Universities, speak up for Chinese students

Let’s imagine that news outlets reported widespread threats of violence against Asian-American college students and their families. My fellow liberals in the academy would rise up in protest, just as we did during the spate of anti-Asian-American violence earlier this year. Faculty would circulate petitions and university officials would release statements, all denouncing the harassment of minority students and pledging to protect them.

But when the victims are simply Asians rather than Asian-Americans — and when their oppressors are of the same ethnic background — we don’t seem to care. And that speaks volumes about the hypocrisy that permeates higher education right now, especially when it comes to free speech.

Witness the resounding silence that greeted a lengthy investigative report late last month by ProPublica, showing how Chinese intelligence officials are using online surveillance and local informants to intimidate Chinese students on our campuses who criticize president Xi Jinping or the ruling Communist Party. Back in China, state security officials have also threatened to fine, fire or jail the dissident students’ parents.

As a result, several Chinese students told ProPublica that they had stopped speaking out against the regime. Others said that they refrained from taking courses that have more than one student from China, because they feared that other Chinese students would inform to their government about what the dissidents said in class.

That violates every canon of academic freedom in the United States, of course, which is premised on the idea that everyone should be able to speak their minds. Thus far, however, the only academic leader whom I’ve heard speak out forcefully against it is Purdue president Mitch Daniels, whose university was one of the ones profiled in the ProPublica article.

“No value is more central to our institution or to higher education generally than the freedom of inquiry and expression,” Daniels wrote on Dec. 15, replying to the article. “Those seeking to deny those rights to others, let alone collude with foreign governments in repressing them, will need to pursue their education elsewhere.”

When I asked a high-ranking official at my own institution — the University of Pennsylvania — whether our school was considering the release of a similar policy statement, declaring our opposition to spies in our classrooms, she replied courteously but firmly: no.

Part of the reason might simply be that, so far as I know, nobody has yet uncovered spying at Penn. But there wasn’t any epidemic of anti-Asian violence here earlier this year, either, and that didn’t prevent us from condemning it. So there must be something more going on here.

It’s called politics, of course. Criticism of China has been coded “conservative” or even “racist,” the kind of thing that Donald Trump does. And propagandists in the Chinese security services have played up that charge to the hilt, denouncing any criticism of their spying as a form of “anti-Chinese bias” akin to the street violence suffered by Asian-Americans.

It seems to be working, unfortunately. That’s why the lone voice denouncing Chinese spying on our campuses was Daniels, a former Indiana governor and one of the few Republicans in charge of a major university. Almost everyone on the liberal side kept quiet, or said there was nothing much we could do about it.

Please. If Israeli security services were menacing Palestinian students on American campuses — and threatening their families back home — do you think liberal academics would turn a blind eye?

Unfortunately, for Chinese dissidents in the United States, their tormentors are other Chinese people. To be clear, Chinese students here have every right to condemn the dissidents; that’s an exercise of free speech in its own right. But they have no right to threaten to report them to security services, or to inform to those services about them.

And if we keep our mouths shut about that, lest we be seen as “racist,” we’re actually engaging in a subtle form of racism ourselves.

Most of all, we need to put our principles over the almighty dollar. As the ProPublica report noted, U.S. universities have received more than $1 billion in donations from Chinese sources since 2013. Add in the roughly $15 billion paid annually in tuition by Chinese students — who totaled 370,000 in 2019 — and you can see why American academic leaders might be reluctant to criticize Beijing.

But they should do so, anyway, following the lead of their brave Chinese students. “The most important thing is to stand up and speak out,” declared a dissident student at Purdue, whose parents were threatened by security agents after he posted an open letter commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. “I have the responsibility to say something.”

So do the rest of us.