College students in the U.S. have the right to protest—but not when Beijing gets its way

This post was originally published on this site

Over the course of the 21st century, it’s a safe bet that the most impactful relationship between any two countries will be that of the U.S. and China. To describe that relationship as ”complicated” is an understatement so vast, one might just be able to see it from space. The complexity goes beyond geopolitics, the contrast between democracy and autocracy, and economic competition.

A recent incident at George Washington University (GWU) is just one example of how complex the relationship between the countries is. Combining freedom of speech issues; a desire to avoid inflaming the rampant, increased hate and violence Asian Americans have faced since the outbreak of COVID-19; protests against state-sponsored oppression; and the Chinese government’s efforts to influence discourse on American college campuses, this incident is unfortunately far from an isolated one, and it’s deeply indicative of a larger problem.

On or just before Feb. 3, posters went up in buildings on the GWU campus that used Olympic themes to criticize a number of Chinese government policies: the horrific treatment of Uyghurs, the occupation and control of Tibet, Beijing’s handling of COVID-19, the mass surveillance of those living in China, and the suppression of democracy in Hong Kong. The posters utilized designs made by a Chinese dissident activist named Badiucao. 

It’s worth clicking through to see them all.

The anonymous-ish artist’s personal journey is a remarkable one. According to a 2019 interview with AFP, Badiucao, thought to be in his mid-30s, was living in Shanghai and attending law school when he and some buddies downloaded a “Taiwanese drama” and settled in for some entertainment. But the file included 1995’s The Gate of Heavenly Peace, the Peabody Award-winning documentary that explores in depth the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, as well as the Chinese government’s massacre of protesters.

These events were completely unknown to Badiucao—barely out of diapers in 1989—and his friends, all of whom had lived and studied in China their entire lives. In a state-sanctioned scrubbing of history that would make today’s GOP proud, not one educator—or anyone, actually—had ever mentioned Tiananmen Square to any of them.

Badiucao described the experience of watching the film as follows: “It was three hours, everybody just sat there and the room was completely dark, nobody even got up to turn on a light.” He left for Australia shortly thereafter, where he’s lived since 2009, producing political cartoons and becoming one of the foremost activists protesting the Chinese communist regime.

Back on the GWU campus, Badiucao’s cartoons provoked an immediate response. The Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) was one of the first groups to condemn the posters. Many U.S. colleges are home to chapters of the CSSA, an organization brought into being by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the 1970s. According to the U.S. State Department, the CSSA serves to “monitor Chinese students and mobilize them against views that dissent.”

Those opposed to the posters contacted the GWU president and called for their removal, arguing they were racist, discriminatory, and sparked anti-Asian sentiment at a time when members of the Asian diaspora in the U.S. are facing rising levels of hate. Another student group, the GWU Chinese Cultural Association, declared that Badiucao’s posters “pose a potential risk to the personal safety of all [GWU] Chinese and Asian students, including verbal and physical violence.”

A message sent to Mark Wrighton, GWU’s president, characterized the posters as “vicious personal attacks on all international students from China and Asian groups.” They demanded “severe punishment for [whoever put up the] posters, and a public apology to all Chinese and Asian students.” Badiucao disagreed with this assessment, noting in an interview with Axios that “my art is always targeting the Chinese Communist Party, never the Chinese suffering from this regime.”

The GWU president immediately responded. Wrighton emailed the CSSA to report that he was “personally offended” by the posters, had ordered them taken down, and would “undertake an effort to find out who is responsible.” Why in the world would an American university president even consider taking such a step, let alone promise to do so? Those “responsible” could have family in China, or be Chinese citizens, and such an “effort” could put those people in real danger.

Criticizing a government—which couldn’t be more in the wheelhouse of the sort of speech a college should protect—was suddenly speech now being suppressed. Once the word got out, Wrighton was hammered by free speech advocates.

The GWU president quickly backtracked and apologized, admitting that he “should have taken more time to understand the entire situation.” But that doesn’t change what happened—and what could’ve happened had he exposed those involved as planned. A college president, but especially one at a major international institution, should have been more aware of and sensitive to any attacks on efforts to protest Chinese policies.

Christopher Walker, vice president for studies and analysis at the National Endowment for Democracy, expressed his disbelief over the events at GWU in an interview with The Washington Post: “Given the extent to which these problematic intrusions already have come into view, there’s a persistent lack of preparation among universities and the knowledge sector more broadly to ensure that essential standards of academic freedom are upheld.”

An apology after the fact doesn’t resolve the issue: We must ask what ideas are in the air and what pressures are being felt by administrators on college campuses that would lead Wrighton to make such an error.

An Axios report by Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian laid out some important takeaways from what happened at GWU.

• Chinese international student groups sometimes use the language of social justice to silence criticism of the Chinese government’s human rights record.

• The incident also highlights fears among Uyghur, Tibetan, Hong Kong and pro-democracy Chinese students in the U.S. that they can’t exercise their right to free speech.

• “Some Chinese students in the U.S. often don’t realize that it’s possible to be both victim and oppressor at the same time,” Maya Wang, senior China analyst at Human Rights Watch, told Axios.

One publication that came out harshly against the final result at GWU was the Global Times, which published an opinion piece with a headline steeped in anger: “Freedom of speech as the last refuge of racist hater: GWU asylum for racism reflects double standard of U.S. society.” The piece condemned Wrighton for “suddenly turn[ing] his back on the Chinese students who pleaded with him for protection from racism.” The Global Times is owned, perhaps unsurprisingly, by the Chinese Communist Party.

The Washington Post notes that “there has been extensive reporting in recent years documenting how the Chinese government’s diplomatic outposts often work directly with CSSA chapters and other Chinese student groups on campuses to spy on Chinese students, to enforce censorship, and to target critics such as the Dalai Lama or Hong Kong democracy student activist Nathan Law. These incidents have been covered on campuses in the United States, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere.”

You can hear straight from the source what Law—an activist and former Hong Kong lawmaker targeted by Beijing and exiled in London since 2020—faced when trying to use his platform to speak out for freedom and political rights.

The Dalai Lama’s planned appearance at UC San Diego in 2017 prompted swift condemnation from the campus CSSA—vitriol that was also blasted across various social media platforms. Additionally, they coordinated their efforts with other Chinese student groups at the university, clearly promoting the Chinese government’s official position.

Translated from the original, CSSA posted that the group “strongly objects any behavior of spreading inflammatory, politically offensive speech which slanders and belittles Chinese history, [and] proceed[s] to influence China’s international image with unknown motivation.” It asserted that “all behaviors which disgrace politics and history under the flag of spreading religious freedom are carried with intricate motivation and cannot be tolerated, no matter what background they are put into.”

The power of the Chinese government, through the CSSA, to mobilize large numbers of people in the U.S. to show visible support for the regime—and thus shape public perception here and worldwide—is quite impressive.

When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Washington on Sept. 24, 2015 on a state visit, hundreds of Chinese students lined the streets for hours, carrying banners and flags to welcome him. It was a remarkable display of seemingly spontaneous patriotism.

Except it wasn’t entirely spontaneous. The Chinese Embassy paid students to attend and helped organize the event. Working with Chinese Students and Scholars Associations (CSSAs) at local universities — a Chinese student organization with branches at dozens of schools around the country — government officials from the office of educational affairs at the Chinese Embassy in Washington collected the contact information of about 700 students who had signed up to attend. Embassy officials communicated with students via WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, during the event and into the night, responding to messages as late as 3 a.m.

According to a Chinese student at George Washington University who attended the event, participants each received about $20 for their effort, distributed through the CSSA a few months later.

The havoc that the government of China and groups like the CSSA, along with the Beijing-funded Confucius Institutes, have been wreaking extends far beyond GWU—and far beyond college campuses in general, as demonstrated by the March arrest of five individuals charged with “acting on behalf of the Chinese secret police to spy on and harass U.S. residents critical of Beijing.”

At college after college, Beijing and its educational proxies have been leveraging the exploding levels of anti-Asian hate fueled by Donald Trump during the pandemic and beyond to suppress anything and anyone critical of Chinese policy … and it’s been going on for years. ProPublica documented a staggering array of examples in a painstakingly researched piece published last November, noting that “pro-China forces on campuses have assaulted, stalked, threatened and doxxed dissidents and scholars.”

While one activist, Sulaiman Gu, pointed out that “repression is worse in Australia and Canada,” the sheer number of U.S. campuses mentioned in the piece is staggering.

When compared to what happened at GWU, virtually all of these schools were home to incidents that involved far worse damage to protestors, or their families back in China: Purdue University, Brandeis University, University of Georgia, Harvard University, St. John’s University (NY), University of California San Diego, University of Chicago, and Florida State University. And in Gu’s case, the Chinese government not only went after him, they took control of his family’s property—valued at north of $300,000—back in China.

Here’s what happened at Brandeis:

Chinese students mobilized [in 2020] to sabotage an online panel about atrocities against Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region. Viewers interrupted a Harvard-educated lawyer [Rayhan Asat] as she tried to describe her brother’s plight in a concentration camp, scrawling “bullshit” and “fake news” over his face on the screen and blaring China’s national anthem. To the dismay of participants, the university’s leaders failed to condemn the incident.

…

Apologetic Chinese students told Asat and other panelists privately that members of the CSSA mobilized to sabotage the event. “They planned the whole thing,” Asat said. “They created a WeChat group for it. Everything was planned on WeChat.”

Perhaps one reason Brandeis and other colleges are so reluctant to act? The financial implications. As ProPublica noted, over $1 billion dollars in donations flowed to U.S. institutions of higher learning from the People’s Republic of China between 2013 and 2020. That’s on top of the 370,000 tuition-paying students hailing from China as of 2019. Though these schools are nonprofit institutions, it would be naive to think that money—big money—doesn’t impact a college administration’s actions.

“It is easier to take a stance against the United States than against China,” Asat told ProPublica. “That is what is happening at U.S. universities. They are self-censoring themselves in order to recruit Chinese students for economic benefit.” She added that she believes the students did not act on their own: “I can see the Chinese government’s hand behind it.”

The Chinese government regularly and without hesitation uses its power and resources to stifle scholarly debate, as well as to punish both Chinese students on campus who speak out against its policies and their families back home.

But what can higher education institutions do about it? First, they must make sure to avoid the trap GWU’s uninformed Wrighton face-planted into. One hopes that more information about the role Beijing plays in attacking speech critical of its policies will encourage universities to recognize those efforts for what they are: government propaganda. Second, colleges can take countermeasures, as Princeton professor of politics and international affairs (and expert on Chinese politics) Rory Truex argued in The Atlantic back in 2019. In response to what he characterized as the CCP’s “encroachment” on “our own social and political discourse,” Truex recommends that American universities and other institutions conduct what he calls “freedom-of-speech operations” (FOSOPS).

American universities can take the lead. They should routinely hold events on the fate of Taiwan, the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, the repression of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, and other topics known to be sensitive to the Chinese government. These events can be organized by students, faculty, or research centers. They need not originate from a university’s administration. If anything, the message that FOSOPs send—that everything in the United States is subject to open debate, especially on college campuses—is even stronger if the pressure comes from the grassroots.

…

The goal of freedom-of-speech operations is safety in numbers. Other universities remained largely mum after the Chinese government moved to punish UCSD [where the Dalai Lama gave a commencement address in 2017], effectively inviting Beijing to deploy similar tactics against other schools in the future. But imagine if instead there had been an outpouring of events on Tibet or invitations for the Dalai Lama. Coordination is key. An affront to one American university should be taken as an affront to all.

…

Firms, local governments, civic associations, and individuals can create their own freedom-of-speech operations. Imagine if every NBA player signed a pledge to mention China’s mass detention of Muslims in Xinjiang at press conferences, just for one day. Or if American churches reached out to Chinese pastors to give sermons about the repression of China’s Christian community.

That. Would. Be. Awesome.

It’s still very important to draw a clear line between calling out the government of China for its actions and demonizing Chinese people and those of the diaspora. The latter was a particular specialty of The Man Who Lost An Election and Tried To Steal It, who was even caught adding extra Sinophobic hate when remarks prepared for him in 2020 didn’t sink to an appropriately low level.

President Joe Biden, thankfully, has largely struck a far better balance when criticizing Beijing’s policies.

As Human Rights Watch’s Maya Wang explained in February, “racism and discrimination against people of Chinese origin is definitely real. But some are exploiting this legitimate grievance and twisting it to say that any criticism of China is racism against Chinese people and should not be raised in any form.” Likewise, all criticism of Israel ought not be considered out of bounds, or responsible for antisemitic violence, just as valid criticism of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East ought not be blamed for terrorist acts such 9/11. To do so is wholly disingenuous and silences the voices of marginalized groups.

In February, California Rep. Judy Chu, head of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, drew the clear distinction between “being specific about challenges and opportunities with China,” and instances where “the rhetoric is vague and xenophobic, simply reduced to ‘tough on China,’ which is the kind of rhetoric we know has led to anti-Asian violence here at home.” Such violence is something everyone should oppose; it’s despicable for people to cynically exploit such concerns to gain support for suppressing legitimate criticism of an oppressive authoritarian regime such as China.

Freedom of speech is one of our democracy’s core values, something virtually all Americans revere. Most Americans also say they reject race-baiting rhetoric—even as the twice-impeached former president, Fox News’ favorite white nationalist Tucker Carlson, and so many others on the right spew hate on a regular basis, never acknowledging that’s what they’re doing. As we’ve seen with Fuck a l’Orange, condemnation of a government’s policies can swiftly cross a line into fomenting ethnic hatred. Pushback against such bigoted condemnation reflects democracy itself.

But what doesn’t reflect democracy is an institution of higher learning shutting down political speech, particularly speech advocating for human rights amid an oppressive government. It’s even worse when such extreme actions are taken without a full awareness of the influence that particular government has on college campuses—an influence that harms students of every background, including the ones it claims to represent.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of  The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)