a way, these writers have picked up where Wild Swans left off, providing an ongoing dissenting portrait of China in the years since the events that Chang wrote about. 

In addition, a younger cadre of Western historians who study China deeply has emerged, demolishing whatever remains of Maoist apologetics.
Yet one thing is unchanged from Chang’s younger years: Writing about China remains a dangerous occupation—dangerous of course to China’s citizens, but now even to foreigners who challenge the official doctrine. 

Witness the storm of protest from China, the threats and the economic penalties imposed on the National Basketball Association over a single tweet by Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, who briefly wrote of (and hastily deleted) his support for pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong. 

China’s ruling authority has a very thin skin. 

Inside the country, the danger of writing leads to pervasive self-censorship, and more and more that appears to apply to those outside the country, too.
Of course, even at the time when Wild Swans appeared, Chang was not alone in opening Western eyes to the full horror of the Maoist era. 

When we spoke, she was quick to give credit to Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai, an unforgettable account of survival in the Cultural Revolution, as an earlier example of such works. Subsequently there have been other books—Wu Ningkun’s A Single Tear and the physicist Fang Lizhi’s The Most Wanted Man in China among the most affecting of them. 

But while she hasn’t had the field to herself for a long time, Chang occupies a special position, not only because Wild Swans, with its historical, multigenerational sweep and its sheer narrative power, is a true masterpiece, but also because she has moved on from memoirist to what might be called a polemical historian.
Chang could have followed what some might have expected to be her natural trajectory—becoming a kind of Chinese Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a public critic of China’s cruelly authoritarian, one-party system. 

Her more recent works, including Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, out October 29, instead take a different approach.
“I like the distance that only history provides,” she said. 

“History is no less devastating.” 

She meant devastating in the effect that an honest attempt at recounting the past can have on the sanctioned Chinese version of the past. 

In China, that is the heroic chronicle according to which the Communist Party rescued the country from the scourges of imperialism, poverty, and oppression. 

A few years ago, in a proclamation known as “Document Number Nine,” the party’s central committee warned against what it said were wrong ideological tendencies, among them “historical nihilism,” meaning history that undermines the official account of the past. 

“History is one of the biggest taboos in China today,” Chang told me. 

“It’s not some harmless, apolitical thing.” 

In this sense, Chang is one of the world’s leading historical nihilists.
Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister is a collective biography of three women of China’s 20th century, the Soong sisters—famous for marrying powerful men, notorious for their extravagance and corruptibility, and for the ways they used their proximity to power. 

Soong Qingling (Red Sister) married Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the 1911 revolution that overthrew China’s last dynasty; Soong Meiling (Little Sister) was the wife of the Nationalist head Chiang Kai-shek, who led China for 20 years until he was overthrown by the Communists; and Soong Ailing (Big Sister) was married to H. H. Kung, Chiang’s corrupt minister of finance. 

Chang makes the case that the trio, in their different, conflicting ways, were both close observers of and participants in the deadly, knife-in-the-back struggle for power between Chiang’s Nationalists and the Communists that in one guise or another dominated China for a quarter century.
Like Wild Swans, the book intertwines the intimate with the big historical picture, tying their personal stories to the deep and irreconcilable political divisions among them. 

Meiling, for example, had an early, visceral dislike of the Communists, while Qingling loathed Chiang, her brother-in-law, which was one of the things that made her a faithful servant of Mao and the Communists most of her life. 

At the end of 1947, not long before the Nationalists would have to flee to what is now Taiwan, it had become clear to both Chiang and Meiling that the Communists were winning the Chinese civil war. Meiling, on a mission from her husband, invited Qingling on an outing to ask her what the Communists’ conditions were for ending the conflict. 

Qingling replied with “the same old make-believe,” Chang writes, “that she had nothing to do with the Communists” and didn’t know their conditions. 

Then Qingling “left her sister and boarded the next train to Shanghai, where she immediately informed the CCP of the conversation between her and Little Sister,” not wanting the party to suspect her of double-dealing.
The new book fits into the period between Cixi and Mao, and seeks to understand how China went from the promising days after the fall of the last dynasty to the Maoist wreckage. 

And while it is probably Chang’s least edgy, least contentious work, it is still stamped by her revisionist impulse.
Cixi was the most powerful person in China for most of the second half of the 19th century and has been regarded by most historians as a usurping, reactionary tyrant, but Chang portrayed her as a pioneering reformer, “the modernizer who brought China out of the medieval world,” as she put it to me. 

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Chang argued that it was Cixi who had fostered the freedom that China experienced in the couple of decades after the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty. 

“She was the first to ban foot binding, which had tormented my grandmother and Chinese women for a thousand years,” Chang said. 

“In school in China we learned that it was the Communist Party that did that.” 

Her and Halliday’s biography of Mao was criticized by some historians for always putting forth the worst possible interpretation of things. 

Still, informed by some 200 interviews with people who knew Mao, the book made a powerful case for the authors’ withering judgment of a man still admired in parts of the world as a revolutionary genius. 

In Chang and Halliday’s view, Mao belonged with Hitler and Stalin as one of the most destructive and hateful figures of 20th-century history.
Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister keeps in that revisionist tradition. 

Chang debunks Sun’s reputation as one of China’s great founding figures, for example, finding him to be not just mediocre and self-serving but at least partially responsible for bringing an end to the democratic experiment that marked the first couple of decades following the overthrow of the Manchus. 

She also blames him for inviting to China the Soviet advisers who brought Leninism to the country. 

In a significant recasting of conventional views on this topic, she also argues that it was Sun’s, and subsequently Chiang’s, war against the republican government in Beijing—presented by most historians as a liberation of the country from warlord control—that doomed the chance of a Chinese liberal democracy.
Chang is translating the book into Chinese for publication in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but almost surely not mainland China. 

It contains too much truth about Mao and the Communists to get past the censors. 

And here we see again the threat, in Beijing’s view, of writing: Not only are Chang’s and others’ published work not available to Chinese readers, but that work has led many of them to be exiled from the country. 

After her biography of Mao came out, Chang was banned from China. 

Only through the intervention of the British government did Chinese authorities relent slightly, allowing her to visit the country to see her 88-year-old mother, but just for two weeks at a time and under strict conditions.
“When I’m there, I’m in a cocoon,” she told me of her trips to China. 

“I can have no contact beyond my immediate family.” 

She spoke of her dread that even this “privilege” will one day be revoked, of the anxiety she experienced living apart from her mother, of the sadness she felt for being treated as what she called a “nonperson” in her home country. 

“But,” she said, “I realize this is the price I pay for writing honestly.”

Greedy America: Hollywood Is Paying an ‘Abominable’ Price for China Access

A kid’s movie has turned into a geopolitical nightmare for DreamWorks.
BY BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN 

A scene from "Abominable" taken in a theater and shared by Vietnamese media. 

Hollywood’s China reckoning has come. 

But unlike the NBA’s recent China debacle, this time it’s not the United States but China’s nearest neighbors who’ve had enough.
Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia have all expressed outrage at a map of China that flickers across the screen in a new film released in late September. 

The animated film, Abominable, is a joint production of DreamWorks and Pearl Studios, which is based in Shanghai. 

The map includes China’s infamous “nine-dash line”—the vague, ambiguously marked demarcation line for its territorial claim over most of the Vietnam East Sea.
The dispute points to a new problem for Hollywood as studios move closer to Beijing’s positions. Silence on China is nothing new—but positively pushing the Chinese government’s view of the world is.
Hollywood’s traditional self-censorship on China has market roots. 

China’s burgeoning market of movie-goers is expected to soon surpass the United States as the largest in the world. 

China’s censors have wielded this power adroitly, mandating that production companies abide by the party’s bottom lines in order to earn one of the 34 coveted spots allotted to foreign films for distribution in China each year. 

That has resulted in a deafening silence from Hollywood on the realities of Chinese Communist Party rule.
In the 1990s, several Hollywood films depicted oppression in Tibet, such as Seven Years in Tibet and Red Corner, and the Tibetan cause was popular among celebrities, most notably Richard Gere. 

But there hasn’t been a major film sympathetic towards Tibet since Disney’s 1997 film Kundun, for which Disney CEO Michael Eisner flew to Beijing to apologize to the Chinese leadership. 

Gere claims he has been frozen out of major films for his Tibet activism. 

The 2013 zombie movie World War Z altered the location of the origin of the zombie outbreak from China to North Korea. 

The 2016 film Doctor Strange changed the “Ancient One,” a Tibetan character in the original comic book series, to a white character played by Tilda Swinton. 

In the past decade, no major film has portrayed China as a military foe of the United States.
Omitting offending plot lines and characters was once enough to satisfy Chinese censors. 

But pressure has grown to include proactively positive depictions, particularly of Chinese science and military capabilities.
O. In the 2014 film Transformers: Age of Extinction, the Chinese military swoops in to save the day. One film critic described Age of Extinction as “a very patriotic film. It’s just Chinese patriotism on the screen, not American.” 

The payoff was enormous; Age of Extinction became the highest-grossing film of all time in China, raking in more than $300 million. (It no longer holds that record.) 

China saved the day again in The Martian, the 2015 science fiction film starring Matt Damon. 

NASA launches a special rocket carrying food for an astronaut stranded alone on Mars, but it explodes and NASA is out of options—until China’s space agency jumps into the plot out of nowhere, announcing it also has a special rocket it is willing to lend the Americans. (In fairness, the subplot was present in the original novel, not just introduced by the studio.) 

The Martian brought in $95 million at the Chinese box office.
The growing phenomenon of U.S.-China joint movie productions has also resulted in a proliferation of mediocre films that cast China in a conspicuously positive light. 

The 2018 B-grade shark flick The Meg, co-starring Chinese actor Li Bingbing, was one such coproduction. 

It features an American billionaire who finances a futuristic ocean research station located, in a narrative non sequitur, off the coast of China, run by brilliant and heroic Chinese protagonists.
Abominable appears to be another. 

It features a young Chinese girl who discovers a yeti on her roof. 

She decides to help the yeti find his way back home to the snowy mountains in the west, and they set off on a trek across China. 

It has gotten middling reviews: One critic wrote that the film is “so distinctive pictorially, and so manifestly good-hearted, that it’s easy to forgive if not quite forget the ragged quality of its storyline.”
But the Chinese government’s heavy-handed film regulation department seems to have gone a bridge too far. 

One scene in the movie includes a map of China on the young female protagonist’s wall. 

Nine slim dashes trace a U-shape around the Vietnam East Sea, a resource-rich body of water with numerous land features also claimed by the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Brunei.
China is the only country that recognizes this fallacious map. 

The nine-dash line has no basis in international law, which does not recognize any country’s sovereignty over open waters. 

In 2016, an international tribunal in the Hague also rejected China’s assertions of sovereignty over the Vietnam East Sea. 

Beijing has never clarified the line’s legal definition or even its precise location, likely because to do so would open its vague claims up to further legal challenge.
These issues will come into sharper focus as Beijing begins to demand positive submission, not just omission. 

China’s domestic film market has already shifted from censorship to forced inclusion of propaganda. 

Last year, as part of a sweeping reorganization that saw many Chinese Communist Party bureaus absorb the purview of government departments, the party’s propaganda office took over regulation of the film industry. 

The result has been even more heavy-handed censorship and more overtly patriotic content in films. Over the summer, six anticipated blockbusters were axed entirely, and China’s box office slumped.

The Chinese Threat to American Speech

American companies have an obligation to defend the freedom of expression, even at the risk of angering China.
The New York Times

China’s assertive campaign to police discourse about its policies, even outside of its borders, and the acquiescence of American companies eager to make money in China, pose a dangerous and growing threat to one of this nation’s core values: the freedom of expression.
The Communist state is becoming more and more aggressive in pressuring foreign companies to choose between self-censorship and the loss of access to what will soon be the world’s largest market. 

An old list of taboo topics, sometimes described as the “three Ts” — Tibet, Tiananmen and Taiwan — has been joined by newer subjects that must not be mentioned, including protests in Hong Kong and China’s mistreatment of its Muslim minority.
This month, China responded to a tweet by Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, in support of the Hong Kong protesters — a message he posted while in Japan, on a website that is not even accessible in mainland China — by demanding Mr. Morey’s firing and by canceling broadcasts of N.B.A. games, a histrionic display intended not just to punish the N.B.A. but also to intimidate other foreign firms into censoring themselves.
The Constitutions of China and the United States both enshrine freedom of speech, but China’s totalitarian regime has long taken a narrow view of that freedom — and American companies have long accepted those restrictions while doing business in China. 

Now, however, China is seeking to control not just what is said in China but what is said about China, too. 

If China has its way, any topic it deems off limits will be scrubbed from global discourse.
For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the United States finds itself in a contest of ideas and principles with a country in its own weight class. 

But this time is different. 

The United States and China are economically intertwined.

But China is engaged in the kind of cultural imperialism it often decries.
China insists that its national interest is at stake. 

So is the national interest of the United States and other free nations. 

China has taken a hard line, and it’s time for the United States to respond in kind. 

The United States and American businesses have a duty to not appease the censors in Beijing — even if the price of insisting on free expression is a loss of access to the Chinese market.
The N.B.A., to its credit, is standing firm. 

After an initial round of obsequious apologies prompted widespread criticism in the United States, the league’s commissioner, Adam Silver, said that the league was committed to free expression and that players and other league personnel remained free to speak their minds despite what he described as “fairly dramatic” financial repercussions from lost business in China.
“We wanted to make an absolutely clear statement that the values of the N.B.A., these American values — we are an American business — travel with us wherever we go,” Mr. Silver said on Thursday in New York. 

“And one of those values is free expression.”
But far too many American companies have shown that their values are for sale. 

They don’t even haggle much over the price. 

Last year, the Chinese government demanded that foreign airlines remove references to Taiwan from their websites, because China views Taiwan as a renegade province. 

The four American airlines affected by the order — American, Delta, Hawaiian and United — present themselves to the world as representatives of the United States. 

The American flag is painted on the outside of their planes; the interiors are American territory. 

But instead of standing up for American values, the airlines complied with China’s orders. 

Other recent examples of capitulation include the fashion retailer Coach destroying T-shirts that read “Hong Kong,” rather than “Hong Kong, China,” and Marriott firing a social media manager in Omaha for “liking” a tweet posted by a group that backs Tibetan independence.
Increasingly, China doesn’t even need to raise an eyebrow for global businesses to blink: American companies are engaged in proactive appeasement. 

In the new animated movie “Abominable,” released by DreamWorks, a subsidiary of Comcast, one scene includes a map of China with a boundary line encompassing most of the South China Sea. 

The United States does not recognize that line; neither do the other nations that border the sea, including Vietnam, which pulled the film from theaters. 

ESPN, a Disney subsidiary, displayed a similar map of China — showing what is known as the “nine-dash line” in the South China Sea — on a recent broadcast.
Comcast and Disney are, of course, free to advocate for the Chinese Communist Party’s position, and against the American and global consensus, in the continuing dispute over China’s international boundaries. 

But by all appearances, the decisions were both less principled and more pernicious: The companies acquiesced in China’s view of the world simply because that was the path of least resistance.
Some companies have tried to evade the issue by insisting they want to avoid politics altogether. Blizzard Entertainment, a subsidiary of the California video game maker Activision Blizzard, banned a user for shouting “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times” during an online tournament earlier this month, and confiscated $10,000 in winnings. 

The company, which later returned the money and commuted the ban to a six-month suspension, said it would have taken the same action if a player had shouted in opposition to the Hong Kong protesters. 

A rival company, the Los Angeles-based Riot Games, announced its own ban on political speech, warning players to “refrain from discussing” political issues, including the Hong Kong protests. (Tencent, a Chinese conglomerate, holds a 5 percent stake in Activision and owns the entirety of Riot.)
Companies face particular pressure on the internet because deference to physical geography is no longer a viable standard. 

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” has lost its meaning. 

On the internet, one is always at home and always in Rome, too. 

But there is, or should be, a critical point of difference between American and Chinese internet businesses. 

Corporations are the creatures of a particular state, however much their executives prefer to think of their operations as multinational. 

American companies choose to operate under the laws of the United States and to reap the benefits of life in the United States — and they ought to be held accountable for upholding the values of the United States. 

American companies should feel a responsibility for maintaining the right to free expression in the internet spaces they create and operate. 

Otherwise, they risk becoming the enforcers of a corporate regime of global censorship that takes its marching orders from Xi Jinping.
Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, which is banned in China, said this week that the character of the internet must not be taken for granted. 

“Today, the state of the global internet around the world is primarily defined by American companies and platforms with strong free expression values. There’s just no guarantee that will win out over time.”
Facebook’s role as the private manager of the nation’s public square generates constant controversy, most recently over its refusal to prevent politicians from disseminating clear falsehoods. 

And the debate over its policies highlights the challenges and contradictions of America’s commitment to free expression. 

Yet Mr. Zuckerberg is undoubtedly correct that his imperfect company, along with other American tech giants, are the guardians of free expression on the internet. 

The responsibility of American companies is to maintain that commitment to free expression even if the price is not doing business in China.
It is a price The New York Times, and several other media companies, already pay.
Donald Trump has weakened the ability of American companies to stand up for American values, including free expression, by making clear he does not share those values and by failing to firmly oppose China’s demands. 

A White House spokeswoman last year described China’s order to airlines as “Orwellian nonsense,” but the administration, which has been so quick to threaten China with harsh consequences for its trade policies, did not defend the airlines by warning of similar consequences for China’s efforts to suppress free speech. 

If American companies are to stand up for American values, their own government should be in their corner.
Back in 2009, North Carolina State University canceled an appearance by the Dalai Lama, whom China regards as an enemy of the state. 

The explanation offered by the school’s provost, Warwick Arden, was memorably frank: “China is a major trading partner for North Carolina.” 

What Arden and the many Americans in positions of authority who have since followed him down that disgraceful path seem to forget is that North Carolina is also a major trading partner for China. 

Those fearing the loss of what the United States gets from China would do well to consider that China fears the loss of what it gets from the United States. 

And the government can buttress American companies by making clear that penalties for free speech will be met in kind. 

The proper response to a Chinese threat to prevent American planes from landing in China is to make clear that Chinese planes would not be allowed to land in the United States.
America also can strengthen its hand by making common cause with other nations that value free expression. 

China has placed similar pressure on the Italian company Versace; German companies, including Mercedes-Benz; and airlines from around the world.
America’s commitment to human rights, including the freedom of expression, has always required careful tending and firm resolve. 

It now faces an especially stern test. 

The world is watching — and talking.

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.

American greed: Beijing's ass kissers

How the NBA censored me on American soil

The NBA’s courage to speak truth to power dissipates when faced with the power of China’s monstrous Communist regime

By Jon Schweppe


I’ve been an NBA fanatic as long as I can remember. 

Growing up, I rooted for the Minnesota Timberwolves. 

I was there for the ups — who can forget that almost magical 2004 season? — and all of the downs, of which there have been far too many. I still follow the team closely today.
So as a fan of the league, I was shocked when I found myself being censored at an NBA exhibition game Wednesday night in Washington between the Washington Wizards and the Guangzhou Loong Lions. 

Now, I’m rethinking my allegiance to the league and wondering whether I should stop attending or even watching games altogether.
I decided to attend last night’s game after reading about an incident that took place at a Philadelphia 76ers game this week. 

In Philly, security guards ejected two spectators for displaying small signs with messages of support for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy dissidents.
It was an unsettling sight: One of America’s premier sports leagues, which constantly virtue-signals about its “values,” groveling to a totalitarian regime and censoring its own fans in the United States of America — in Philly, home of the Constitutional Convention and the Liberty Bell.
I knew I had to do something. 

I wanted to test for myself whether the NBA would be so brazen as to censor fans again — this time in our nation’s capital, no less.
My friends and I entered Capital One Arena donning “Free Hong Kong” T-shirts given to us by an activist outside the arena and with homemade signs concealed in our clothes. 

We took our seats shortly before the Chinese national anthem began to play.
At that point, we stood up and unfurled a long “Free Hong Kong” banner. 

That immediately attracted the attention of several security guards, who came over to confiscate our sign. 

We asked why we were having our sign taken away. 

We were told: “We respect your freedom of speech, but … we don’t have any stance on [Hong Kong]. So we’re just asking not to have any signage related to that in here tonight.”
Later, we unveiled a second message, a homemade sign that simply said “Google Uyghurs,” referring to China’s oppressed Muslims, more than a million of whom are detained in Chinese concentration camps.
This sign, too, was deemed to be a problem. 

Within minutes, we were approached by security supervisors, who told us that we were not allowed to make political statements about China at the game. 

My friend pleaded that we were simply seeking to educate some of the NBA officials, coaches and players, many of whom had expressed ignorance about the issue. 

It was in vain: The supervisor still confiscated the sign and told us that if we continued to disrupt the game, we would be ejected.
By then, we felt we had seen enough and left of our own accord.
At this point, it’s fair to wonder: 

What values does the NBA really stand for? 

In recent years, the league has taken pains to exhibit a concern for “social justice,” with prominent players speaking out in favor of almost exclusively progressive political causes and executives encouraging such activism.
Most notably, in 2016 the NBA used its influence to push a gender ideology and lobby against a “bathroom bill” law in North Carolina that would have protected women in private spaces — going so far as to move the NBA All-Star game out of Charlotte to New Orleans. 

Far from avoiding political controversy, the league seemed to embrace it when the targets were American conservatives.
But the NBA’s courage to speak truth to power dissipates when faced with the power of China’s monstrous Communist regime. 

When Xi Jinping yanks the NBA’s corporate chain, the league tells its fans: “Shut up and watch us dribble.”
This should be very worrying for all Americans, not just sports fans. 

If the price of US companies doing business in China involves self-censorship, there should be no sale. 

Free speech is a bedrock American principle, not some cheap slogan that can be auctioned off to the highest bidder. 

When Beijing can force the country’s wokest sports league to practice Chinese-style censorship and authoritarianism on American soil, free trade has gone too far.
Our country and the freedoms we enjoy are too important to ignore the league’s craven conduct. 

Until the NBA apologizes to fans for how it has handled this incident and unequivocally commits to bedrock American values, I will be forgoing my NBA viewership for a pastime which better upholds American values. 

I encourage my fellow fans to do the same.

American greed: NBA sold its soul to China over cash

Ted Cruz, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Demand NBA to Suspend China Activities Over Boycott
AFP

Washington – A bipartisan set of US lawmakers urged the NBA on Wednesday to suspend all activities in China until Chinese firms and broadcasters end their boycott of the league and the Houston Rockets.
The open letter to NBA commissioner Adam Silver came from eight US lawmakers as politically diverse as Ted Cruz of Texas and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York, both from states with multiple NBA teams.
“You have more power to take a stand than most of the Chinese government’s targets and should have the courage and integrity to use it,” the letter said.
“It’s not unreasonable to expect American companies to put our fundamental democratic rights ahead of profit.”
The letter comes in the wake of a since-deleted tweet from Rockets general manager Daryl Morey supporting Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters.
That prompted the Chinese government to end sponsorships for the team and league and drop planned NBA telecasts in China, huge NBA logos and banner being stripped off buildings a sign of the anger.
After early NBA statements were seen as overly capitulating, Silver said, “I understand there are consequences from … his freedom of speech. We will have to live with those consequences. As a league, we’re not willing to compromise those values.”
The full cost might not be known for months, with the NBA having made lucrative deals to a nation of 1.4 billion that loves basketball. 

But the lawmakers demanded values win over profits.
“Equivocating when profits are at stake is a betrayal of fundamental American values,” the lawmakers wrote. 

“That you have more potential fans in China than in Hong Kong is no excuse for bending over backwards to express ‘sensitivity’ only to one side.”
Lawmakers urged Silver to take four steps to harden the NBA’s stance against China’s retaliatory moves, most notably shutting down NBA activities in China, where two pre-season exhibition games were slated to be played.
“The NBA should have anticipated the challenges of doing business in a country run by a repressive single party government, including by being prepared to stand in strong defense of the freedom of expression of its employees, players, and affiliates across the globe,” the lawmakers wrote.
They also pushed for an end to punishments to the Rockets, saying the NBA must be united against “future efforts by Chinese government-controlled entities to single out individual teams, players, or associates for boycotts or selective treatment.”
That would also include NBA stars with major sponsor deals in China, including LeBron James, James Harden and now-retired Kobe Bryant.
Lawmakers want Silver to “re-evaluate” having an NBA Academy in East Turkestan, “where up to a million Chinese citizens are held in concentration camps as part of a massive government-run campaign of ethno-religious repression.” 

Lawmakers fear self-censorship
The threat of capitulating on free speech issues to Chinese Communist Party censorship by the NBA and other businesses was a major emphasis for lawmakers.
“We would hope to see Americans standing up and speaking out in defense of the rights of the people of Hong Kong,” the letter said, saying pressure on Morey to back away from his tweet “sold out an American citizen.”
“We are deeply concerned that individuals associated with the league may now engage in self-censorship that is inconsistent with American and the league’s stated values.
“This is an outcome that Americans reject, and one that you should reject — especially given that the NBA represents a unique brand for which there is no competition inside or outside China.”
A hard split could leave basketball-hungry fans in China struggling for banished NBA news, much like baseball fans in Communist Cuba struggled for news on US major league teams.
Lawmakers asked Silver to support the rights for all NBA players, staff, partners and fans to express their opinions no matter the economic repercussions and stress that while Chinese law will be respected in China, American laws and principles will govern global NBA operations.
They also want Silver to clarify in NBA documents that “public commentary on international human rights repression — including in Tibet, Hong Kong, and East Turkestan –falls within expected standards of public behavior and expression.”

China Is Burning Books Again

Censors are on the lookout for political mistakes—even in print runs for foreigners.
BY AMY HAWKINS

Books about Chinese dictator Xi Jinping are displayed at the Beijing International Book Fair in Beijing on Aug. 23, 2018. 

The year is 1925, and Shanghai is in flux. 

Communists, Nationalists, and Triad gangsters are all fighting for control of this vice-laden city, and one “preeminent bon vivant,” Victor Sassoon, is fighting to keep evil at bay. 

Almost a century later, however, on China’s south coast, Sassoon is burnt to a crisp, a victim of the government’s ever-tightening restrictions on the imaginative world.
Victor Sassoon was a real person—but he’s also the hero of The Sassoon Files, a roleplaying game supplement (think Dungeons and Dragons) designed by Jesse Covner and Jason Sheets, two Americans living in Japan. 

Last week, via a recorded video message, Covner broke the news to their 511 followers—who had crowdfunded $24,183 to make the book a reality—that the entire print run of The Sassoon Files had been destroyed by the factory in Guangzhou contracted to fulfil the order. 

A government official had visited the manufacturer and ordered that all the books be destroyed within 24 hours, even though they were scheduled to be shipped directly overseas, with no plans for sale to the Chinese market. 

“I couldn’t believe what I heard,” lamented Covner. 

“I’d never heard of China’s government getting involved with printing issues for export to foreign markets.”
The Sassoon Files is the latest casualty of the Chinese government’s ever-increasing political paranoia and determination to control the global narrative. 

Whether it’s demanding that Cambridge University Press censor its offerings in China, grooming foreign journalists, or expanding its infiltration of Western newspapers with inconspicuous supplements from the state-run China Daily, Beijing’s propaganda drive has gone from the defensive to the offensive.
As the journalist Louisa Lim and researcher Julia Bergin have argued, the Chinese Communist Party has embarked on an “aggressive drive to redraw the global information order.” 

Part of this drive is controlling what can and can’t be produced in what used to be the world’s workhouse, regardless of who the intended audience is, or of the commercial consequences. 

The printing industry in China is worth about $93 billion—making up more than 10 percent of the worldwide total, and second only to the United States.
Jo Lusby, a former CEO of Penguin Random House North Asia who now runs her own publishing consultancy in Hong Kong, stresses that rules about what printers in China can print have always been in place, and those with a license to print foreign ISBNs know that they will face extra administrative hurdles and scrutiny. 

“It’s like trying to print a T-shirt that says ‘Free Tibet’ in China—that factory would get shut down,” she explained. 

Industry veterans have navigated these murky waters for a long time. 

What has changed, though, is the expanding list of topics deemed sensitive.
Earlier this year, this list was put in writing for the first time and circulated among publishers. 

Its scope is farcical: As well as widely known sensitive subjects such as Tibet, Taiwan, and the Tiananmen Square massacre, any mention of any political figures whatsoever is verboten. 

Lusby said that even the phrase “Deng Xiaoping-era policies,” a common proxy term for the reform and opening up of China that began in the 1980s, has been flagged before.
This rule is where The Sassoon Files faltered—one of the options in the game is to work as a secret agent for Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong’s second in command. 

“The cultural department examined the books and found some false reports about the men of Chinese history, so did not allow us to print [them] and ordered us to destroy the books,” a spokesperson for China Seven Color Group, the factory used by Covner and Sheets, told Foreign Policy. 

Covner and Sheets declined to comment, citing security concerns for their friends and colleagues in China.
It is not just newcomers who have had print runs scuppered by China’s censorship laws. 

Last year, the Australian publishing house Hardie Grant was forced to abandon two book projects after its Chinese suppliers refused to cooperate. 

Both issues were cartographical: In one book, the font used for Taiwan on a hand-drawn map was the same size as that used for China, which was “unacceptable,” they were told; the other book, a children’s atlas, showed a hard border between China and Tibet. 

Maps are a particular shibboleth in China, where “incorrect” images are regularly destroyed.
Sandy Grant, Hardie Grant’s co-founder, said that he hadn’t anticipated any problems, given that neither book was pegged for release in China. 

Still, the publisher tried to find workarounds. 

But when the illustrator of the Taiwan map refused to compromise on the design, and color printers for the children’s atlas in other countries were too expensive, both books had to be dropped. 

“We don’t want to change what we do,” Grant said, “but anything that requires international mapping we will [now] not do or look at very carefully.”
Grant believes the result of China’s demands is that self-censorship “is not just a risk in the industry—it is prominent.” 

As in many other sectors, such as technology, aviation, and film, publishers around the world are having to consider how far they are willing to capitulate to China’s view of the world in order to exploit its economic offerings. 

In the case of publishers, though, it is not about reaching a Chinese audience—it is about what version of China to communicate to the rest of the world. 

For Lusby, the issue of self-censorship is not clear-cut, although she conceded that it can “creep in” in the “tiny judgement calls” that publishers are forced to make over, for example, whether Taiwan should be listed as a separate country. 

Major academic publishers have already conceded to censoring for the Chinese market, if not the global one.
Any publisher has to consider the cost of printing in order to be commercially viable. 

Cheap black-and-white printing is available worldwide, but China still has a market edge when it comes to color or other special features—one publisher estimates that it is 40 percent cheaper to print books in China than it is in North America. 

This could change, though, as publishers feel less confident about investing resources into print contracts that could fall through at the last minute or be subject to lengthy delays. 

Printing is where “the commercial meets the political,” Lusby said, adding that rising labor costs in China and delays caused by factories being forced to close because of air pollution reduction targets have meant that Chinese printers are becoming less competitive.
What is certain to make Chinese printers less competitive is book burning. 

China Seven Color Group said that The Sassoon Files was the first time that it had been forced to take destructive action—a technique once common in the bonfires of the Cultural Revolution.

Publishers might be willing to put free speech concerns aside for the sake of profit, but if Chinese printers are forced to bear the brunt of the government’s obsessions, they’ll pay a sharp price.

China’s long surveillance arm thrusts into Canada

State intimidation and electronic surveillance can be highly effective. It's affecting China's 180,000 students in Canada, as well as journalists.
By DOUGLAS TODD 

Tibetan Chemi Lhamo, student-union president at the University of Toronto, was barraged with a 11,000-name petition from people with Chinese names, demanding she be removed. Police are also investigating possible criminal threats against her.

What does a superpower do when pandas, private persuasion at the highest echelons and trumpeting the value of “harmony” are no longer winning global friends?
If you’re the leaders of increasingly autocratic China, you clamp down, especially on your own people. 

You spread an evermore elaborate system of surveillance, monitoring and pressure on citizens in your home country and in foreign lands.
You press your overseas contingent, including Chinese students you have in Canada, to attack disapproving speakers. 

You suddenly toss two Canadians in secret isolation cells in China and, this week, accuse them of spying. 

And then you dismiss Canadians as “white supremacists” if they get riled or defend the lawful arrest and bail of a Huawai executive in Vancouver.
Back home, you develop an invasive mobile phone app and make sure its downloaded by most of the 90 million members of your ruling Communist party. 

You take DNA samples from millions of the Uyghur Muslims in China, because genetics can be used to track their moves. 

You bully Chinese journalists at home and abroad.
And it works.
State intimidation and electronic surveillance can be highly effective, no matter which regime brings it into oppressive play.
It’s not just China. 

Often times in Canada it is global agents of Iran’s regime, who spy on the anxious Persian diaspora in this country. 

And this year Saudi Arabia expanded its watching game with a high-tech app by which male guardians could track the movement of Saudi women abroad.
When people know, or fear, they are being watched through technology or by clandestine agents of the state, they understandably grow nervous — and compliant.
The only hope is this culture of watchfulness doesn’t always work. 

A University of B.C. professor who specializes in Asia tells me how an apparent culture of subjugation is playing out on campus.
The majority of the many students from China that the professor comes across are self-censoring.
They don’t go to possibly contentious events about China. 

They don’t speak out in classes. 

A few patriotic ones feel it’s their duty to criticize the professor for exposing them to material that does not hold the world’s most populous country in a positive light. 

A few very privately offer the faculty member their thanks for the chance to hear the truth.
“Mostly, however, I find my undergrads in particular to be profoundly uninterested in politics and proud of their country’s rise,” said the professor, who, like many academic specialists on China these days, spoke on condition of anonymity. 

Metro Vancouver campuses host almost 50,000 of the more than 180,000 students from China in Canada.
Mandarin-language students in Canada are “the major beneficiaries of the rise” of China, said the professor. 

“They don’t want to rock the boat and the more aware ones are discreet about their critiques. They have decided to tread carefully, which suggests a consciousness that they could be under surveillance.”
If that is the look-over-your-shoulder reality for students from China in B.C., imagine how it is for those on some American and Ontario campuses, which have had high-profile outbreaks of angry pro-China activism.
National Post reporter Tom Blackwell has covered China’s recent interference in Canadian affairs. He’s dug into how University of Toronto student president Chemi Lhamo was barraged with a 11,000-name petition from people with Chinese names, demanding she be removed. 

A Canadian citizen with origins in Tibet, which China dominates, Lhamo was also targeted by hundreds of nasty texts, which Toronto police are investigating as possibly criminal threats.
A similar confrontation occurred in February at McMaster University in Hamilton, where five Chinese student groups protested the university’s decision to give a platform to a Canadian citizen of Muslim Uyghur background. 

Rukiye Turdush had described China’s well-documented human-rights abuses against more than a million Uyghurs in the vast colony of East Turkestan.
The harassment is escalating. 

Even longtime champions of trade and investment in Canada from China and its well-off migrants are taken aback. 

Ng Weng Hoong, a commentator on the Asian-Pacific energy industry, is normally a vociferous critic of B.C.’s foreign house buyer tax and other manifestations of Canadian sovereignty.
But Ng admitted in a recent piece in SupChina, a digital media outlet, that Chinese protesters’ in Ontario “could shift Canadians’ attitude toward China to one of outright disdain and anger at what they see is the growing threat of Chinese influence in their country.”
It certainly didn’t help, Ng notes, that the Chinese embassy in Ottawa supported the aggressive protesters. 

“The story of Chinese students’ silencing free speech and undermining democracy in Canada,” Ng said, “will only fuel this explosive mix of accusations.”
Some of the growing mistrust among Canadians and others has emerged from multiplying reports of propaganda and surveillance in China.
Chinese dictator Xi Jinping is attempting to control followers through a dazzling new app, with which China’s Communist Party members are expected to actively engage. 

The New York Times is reporting China has been swabbing millions of Uyghur Muslims for their DNA, the genetic samples being used to track down those not already sent to “re-education” camps.
China’s pressure tactics are also coming down on journalists. 

The Economist reports students from China trying to enroll in Hong Kong’s journalism school are being warned against it by their fearful parents. 

They’re begging their offspring to shun a truth-seeking career that would lead to exposing wrongdoing in China, which could result in grim reprisals against the entire family.
Within the Canadian media realm there are also growing private reports that Mandarin-language Chinese journalists at various news outlets across this country are being called into meetings with China’s officials, leading some Chinese reporters to ask editors to remove their bylines from stories about the People’s Republic of China and its many overseas investors.
It’s always wise to be wary of superpowers. 

But China’s actions are cranking suspicion up to new levels. 

China’s surveillance tactics are making it almost impossible for that country to develop soft power with any appeal at all.
While some observers say many of the people of China are primed for more reform, openness and media freedom, it’s clear the leaders of China have in the past year been going only backwards, intent on more scrutiny and repression.

Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei Accuses ‘I Love You, Berlin’ Producers of Censorship

By PATRICK FRATER and ED MEZA

The executive producer of anthology film “Berlin, I Love You” is engaged in a war of words with Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, whose contribution to the movie was left on the cutting-room floor.
The segment Ai shot for “Berlin, I Love You” was axed by the producers for political reasons, out of fear of upsetting Chinese officials. 

But Emmanuel Benbihy, the film’s Shanghai-based executive producer, says that Ai’s segment did not meet the Chinese requirements for inclusion.
“Berlin, I Love You,” whose short takes feature such stars as Helen Mirren and Keira Knightley, was submitted to the Berlin Film Festival but failed to land a slot, even out of competition or in one of the fest’s sidebars. 

Instead, it began its commercial career with a Feb. 8 theatrical release, handled by Saban Films, in the U.S.
To Ai’s surprise, the finished picture left out the segment he shot in 2015, long before contributions from Peter Chelsom, Til Schweiger and nine others went before the cameras. 

Ai directed his piece remotely, issuing instructions by video-call, while under house arrest in China, to Claus Clausen, the Germany-based producer of the film, who co-directed. (Ai later relocated permanently to Berlin.) 

The segment focuses on a boy, played by Ai’s son, who discovers a new city and uses unreliable technology to keep in touch with his distant father.
Clausen cited pressure from distributors uncomfortable with Ai’s inclusion as the reason for the segment’s omission. 

“It was because some of the distributors told us, ‘No,’” Clausen said Wednesday, declining to name the companies.
The decision to pull Ai’s segment was made in order “to show the movie,” Clausen added. 

“That’s what made my heart really bleed. I had an obligation to the other directors and to the other actors. We would have had problems getting the movie out there worldwide….It was a no-win situation for me no matter which way we went. I fought for it till the last moment.”

The rules of the “Cities of Love” franchise give directors final cut of their own segment, but the final say over the film’s lineup rests with the producers.

Benbihy confirmed that the decision to leave out Ai’s offering was made only recently – years after Ai submitted his work. 

In a stream of criticism on Twitter, Ai makes clear his belief that political censorship, or self-censorship, was at work. 

“Chinese movie censorship: Ai Weiwei, Zhang Yimou withdrawals suggest it reaches beyond borders,” he said in one tweet, referring to the last-minute cancellation of the premiere of Zhang’s “One Second” at the Berlinale.
“If someone like Zhang Yimou is facing this problem, if someone like me faces this kind of dramatic situation. Think about the young artist…[China] would lose a whole generation’s imagination, courage, and their passion for art,” Ai said in another tweet.
He retweeted other commentators’ suggestions that his omission from “Berlin, I Love You” was motivated by Benbihy’s desire to remain in the Chinese government’s good graces and to make a “Cities of Love” installment about Shanghai. 

According to IMDb, Benbihy previously tried to launch “Shanghai, I Love You” as far back as 2007, but the project has largely lain dormant since 2009.
Benbihy acknowledged plans to revive plans for “Shanghai, I Love You” this year. 

“Nothing [is] happening on the Shanghai movie yet,” he said. 

“We are working on the strategy and the budget. Not on the financing.”

China has silenced American academics for years. Now they’re pushing back.

By Fred Hiatt

In Peyzawat, in China's East Turkestan colony, children play outside the entrance to a school ringed with barbed wire, security cameras and barricades near a sign which reads "Please use the nation's common language.”

When it comes to China, Americans are victims of an insidious kind of censorship that stunts the debate they hear and read in nearly invisible ways.
The censorship — or self-censorship — stems from fear.
Many academics who specialize in China fear that if they are critical, the Communist rulers will deny them a visa. 
If you are an anthropologist who needs to interview Chinese villagers, being banned from the country can end your career.
A professor who speaks honestly about human rights abuses may fear a rebuke, or worse, from university administrators, who in turn fear losing their satellite campus in China — or the lucrative flow of Chinese students to their school.
Even if you were willing to risk your own future, you might worry that candor would endanger your colleagues here or in China. 
Those working at think tanks and other nonprofits must make similar calculations every day.
The upshot is that America’s — and Australia’s, and Europe’s — leading experts on China often remain silent as its regime becomes ever more repressive. 
Newspaper articles are published without their perspective, op-eds go unwritten, conferences present an incomplete view.
Which is what makes the East Turkestan Initiative so striking — an unprecedented response to an unprecedented, yet little-noticed, assault on freedom.
Xi Jinping has been narrowing the space for free expression for years.
His regime has imprisoned and tortured lawyers, silenced reporters and professors, kidnapped and jailed critics from outside China’s borders.
But the human rights violations taking place now in the western colony of East Turkestan are, as Human Rights Watch said in a recent report, “of a scope and scale not seen in China since the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.”
More than 1 million people, by reliable estimates, have been rounded up and put in prisons, detention centers or concentration camps. 
They are Muslims of Turkic ethnicity, and the government’s goal seems to be to eradicate their religion and inculcate Communist fealty. 
“Within these secretive facilities, those held are forced to undergo political indoctrination for days, months, and even over a year,” Human Rights Watch said.
Outside the camps, meanwhile, people are subjected to unprecedented surveillance and control, including the compulsory collection of biometric data, such as voice samples and DNA, and assignment of “trustworthiness” grades. 
Uighurs abroad are harassed and often unable to communicate with relatives inside China. 
Families are broken up, children indoctrinated while their parents are locked away.
China denies all this — the camps are for “vocational education,” it says — but won’t let inspectors or reporters in.
So news of what is likely one of the greatest crimes against humanity of this young century hardly registers.
Jerome Cohen and Kevin Carrico, China scholars at New York University and Australia’s Macquarie University, respectively, find this unacceptable.
They drafted the East Turkestan Initiative, asking for a pledge to raise awareness of these events in every public forum.
More than 100 China scholars signed on.
“Hundreds of thousands of people of Uyghur and Kazakh descent are being held indefinitely in extra-judicial internment camps in East Turkestan today,” the joint statement explains.
“Prisoners are detained due to their ethnicity or Muslim faith, tearing apart families, destroying lives, and threatening culture.
These are horrific developments that should have no place in the twenty-first century.
“The global response to these developments, however, has been muted.
Many are still unaware even of the existence of these camps.
Reporting on the situation is hindered by an information blockade by the Chinese state, which denies even the existence of any such camps. 
And those who stand up and speak out openly against these policies may face the wrath of a rising power that is determinedly hostile to criticism.”
You could be discouraged that the number of signers is yet only in the low three digits.
You could be discouraged that one signer already has withdrawn his name.
“I’m sure it’s too hot for him, and I’m sure his colleagues have asked him to withdraw it,” Cohen told me.
But the list is growing and already impressive: young and old, from multiple continents, respected scholars from top-flight schools.
What’s most striking about the list is that these are, in a very real sense, China’s friends: men and women who have devoted years and decades to learning the language and understanding the people, who wish nothing but the best for China.
When they and people like them do not participate in the debate, the field is left to shills with little credibility and to the most feverish apostles of deterring and controlling China’s rise.
If, with the East Turkestan Initiative, more of them engaged with the public, awareness of China’s crimes would rise.
But as they shared their appreciation for the challenges of development and for China’s accomplishments, so would Americans’ understanding.
In the long run, China would be so much better off.

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.