In exchange for the largesse it dispenses around the world, the Chinese state and Chinese Communist Party want the recipients do what it wants them to do.
Illustrative is what happened to Steve Tsang, former head of Nottingham’s former School of Contemporary Chinese Studies, and to one of his colleagues. As The Telegraph puts it, “The claims raise disturbing questions about the influence exerted by Beijing on British education institutions” (November 28, 2023). They do.
Tsang says that in 2015, the university asked him to avoid speaking to the media during Chinese Dictator Xi Jinping’s visit that year to the United Kingdom “for fear his comments would cause embarrassment to the institution.”
Moreover:
The academic, known as a critic of the Chinese Communist Party, said that the previous year he had invited a senior Taiwanese politician to speak on campus, but was “ordered” by a senior University manager to hold the speech elsewhere.
Professor Tsang told Channel 4’s Dispatches, broadcast on Wednesday: “He [the university manager] said he was summoned—the word ‘summoned’ was used by him. He was summoned by the Chinese embassy in London. And he was told in no uncertain terms that that speaker cannot speak on campus.”
So a China rep summoned a University of Nottingham rep and told him that a politician from Taiwan could not speak on the Nottingham campus. Then the Nottingham rep told Tsang that the politician from Taiwan could not speak on the Nottingham campus.
Why didn’t the Nottingham rep instead tell the China rep to go jump in a lake? Perhaps in part because Nottingham had long been entangled with the Chinese state: the University of Nottingham has a campus in China that was established in 2004.
In a separate incident Stephen Morgan, former associate provost for planning at the University’s campus in Ningbo, China, claims that books and articles at the campus were censored by local Chinese officials and students were encouraged by the party to spy on their teachers.
Morgan reports that he was forced to quit his position at the Ningbo campus because he publicly criticized Xi Jinping, China’s dictator. The former associate provost says that his criticism was “seen by the party secretary as completely unacceptable. He more or less barged into the provost’s office quite angry and said, ‘You are condoning illegal actions.’ What was illegal? Being critical? That’s what Western academics are about.”
A China rep barged into the office of a Nottingham rep and lashed out at a campus official, Stephen Morgan, probably also demanding that Morgan be ousted. Instead of telling the China rep to go jump in a lake, the Nottingham rep or his superiors obeyed and ousted Morgan.
The University of Nottingham felt that it had no choice but to obey. After all, Nottingham is stuck in an academic partnership with China. What was Nottingham’s alternative? Close down the Ningbo campus and leave China? (Yes.)
The University of Nottingham said: “We do not recognise the descriptions of the University of Nottingham Ningbo China campus. Any UK institution operating overseas…must observe the laws and customs of the host country. The University of Nottingham is committed to supporting and promoting academic freedom and ensures open research and freedom of speech.”
Open research, freedom of speech, obedience to the Chinese state’s demands to crack down on research and speech—it’s all part of the same rarefied gestalt.
According to a documentary sited by both The Telegraph and The Guardian, “Secrets and Power: China in the UK,” the University of Nottingham “closed its School of Contemporary Chinese Studies in 2016 in response to pressure from Beijing.” The Guardian reports:
The programme also looks at Imperial College London, where it claims a leading computer science professor collaborated with researchers at a Chinese university to publish papers on the use of artificial intelligence weaponry that could be used to benefit the Chinese military.
It reports that Guo Yike, the founder of Imperial College’s Data Science Institute, has written eight papers with collaborators from Shanghai University on developing ways to use AI to control fleets of drone ships. In 2019, Guo signed a research deal with JARI, a Chinese research institute with links to the Chinese military. The research deal was terminated in 2021 and Imperial College said that it returned the funding associated with the partnership.
An academic partnership with China was terminated merely because the research could help the Chinese military improve its ability to attack us? Someone must have noticed.
Of course, the Imperial College fiasco is just the tip of the iceberg of research collaborations with China that could help China fine-tune its military and achieve other goals involving oppression and invasion.
In these kinds of “partnerships,” there is no way to draw lines that prevent China from gaining at the expense of its “partners.” Gaining at the expense of “partners” and the countries of the alleged partners is the Chinese government’s very purpose in permitting or undertaking such enterprises. Meanwhile, the persons and countries on the other side of the deal are not actually gaining anything. The fact that as a university official you can now say at cocktail parties that “we’ve got a campus in China” does not mean that you or your university have gained anything by abetting the Chinese state. You have only lost.
As a matter of principle and self-preservation, all governments, schools, and other institutions in foreign lands should reject all collaboration and all funds and other resources proffered by the Chinese state or any of the semiprivate or fictionally private entities that it controls. The money is dirty to begin with, the benefits are illusory, and the price is unacceptable.
Also see:
StopTheChinazis.org: “Collaborating on AI —> Empowering the CCP”
“While Europeans will find themselves ethically restrained from exploiting the technology, China will not. And since China is already one of the leaders in AI, if not the most advanced, the ‘two-way street’ just gives China more of an advantage.”
MERICS: Getting China right: “AI entanglements: Balancing risks and rewards of European-Chinese collaboration”
“Many European-Chinese AI research outputs have military or surveillance applications. These include, among others collaborations on target tracking, cybersecurity and biometric recognition with risky entities in China. European researchers should consider the prospective partners, the specific research, and its potential end uses.”
Foreign Policy Research Institute: “Political Training Under the Belt and Road Initiative: A Look at the Chinese Communist Party’s First Party School in Africa”
“The CCP has been providing party training in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and other regions for years, but this school represents the first CCP-funded permanent party school in Africa. This may signal the start of a trend of permanent, scaled-up training programs intended to promote China’s governance methods to foreign political parties and cultivate foreign partnerships that will advance CCP goals.”
