The battle to keep China off European university campuses

German universities have been ordered to review their links with China after the country’s education minister warned of Beijing’s “high-level influence”.

Anja Karliczek, a member of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union, said Chinese influence over universities was “unacceptable” after “the launch of a German biography” of China’s president Xi Jinping “was cancelled under alleged diplomatic pressure”, The Times said.

“China has established about 550 state-funded Confucius institutes around the world,” the paper added, including “about 20 in Germany and 30 in the UK”. But the claim that pressure from Beijing led to the shelving of the German book launch has raised questions over whether the Confucius institutes “spread propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party”.

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‘Sacrosanct and beyond discussion’

Journalists Stefan Aust and Adrian Geiges had been scheduled to introduce their book, Xi Jinping: The World’s Most Powerful Man, at an event organised by the Confucius institutes in Hanover and Duisburg-Essen.

But the publisher has “claimed that the Chinese consul general in Dusseldorf forced” the institutions to cancel the online talk, The Times said.

One member of staff at the Confucius institute allegedly warned: “You can’t talk about Xi Jinping as an ordinary person any more. Now he must be sacrosanct and beyond discussion.”

The warning prompted Aust to tell the paper that “for the first time a dictatorship is overtaking the West in economic terms and now it’s trying to internationally enforce its values, which are in opposition to our liberty”.

His warning prompted Education Minister Karliczek to state in a letter to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper that the independence of German universities was being “challenged in a significant way by international actors”. She has ordered all higher education institutions to “reassess” their partnerships with China.

Concern over the rising influence of China on European universities has been growing for some time. Former higher education minister Jo Johnson said in March this year that the risks involved in Beijing’s investment in the UK’s universities is “​​poorly understood”.

His warning came as a study “identified a significant increase in funding from China and collaboration with Chinese researchers over the past two decades”, The Guardian said.

This included research “in sensitive areas for national security and economic competition – such as automation, telecommunications and materials science – or in disciplines where collaboration may threaten freedom of speech”.

After publication of the report, Johnson said: “The UK urgently needs to put in place a framework for this key relationship so that it will be able to withstand rising geopolitical tensions. Failure to do so risks real damage to our knowledge economy.

“The UK needs to do a better job of measuring, managing and mitigating risks that are at present poorly understood and monitored.”

In August, two academics who had “recently left the UK’s two joint venture universities in China” told Times Higher Education (THE) that they had resigned amid “increasing conflicts with management” and practices that “are not in keeping with the values” of the UK’s most prestigious higher education institutions.

The pair alleged that “there had been a drop-off in standards around academic freedom and freedom of movement since the 2020-21 year”. Admitting that universities in China have “modern facilities and research opportunities”, they added that there has been a “narrowing space for academic freedom”, THE added.

The role Chinese universities can play in the UK was highlighted in June, when The Sunday Times revealed that a Cambridge academic who had “benefited from close links to China cautioned against debating the plight of the Uighur Muslims on campus”.

Professor Peter Nolan, described by the paper as “one of the foremost authorities on China’s economy”, was reported to have “advised colleagues to avoid contentious debates on China’s human rights record”. He suggested instead that “all countries” that are home to “ethnic minorities faced similar issues to China”.

It later emerged that Cambridge University had in 2009 “received a £3.7 million donation to fund his professorship from a trust belonging to a former Chinese prime minister’s daughter”, the paper added.

The case “highlights the risks of the Chinese government’s rising influence in UK universities”, said The New Statesman. “Through financial support”, Beijing “is potentially able to mould the boundaries of debate on UK campuses”.

Described by the chair of the China Research Group, Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, as a “gentle, drip, drip, drip of silence” as academics are dissuaded from covering controversial topics, the issue is also not “always as blatant as a professorship being funded by organisations with links to the Chinese state”, the magazine added.

“Nine UK universities depend on Chinese students for more than 20 per cent of their tuition fee income,” it continued, “leaving them vulnerable to potential sanctions.”

And “specific donations are also common”, with Oxford University recently renaming “the 120-year-old Wykeham professorship in return for a £700,000 donation from Tencent, the Chinese software company”.

Soft power

In late 2020, a report by researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands warned that “European governments, higher education and research institutions” must outline guidelines for “safe” collaboration with China.

Towards Sustainable Europe-China Collaboration in Higher Education and Research warned that “scholars in both Europe and China feel it is becoming more difficult to develop collaboration”.

It added that amid a tightening of academic freedoms in China, “transparent guidelines can help institutions and researchers explain to their Chinese counterparts why specific requests or decisions have been made”.

One of the report’s authors, Ingrid d’Hooghe, senior research fellow at the Leiden Asia Centre, said: “Cooperation with China is important, but we have to do it in a safer way and in a better way and look at it more strategically.”

The issue is by no means confined to Germany and the UK. China also invests in universities across the continent and funds the building of higher education institutions in Eastern European nations like Hungary and Poland.

The Central European Institute of Asian Studies (CEIAS) has warned that China “wants to improve how foreign countries perceive it, as well as gain access to the most advanced technologies possible”. And “while often these goals are being achieved in legitimate ways, other times, often due to the authoritarian nature of the Chinese regime, these ways are less legitimate”.

In many cases, CEIAS found evidence that “universities lack the resources and will to thoroughly investigate the institutions as well as individuals” based in China “with whom they cooperate”. In others, lack of due diligence meant universities “entering into contracts with institutions that have been implicated in human rights abuses”.

In June, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report warning of the harassment of Chinese students in Australia that followed them expressing “pro-democracy” views. Two years earlier, HRW said that “Chinese authorities have long monitored and conducted surveillance on students and academics from China”.

“Shutting down debate of controversial issues makes sense for a regime seeking to crush any dissent at home and enhance its reputation overseas,” The New Statesman said.

But “China’s increasing boldness when it comes to flexing its muscles abroad makes protecting the academic study of these topics more important than ever”.