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Travel To China
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China and Global Academic Freedom
Yesterday, Human Rights Watch published a 12-point Code of Conduct for institutes of higher learning to adopt to aid in responding to Beijing’s threats to academic freedom abroad. In a press release, the rights organization describes the proposed code of conduct–based on over 100 interviews with academics and students from Australia, Europe, and North America between 2015 and 2018–and the many threats that it attempts to mitigate:
Human Rights Watch found various threats to academic freedom resulting from Chinese government pressure. Chinese authorities have long monitored and conducted surveillance on students and academics from China and those studying China on campuses around the world. Chinese diplomats have also complained to university officials about hosting speakers – such as the Dalai Lama – whom the Chinese government considers “sensitive.”
Academics told Human Rights Watch that students from China have described threats to their families in China in response to what those students had said in the classroom. Scholars from China detailed being directly threatened outside the country by Chinese officials to refrain from criticizing the Chinese government in classroom lectures or other talks. Others described students from China remaining silent in their classrooms, fearful that their speech was being monitored and reported to Chinese authorities by other students from China. One student from China at a university in the United States summed up his concerns about classroom surveillance, noting: “This isn’t a free space.”
Many of the academics interviewed identified censorship and self-censorship as serious concerns. One said a senior administrator has asked them “as a personal favor” to decline media requests during a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping, fearing that it could have ramifications for their university.
[…] Many expressed discomfort with the presence of Confucius Institutes on their campuses. They said the presence of such institutions fundamentally compromised their institution’s commitment to academic freedom, especially when Confucius Institutes had been invited to their campuses without broad faculty consultation. In 2019, Victoria University cancelled the screening of a documentary critical of Confucius Institutes after the university’s Confucius Institute complained. […] [Source]
China’s Confucius Institutes, the long controversial government-funded centers offering Mandarin-language and cultural courses at partner universities worldwide, have been rapidly closing at host universities in the U.S. Last month, a bipartisan Senate subcommittee recommended a mass termination of Confucius Institute programs. At Mother Jones, Dan Spinelli reports on the increasing U.S. government scrutiny of the institutes:
In June, the [University of Minnesota] will cut ties with Hanban, and Minnesota’s Confucius Institute will close. University officials cited a desire to refocus “our China-related activities through a strengthened and enhanced China Center,” spokesperson Katrinna Dodge said in an email to Mother Jones. In doing this, Minnesota joins the ranks of roughly a dozen other American colleges that have abandoned their partnerships with Hanban amid increasing criticism of Beijing’s growing authoritarianism and hostility to free speech. “Most agreements establishing Confucius Institutes feature nondisclosure clauses and unacceptable concessions to the political aims and practices of the government of China,” the American Association of University Professors concluded ina 2014 report, whichsaid the centers “function as an arm of the Chinese state and are allowed to ignore academic freedom.”
[…] Beijing first imported Confucius Institutes to American universities in 2004, offering generous subsidies and even staff, but the centers have attracted controversy from the start. As retired Communist Party bigwig Li Changchun once said, these institutes are “an important part of China’s overseas propaganda set-up.” Marshall Sahlins, a University of Chicago anthropologist, called them “academic malware” with propaganda objectives “as old as the imperial era.” Many scholars and lawmakers wanted nothing to do with the institutes, which use an authoritarian government’s money to bankroll hundredsof classes and programs at colleges, high schools, and elementary schools. Now, as tensions between the US and China have increased, the White House, lawmakers from both parties, and the intelligence community have singled out Confucius Institutes as a nefarious symbol of China’s creeping influence.
In a January Senate hearing, FBI Director Christopher Wray said China posed a threat “more deep, more diverse, more vexing, more challenging, more comprehensive, and more concerning than any counterintelligence threat I can think of.” He acknowledged last year that federal agents had targeted some Confucius Institutes with “appropriate investigative steps” over concerns of improper Chinese influence. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) introduced a bill last month that would require Confucius Institutes to register with the Justice Department as foreign agents, which quickly gained bipartisan support, and the most recent defense appropriations bill restricts schools with Confucius Institutes from receiving Pentagon language grants. […] [Source]
The first of 12 points on Human Rights Watch’s code of conduct is “speak out for academic freedom.” While delivering an address at Peking University on March 20, Harvard University President Lawrence S. Bacow did just that. Harvard Magazine delivers highlights from Bacow’s address, in which he emphasized the need for free thought and independence in the academy, and made several highly sensitive references, including one to the May 4 Incident and another veiled nod to the human rights crisis currently unfolding in Xinjiang:
It is a special honor for me to visit you as you approach…the centennial of the May Fourth Movement, a proud moment in your history that demonstrated to the world a deep commitment on the part of young Chinese to the pursuit of truth—and a deep understanding of the power of truth to shape the future. Even now, President Cai Yuanpei speaks to us. “Universities are places for grand learning,” he said. “They are grand because they follow the general principle of free thought.” Under his visionary leadership, tremendous intellectual exploration and dramatic social change were unleashed.
[…] In many circumstances, my role as president is not to define the “correct” position of the University but to keep the channels of discussion open. From a distance, Harvard can appear to be a place that speaks in one voice. It is, in fact, a place of many voices. And one of the most important—and most difficult—of our tasks is to ensure that all members of the community feel empowered to speak their minds. [Source]
The magazine’s coverage also includes mention of Bacow’s chosen closing: “a resonant invocation of the spirit of intellectual exploration in a verse by the late Abdurehim Ötkür,” a renowned Uyghur poet who passed away in 1995. Ötkür’s fellow Uyghurs are currently facing an unprecedented ethnic crackdown in Xinjiang, where an estimated 1.5 million are currently being held in internment camps.
See also a recent episode of the Sinica podcast featuring the University of Missouri’s Sheena Greitens, Princeton University’s Rory Truex, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Neysun Mahboubi. The hosts and guest scholars examine the topic of self-censorship among China-focused scholars, and dig into the findings of a recent study by Greitens and Truex on the various types of “repressive experiences” facing China researchers.
© josh rudolph for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). |
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U.S. Companies Fuel Surveillance in China as Chinese Firms Export It
At Foreign Policy this week, Securing Democracy’s Lindsay Gorman and Matt Schrader described how American tech firms and institutions “are lending expertise, reputational credence, and even technology to Chinese surveillance companies, wittingly or otherwise,” following the exposure of massive quantities of surveillance data by a firm, SenseNets, which claims to have a partnership with Microsoft. (Microsoft denies that any such partnership exists.)
[… T]he party is leveraging China’s vibrant tech ecosystem, inviting Chinese companies to participate through conventional government-procurement tools. Companies built the re-education camps. Companies supply the software that watches Uighurs online and the cameras that surveil their physical movements. While based in China, many are deeply embedded in the international tech community, in ways that raise serious questions about the misuse of critical new technologies. Foreign firms, eager to access Chinese funding and data, have rushed into partnerships without heed to the ways the technologies they empower are being used in Xinjiang and elsewhere.
In February 2018, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced a wide-ranging research partnership with Chinese artificial-intelligence giant and global facial-recognition leader SenseTime. SenseTime then held a 49 percent stake in SenseNets, with robust cross-pollination of technical personnel. SenseNets’ parent company Netposa (also Chinese) has offices in Silicon Valley and Boston, received a strategic investment from Intel Capital in 2010, and has invested in U.S. robotics start-ups: Bito—led by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University—and Exyn, a drone software company competing in a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) artificial-intelligence challenge. This extensive enmeshing raises both moral and dual-use national-security questions. Dual-use technology is tech that can be put to both civilian and military uses and as such is subject to tighter controls. Nuclear power and GPS are classic examples, but new technologies such as facial recognition, augmented reality and virtual reality, 5G, and quantum computing are beginning to raise concerns about their dual applicability.
[…] Equally concerning is that the details of technical and research collaborations with Chinese companies can be opaque to international partners, concealing ethically objectionable activities. When Yale University geneticist Kenneth Kidd shared DNA samples with a scientific colleague from the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s Institute on Forensic Science, he had no idea they would be used to refine genetic surveillance techniques in Xinjiang. Massachusetts-based company Thermo Fisher is also implicated: Until it was reported last month, the company sold DNA sequencers directly to authorities in Xinjiang for genetic mapping. Western companies and institutions must be far more vigilant in scrutinizing how Chinese partners are using their products, especially emerging technologies. [Source]
On Twitter, Charles Rollett highlighted more examples from his own reporting:
Perhaps the most prominent recent case of a Western firm’s willingness to participate in China’s surveillance machinery is Google’s Project Dragonfly, a planned search engine for the Chinese market which would have tracked its users as well as censoring their search results. The project was reportedly abandoned in December after a sharp internal and external backlash, but watchful employees have reported possible signs of continued work. Meanwhile, the company came under fire last week for its existing research activities within China. Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan told the Armed Services Committee last week that while Google had withdrawn from collaborations with the U.S. armed forces, it continued to “support” China’s due to the “fusion of commercial business with [the] military”. This spurred a Twitter rebuke from the U.S. Commander in Chief:
NBC News’ Max Burman reported the company’s response:
“We are not working with the Chinese military. We are working with the U.S. government, including the Department of Defense, in many areas including cybersecurity, recruiting and healthcare,” a spokesperson said.
Trump’s criticism came just days after Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made similar comments in testimony before Congress.
“The work that Google is doing in China is indirectly benefiting the Chinese military,” Dunford said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.
“We watch with great concern when industry partners work in China knowing that there is that indirect benefit,” he said. “Frankly, ‘indirect’ may be not a full characterization of the way it really is, it is more of a direct benefit to the Chinese military.” [Source]
Elsa B. Kania from the Center for a New American Security commented at length on the accusations:
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At The Intercept, meanwhile, George Joseph reported this week on IBM’s role in supplying “probably the first-ever video analytics surveillance […] in Asia” to Davao City in the southern Philippines amid a swathe of extra-judicial killings during now-President Rodrigo Duterte’s time as mayor and vice-mayor. The system’s alleged use against not only criminals but also local political opposition at a time when the killings were receiving vocal scrutiny from organizations such as Human Rights Watch conflicts with IBM’s professed commitment to “high standards of corporate responsibility.” The company’s role ended several years ago, however, and Chinese companies look set to step in as surveillance spreads nationwide.
In the years since the IBM program was phased out, Philippine police interest in cutting-edge surveillance infrastructure has hardly waned. National authorities are now looking to deploy real-time facial recognition across the country, in a project called “Safe Philippines,” and have considered technology from a variety of international vendors, including the Chinese telecom Huawei.
[…] The former consultant to the Philippine Army said his understanding is that the Safe Philippines installation will be modeled after Chinese facial recognition infrastructure, uniting CCTV installations and intelligence databases from security agencies across the country into one unified system. “The project aims to establish new CCTV networks and cascade them with all existing CCTV installations,” he said. “Patterned after the Chinese police state, the system is intended to tap databases from a variety of agencies of the government and integrate them with the data streams from the CCTV networks.”
In a more recent interview, the former consultant said that, given the scrutiny Huawei has drawn, the Department of the Interior and Local Government may opt for another technology equipment supplier, a claim that Densing, the Department of the Interior official, echoed in the January television interview.
Maya Wang, senior researcher on China at Human Rights Watch, said the potential adoption of a Chinese-style surveillance infrastructure, facilitated by Chinese companies, is very concerning given the “context of Duterte’s increasing abuses, drug war, and large-scale extrajudicial violence.” But Wang cautioned that the costs and expertise required for such systems are not easily replicable. The Philippine government could potentially “replicate one or some of the systems, but not all of the overlapping, multitiered mass surveillance systems seen in China,” she said. [Source]
Freedom House and others have warned of an emerging global “China Model” of digital control. Both Western companies’ activities in China and Chinese companies’ activities abroad are examined in James Griffiths’ new book, “The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet.”
© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). |
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Former Swedish Ambassador Under Investigation
Anna Lindstedt, Sweden’s former ambassador to China, is under criminal investigation for breaches of national security, Sarah Zheng reports at South China Morning Post. Lindstedt was recalled to Stockholm in February after Angela Gui, daughter of detained Swedish publisher Gui Minhai, revealed in a Medium article that the former ambassador had invited her to a “very strange” meeting in January with two Chinese businessmen who offered to help her father if she agreed to stop all media engagement on the case.
Deputy Chief Prosecutor Hans Ihrman confirmed Swedish media reports that Anna Lindstedt was “under ongoing investigation” for the relevant national security crimes without further elaboration, the Swedish Prosecution Authority told the South China Morning Post in an email reply.
It was reported earlier that Lindstedt had been recalled from Beijing to meet with Swedish foreign ministry officials, and Stockholm later said it was conducting an internal investigation over her “incorrect action” connected to events occurring at the end of January.
[…] In the post, Gui said that Lindstedt had asked her to come to Stockholm on January 24 for “a new approach” to her father’s case, but ended up in a meeting with unnamed Chinese businessmen who offered to help secure her father’s release. She said they threatened her to stop engaging with the media or it would damage Lindstedt’s career, and that she had to trust them or she would never see her father again.
When Gui later contacted Swedish foreign affairs officials, they told her that they were not aware of the meeting. [Source]
Gui Minhai was one of five Hong Kong-based publishers who were abducted by mainland authorities and taken to China in late 2015. Gui vanished from his vacation home in Pattaya, Thailand before resurfacing months later in detention in mainland China. Gui was released in October 2017 after serving two years in prison for an alleged fatal traffic accident. He then lived under surveillance in China before being detained again in January 2018 while travelling on a train with Swedish diplomats.
The Local has more from Angela Gui on the arranged meeting:
“There was a lot of wine, a lot of people, and a lot of increasingly strange questions,” Gui wrote. “But because Ambassador Lindstedt was present and seemingly supportive of whatever it was that was going on, I kept assuming that this had been initiated by the Swedish Foreign Ministry.”
She wrote that the meetings mostly took place in a hotel lounge only accessible by a key card, and when Gui wanted to meet a friend she was told to invite the friend to the lounge as well. Gui, who has spent the years since her father’s imprisonment campaigning for his release, said the businessmen made vague promises to help her father and even offered her a job in China and help arranging a visa.
The businessmen claimed to be in touch with the Chinese Communist Party, Gui said in her blog post, and at one point offered to help her father in exchange for Gui’s silence and an end to her campaigning. They also claimed that Lindstedt’s career would be damaged if Gui continued to speak to media.
“Ambassador Lindstedt, who was sat next to me, agreed to the plan. She said that if my father was released, she’d go on Swedish television and speak of the bright future of Sweden-China relations, as well as express regret over the Chinese tourist hotel incident in Stockholm last year, and the subsequent coverage of it on a Swedish comedy show,” Gui wrote. [Source]
Anna Lindstedt has been appointed a lawyer, who stated that Lindstedt “welcomes” an investigation and denies any criminal wrongdoing.
At Hong Kong Free Press, Gray Sergeant compares Gui Minhai’s plight with Ayatollah Khomeini’s call for the murder of novelist Salman Rushdie 30 years ago. Sergeant looks at how Gui’s detention “is yet another reminder of the threat that dictators pose to free expression.”
Thirty years ago free societies did not respond well to Khomeini’s frontal assault. With China, its attempts to alter what we see in films and distort the intellectual space through money and other “soft” measures to restrict views it does not like were allowed to pass, and then it escalated to Gui Minhai, not that his alarming case got that much more attention.
Like the Rushdie Affair, the case of Gui Minhai exposes the extraordinary lengths despots will go to in order to silence dissenters who merely write and publish books. Both cases have had far-reaching consequences in terms of chilling free expression which looks set to continue for many decades.
What is more, the action taken against both these men has been tragic for them, their family and their friends. Yet the attacks on them are not a matter just for their nearest and dearest but something which should concern us all.
Freedom of expression is a key foundation of any liberal and open society, and it is in the interest of these free societies to defend it. Those who believe in freedom of speech must, to paraphrase George Orwell, keep telling dictators what they don’t want to hear. [Source]
© cindy for China Digital Times (CDT), get_post_time('Y'). |
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