Prestigious power: the CCP's assault on academia
The Chinese Communist Party’s encroachment on domestic academic freedoms could be brought to bear on university campuses in the UK, with very real effects.
Source: UCL Imagestore
For much of the 20th century, Li Feiyun (name changed) earned a living in two ways. By day, an antiques roadsman recording what remained of old Beijing as, street by street, bulldozers levelled the tiles and courtyards of ages. By night, Li Feiyun was a frankly poor researcher of scandalous exposés containing the explosive material (爆料 bàoliào) of party officials. These were published without a word of protest on every hop to Hong Kong for almost a decade until, in 2018, he was detained going through Beijing capital airport and subject to an impolite questioning. When I met him in a cafe near Jianguomen the following year, he checked at the door after he sat down and before ordering drinks whether or not there were any suspicious men with long coat tails hanging around in the shadows. We chatted for some time until I asked him about his problem with “authority”. Switching to English, he replied: “last few years…” finishing the sentence with a slicing motion across his throat.
Li Feiyun is but one victim of a society-wide push for greater restrictions on free speech as an ascendant Xi Jinping completes his “anti-corruption” (掃黑除惡 sǎo hēi chú è) political purge. University professors, journalists and other acquaintances mourn the long-past breathing room of 1996-2015 and all it offered the publishing inclined. As though balanced on a goldsmith’s scales, academic freedom has lost ground just as the premier’s power has gained it. Late last year they threw a taunting red ribbon before all the bulls of international opinion: at Fudan university “freedom of thought” was deleted from the charter to make way for “following the party”. For all their pawing at the ground and steaming from the snout, not a single observer could lift a finger in protest. In Xi’s China, universities are yet another chamber in the engine of power driving the ever-increasing strength of one man’s grip.
Yet Chinese nationals are not the only victims who need fear the squeeze of this post-communist iron fist. As I have written previously, the Confucius Institute (CI) programme has sustained continuous charges of political perversion and academic tampering across most of the countries they operate within, including the UK - and London specifically. The U.S. officially categorised CI as an organisation for foreign propaganda this August and a Conservative Human Rights report last year found grave evidence of malicious attempts by the institute to impact curricula across British universities.
We might, however, have simply been throwing all our barbs of criticism at a strawman designed specially to soak them up - much like the famous tale of Zhu-ge liang and his arrow-collecting boats. While certainly threatening, the indirect influence of the CI is manageable because its weight is limited by its stakes - either being there or not, the worst it can threaten any university is voluntary closure. With the universal prevalence of Chinese citizens at colleges and universities throughout Europe and North America, the CCP themselves have an inbuilt buy-in at every high-stakes table in the West: their own citizens. From warring states Qin and three kingdoms Wei to Deng Xiaoping, Chinese strategists have long relied on a gradual cultivation of surplus in power and resources - a soft fifth column - to strangulate a victory from apparent thin air.
In the middle of 2019, the Beijing authorities announced tourists from the mainland would no longer be allowed “free” travel to Taiwan, bringing a sudden end to 10 years of a touristic relationship that had crossed into a state of reliance for the island nation. An untold volume of concrete poured into hotels and restaurants built with mainland travellers in mind were suddenly gravestones for misplaced capital as investments lay empty, unused and unproductive across Taiwan. Hoteliers and restaurant owners took to the streets in enormous staged protests, insisting that mainlanders be allowed to return. Neither Taipei nor Beijing moved to rectify the situation. The tourism boom People’s Republic of China (PRC) citizens had created was snuffed out with a single policy directive by the central party commission. Without sustaining a single blow, they had “employed” the power of the populace under their control to first make use of foreign resources (tourism to Taiwan) and second remove access to that now transitioned resource.
The lesson here is twofold: Beijing will wait and then Beijing will bite. Of 458,490 international students in the UK for 2017-18, 106,530 of those were from the PRC and those numbers have “not yet peaked”, according to the BBC. With PRC citizens paying two to three times domestic fees now an irreplaceable link in the chain of obscene funding for UK universities, what is to stop a hungry Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from leaving the high stakes table, every card in hand? While they are unlikely to introduce any measure so drastic as with Taiwan, their position at the table is just as strong. In return for a scissor snip here or censoring pen there, they do not leave the game and take the whole stake with them.
Last year, Human Rights Watch published a 12 point code of conduct for higher learning institutes across the globe to implement in the face of CCP encroachment. Continued threats such as campus surveillance and diplomatic pressure are in the here and now, impacting the 7,405 Chinese students enrolled at University College London (UCL) and beyond. As the CCP emerge from our catastrophic year with a stranglehold on power, even Jiang Qing could hardly have wrought, we must learn from the past and look to the future if the Party are to be kept at their table and from our seats of learning.
Pi Opinion content does not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial team, Pi Media society, Students’ Union UCL or University College London. We aim to publish opinions from across the student body — if you read anything you would like to respond to, get in touch via email.