Dismissing concern about China as Sinophobia is a disservice to students

Michael Spence’s recent warning that growing concern about China in UK universities risks sliding into Sinophobia came just days after MI5 briefed vice-chancellors on foreign interference in higher education.

The UCL provost’s article, published in Times Higher Education, also came on the same day as the UK government announced a new Academic Interference Reporting Route for senior university leaders to pass on concerns about foreign interference to the security services – amid fears that, as skills minister Jacqui Smith put it, “Our universities’ world-class reputation makes them a prime target for foreign states and hostile actors, who seek to erode that reputation by shaping or censoring research and teaching.”

Spence took a similarly dismissive stance regarding such concerns in 2018 while vice-chancellor of the University of Sydney, describing Australian government efforts to counter Chinese state interference as “Sinophobic blathering”, according to the country’s former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.

While Spence is right that anti-Chinese racism exists and must be firmly rejected, his argument erroneously conflates racial prejudice with scrutiny of an authoritarian state.

China analysts such as John Fitzgerald at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute have shown how PRC officials and aligned voices deliberately blur the boundaries between the Chinese state, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese people, thereby allowing criticism of state behaviour to be dismissed as Sinophobic. When this conflation takes hold in universities, it does not protect our ethnically Chinese students. Instead, it shields a state apparatus from legitimate scrutiny, discouraging staff and students from raising concerns about coercion, intimidation or self-censorship.

In his THE piece, Spence sets alongside each other students who feel socially constrained praising the Chinese government in the UK and those who fear reprisals for criticising it. But the risks each run are not remotely symmetrical. In the UK, pro-CCP speech may provoke disagreement or robust debate. By contrast, even mild criticism can expose students – and their families – to state-backed intimidation or worse, as attested to in a recent House of Commons research briefing. A recent Daily Telegraph investigation detailed the experience of a Chinese student who, after participating in a protest outside the Chinese embassy in London about China’s Covid policy, was threatened via a Chinese Students and Scholars Association. Then, on his return to China, he was detained and forced to sign a repentance letter.

Patterns of transnational repression affecting Chinese diaspora communities, including students, have been extensively documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UK-China Transparency and the UK Parliament Joint Committee on Human Rights. As I argued in my written submission to the committee’s inquiry, foreign interference harms not only individuals but the educational mission as a whole, narrowing and shaping teaching content, teaching methods and research agendas.

My own experience at UCL is illustrative. I was removed from teaching my long-running “Data Detectives” module after a Chinese student complained about my use of data on China from the Global Slavery Index. The department made a decision to protect what it saw as a risk to its income owing to potential reputational damage from the student complaint, and the core content teaching how to critically evaluate factual claims and secondary data was removed. Interestingly, research has revealed that questioning official accounts is explicitly problematised by CCP official doctrine. The upshot is that no student – Chinese or otherwise – is now learning those critical investigative skills on that course.

So how to hold the line against the invisible, incremental and voluntary adjustments individuals and organisations make in response to the “anaconda in the chandelier” as China’s network of repression has been memorably described? The Academic Interference Reporting Route is welcome, but the design is lacking. If it is up to senior university leaders to report concerns, significant blind spots will remain. Leaders can sincerely believe they tolerate no inappropriate influence while not realising what is happening on their campus.

This was illustrated on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme last week (2hrs 37min into the programme). After I explained my experience, a UCL spokesperson responded that the university would “never accept or tolerate inappropriate influence”. And Sir Peter Mathieson, vice-chancellor of Edinburgh and the Universities UK and Russell Group lead on international security, said his university had no evidence of Chinese or Russian interference.

Given the large numbers of Chinese students at Edinburgh and extensive evidence of the likely pressures on them, the absence of evidence may reflect difficulties in detecting and even reporting such pressures. Asked by the interviewer whether leaders were able to monitor the problem deeply enough, Sir Peter – formerly the vice-chancellor of the University of Hong Kong – responded that their awareness was strong, but it was difficult for that to permeate down through large universities. Yet vice-chancellors routinely communicate other significant risks through all-staff emails, inductions and training.

Rather than relying on senior university leaders to transmit concerns that may not reach them, the government should amend the new reporting route to include a direct mechanism for staff and students to highlight concerns.

The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 already contains a statutory complaints scheme designed precisely to address curtailments of academic freedom. However, that scheme has not yet been brought into force, pending government amendments. As Abhishek Saha has argued, the minister, Jacqui Smith, should immediately publish a timetable for those amendments and, in the interim, use a statutory instrument to commence the complaints scheme without the student union provisions she plans to repeal.

The complaints scheme will help considerably to address some of the symptoms of interference. However, it is necessarily reactive and cannot address the structural incentives that make infringements more likely. Moreover, foreign interference rarely arrives labelled as such. It can appear as informal complaints or requests to “adjust” teaching. Proactive avoidance of feared repercussions is disguised as adjustment of content, tone or focus.

The Freedom of Speech Act’s section on overseas funding was designed to address this problem, empowering regulators to examine relationships where leverage over academic activity could arise. Yet the government has paused commencement of these provisions, too, and left open the possibility that they will be repealed.

That would be a grave mistake. Taking action to protect our students, staff and academic independence from CCP interference is not Sinophobic. It is the strongest protection we can offer our Chinese and Hong Kong students and their families – not to mention the credibility and mission of UK higher education.

Michelle Shipworth is an associate professor at the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources at UCL and a founder member of the London Universities’ Council for Academic Freedom. She writes here in a personal capacity.