Category: China, Foreign Influence, Higher Education;
Reading Time: ~4 minutes
College and university towns often have a unique cultural feel. In small towns, a vibrant university can encourage a cosmopolitan atmosphere through the students and professors who come from across the country, or even from around the globe. Academia often thrives on international exposure: good-faith relationships with universities overseas facilitate research and collaboration. While this holds true for many, if not most, international academic partnerships, those between China and the United States remain an outlier. These ties are driven by Beijing’s lust for American technological development, and pressured by an increasing disdain for foreigners driven by a renewed nationalistic fervor.
Last month, four instructors from Iowa’s Cornell College were stabbed in Jilin, China. Traveling in China as part of a partnership with Beihua University, the instructors were attacked by a 55-year-old man who claimed he had “collided with a foreign national.” Chinese police stated that the attacker was “unemployed and down on his luck.” Traveling abroad always carries the danger of stumbling into the occasional xenophobe; however, this attack on foreigners in China is not an isolated incident. Two weeks later, a man with a knife attacked a Japanese school bus carrying students in Suzhou. Notably, it is virtually illegal to carry a knife in a public place in China.
These attacks are part of a growing hostility toward foreigners in this Communist country. Japanese firms have been increasingly wary of doing business in China, as the Japanese school related to the attack had been harassed for months. The attacks on the Cornell instructors come amid Chinese police raids on American companies operating in the country and continued corporate espionage. In response to the stabbing attack on the Americans, U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Burns accused Beijing of stoking anti-American sentiment and bullying Americans attending formal diplomatic events with interrogations and harassment. The U.S. Department of State has issued travel advisories for China, warning of “arbitrary detentions” and “exit bans” for foreigners. Despite the warnings, some professors remain aloof to the looming risks by claiming “scholars” have nothing to fear.
Cornell College’s relationship with Beihua University exemplifies the strained relationship between China and American colleges and universities. In 2018, Cornell brokered a bilateral program with Beihua after it was approved by Beijing’s Ministry of Education. The program stipulated that Beihua would offer funding for Cornell professors to live and teach in China for short periods, and offer instruction in the fields of computer science, math, and physics. At the time, Cornell’s dean, Joe Dieker, gave the typical academic justification for wanting closer ties with Communist China. Dieker stated that “like a lot of industries in this country, we have to look internationally as we move into a more global economy.” Prestige and funding are the milk and honey of higher education.
What is perplexing about Cornell and other eager colleges to enter China is how tone-deaf and naïve they are to China’s global ambition. Cornell could have sought out ties with India, Japan, Australia, Taiwan, or Brazil to gain a better footing in the “global” economy to avoid Beijing’s hostility. Instead, Cornell courted China. Under the agreement with Beihua, students from the Chinese university could “easily transfer to Cornell,” and presumably bring tuition dollars with them. According to Beihua’s website, it uses “American teaching methods and resources to give engineering students an international perspective.” Students from China who participate can study for two years at Cornell, and matriculate with degrees from both schools.
China’s interest in fundamental research is driven by Beijing’s desire to obtain dual-use technologies conducive to economic innovation and defense. Earlier this year, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party launched an investigation into Georgia Tech’s research collaboration with China’s military-tied Tianjin University. Last year, Alfred University closed its Confucius Institute after questions were raised about its proximity to the school’s ceramics and hypersonic missile research programs. China is not interested in U.S. research alone. Earlier this year, Britain announced plans to have its security service, MI5, screen academics for potential espionage risks. Britain’s Inter-Parliamentary Alliance stated that much of the United Kingdom’s vulnerability stems from British academia’s “dependence on fees from Chinese students.”
American academia’s openness to China appears increasingly naïve amid growing nationalism among Chinese academics. In the past few years, Chinese universities have reduced emphasis on English instruction and even dropped the country’s College English Test. One Chinese nationalist online influencer posted on Weibo that “English is important, but as China develops, English is no longer that important,” instead “it should be the turn for foreigners to learn Chinese.” Across the Taiwan Strait in the Republic of China, Taipei has laid out plans to be bilingual in English by 2030.
China remains a totalitarian country despite American academia’s interest in building ties with Beijing and accessing the prestige and capital that comes with it. In the U.S., colleges operate as pseudo-independent city-states with their own authority, norms, and prevailing sense of cosmopolitanism—a value in contrast to China’s muscle-flexing nationalism.
Until next week.
Ian Oxnevad
Senior Fellow for Foreign Affairs and Security Studies
National Association of Scholars
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