The shameful pillorying of a brave woman
You almost certainly haven’t heard of Anne-marie Brady, a professor of Chinese politics at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury. Even so, her work is helping to protect your freedoms.
Three years ago, Prof Brady published a paper called “Magic Weapons: China’s political influence activities under Xi Jinping”. It explained how a scandal about Chinese meddling in Australian politics was actually part of a concerted operation by the Chinese Communist Party, called the “United Front”, to expand its influence across the world. The essay, using New Zealand as an example, opened the eyes of other scholars and policymakers to the way their societies were being infiltrated by agents of a hostile foreign power.
It is now increasingly understood that the United Front, often under the guise of legitimate business or cultural entities and using all means from blackmail to technology theft, has been repurposing institutions in democratic countries so that they serve the interests of the CCP. Since “Magic Weapons” was published, all the Five Eyes nations – with the exception of the UK – have begun taking extensive measures to protect themselves.
You might think that her university would be proud of Prof Brady’s work. Apparently not. Her latest paper, submitted to aid a New Zealand parliamentary inquiry, focused on the way Beijing is acquiring and using Kiwi science and technology for military purposes. As with “Magic Weapons”, it is instructive for the rest of the democratic world. The Telegraph has revealed similar goings-on in British academia.
But according to Kiwi media, instead of praising this important work, Canterbury has done the opposite. After complaints from other universities mentioned unfavourably in the paper, it has publicly cast doubt on its conclusions and opened an internal “review” into its author.
More than 120 China experts from around the world have now written to Canterbury expressing full-throated support for her work and dismay at the university’s behaviour. She has, they point out, suffered a campaign of harassment by shadowy actors since publishing “Magic Weapons”, but instead of protecting her, her own university has now gone on the attack.
The situation is so bizarre that you have to ask in whose interests Canterbury’s officials think they are acting. Far from discrediting Prof Brady, the whole debacle suggests we ought to take her work more seriously than ever.