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Editor’s Note: Every Wednesday, WPR’s newsletter and engagement editor, Benjamin Wilhelm, curates the top news and analysis from China written by the experts who follow it.
On Monday, Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations suspended two exchange programs with Beijing-based Renmin University after students there were punished for their labor rights activism. According to the Financial Times, it is the first case in years of a foreign university suspending ties with a Chinese counterpart due to concerns over academic freedom. Renmin students faced various forms of punishment—including surveillance and threats of suspension—after they participated in labor protests this summer at the welding machinery firm Jasic Technology and other factories in the southern Chinese city of Huizhou.
The dispute comes as the Chinese Communist Party seeks to tighten its control over the country’s higher education system. Last week, the Ministry of Education announced the appointment of Qui Shuiping as general secretary of Peking University. The general secretary at publicly funded Chinese universities is generally viewed as more powerful than the president, and is appointed by the Organization Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Qiu previously served as head of the national spy agency’s Beijing branch, and most recently as a high court judge in the northern province of Shanxi. He will now lead one of China’s most prestigious universities in what some analysts see as a “broader ideological hardening” at academic institutions under President Xi Jinping.
The Communist Party’s campaign of suppression on college campuses has targeted an “unlikely foe,” as The New York Times reported in September: young communists in student groups devoted to Marxism and Maoism who call for greater economic equality and workers’ rights. The crackdown also underscores the ascendance of “Xi Jinping Thought,” the ideology of President Xi that was incorporated into the Constitution of the Communist Party of China in October 2017. As the Times notes, since Xi took power in 2012, the party has taken aim at Western textbooks, banning those that disseminate “Western values,” such as rule of law and democracy.
Students from Renmin and Peking, along with other universities across the country, were involved in the summer protests in southern China. The student activists did not get off easy. In August, police raided an apartment in Huizhou where 50 students were staying, detaining them and later escorting them back to their hometowns. It is unclear if all the activists have been released, and a Peking graduate said at the time that authorities conducted similar raids in other parts of the country. Peking’s student Marxist society was not able to re-register for the new academic year in September, and the university threatened to shut it down entirely.
In addition to students, the party has its eyes on teachers and professors—quite literally, as surveillance cameras are increasingly common in classrooms. In an op-ed for the Times earlier this month, Zhang Lun, a professor of Chinese studies at Universite de Cergy-Pontoise in Paris, likened the educational environment in China today to the Cultural Revolution, when students were encouraged to report their teachers and peers for espousing Western “bourgeois” thinking. Top-tier universities have formed special departments to supervise “the ideological and political work” of their faculty. With authorities keeping watch, educators who might stray from the Communist Party line are compelled to self-censor.
Here’s a rundown of other China news from the past week:
Japan’s Abe visits Beijing: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe arrived in Beijing on Thursday for the first official visit by a Japanese leader since 2011. During his meeting with Abe, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang welcomed Japan’s participation in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Abe pledged to lift Sino-Japanese relations into a “new dimension” and announced a “new era” of cooperation.
Abe and Xi held their highly anticipated meeting on Friday. Among the many outcomes of the visit was Abe’s announcement that Japan would end development aid to China, a move that acknowledged a “new phase” in relations in addition to China’s economic dominance. Both countries also vowed to defend free trade and multilateralism.
Additionally, Abe and Li agreed on a number of measures to strengthen bilateral ties between the two countries and oversaw the signing of over 500 business deals. Among them was a three-year currency swap arrangement of up to $30 billion—Japan’s largest such bilateral deal—to strengthen financial stability and boost business activity in both countries.
WPR Associate Editor Elliot Waldman wrote this week about Sino-Japanese diplomacy in the Trump era. Read it here.
Visitors look at a display from Chinese technology firm Huawei at the PT Expo
in Beijing, Sept. 26, 2018 (AP photo by Mark Schiefelbein).
U.S. Justice Department indicts 10 Chinese: On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed charges against “10 Chinese spies, hackers and others” for attempting to steal commercial airline and other secrets from U.S. and European companies. It was the third such accusation in the past two months. The Justice Department alleged that the conspiracy began in 2010, targeting technology for a turbofan engine being jointly developed between a French company operating out of Suzhou, China, and an American company. Neither company was identified in the indictment.
The defendants hacked the French firm, as well as companies in Arizona, Massachusetts and Oregon that made parts for the jet engine, officials told The Washington Post. According to U.S. officials, a Chinese state-owned aerospace company was developing a similar commercial jet engine. None of the defendants are in U.S. custody.
Two of the defendants, Zha Rong and Chai Meng, are officers of a provincial arm of the Ministry of State Security, Beijing’s nonmilitary foreign espionage agency. Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced the extradition of a spy from the ministry on charges that he conspired to steal trade secrets related to jet aircraft engines belonging to GE Aviation and other unnamed American firms.
U.S. to restrict business with Chinese chip maker: The U.S. Department of Commerce, citing national and economic security concerns, has restricted American firms from doing business with state-owned Chinese chip maker Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuit Co.
The decision, announced in a statement Monday, comes after U.S.-based Micron Technology Inc. accused Fujian of stealing its secrets. Micron made those allegations in a federal lawsuit filed in December, but Jinhua retaliated the following month by suing Micron in a Chinese court in Fujian province. That resulted in a temporary order “blocking some Micron units from selling products in China on which each company claims patents,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The paper notes that the government of Fujian province partly controls Jinhua.
Jinhua is central to Beijing’s efforts to decrease China’s dependence on foreign technology, but the U.S. has sought to rein in the rampant practice of forced technology transfer in China. U.S. negotiators pressured China on this issue and cited Micron’s case during August trade talks, according to officials who spoke with the Journal. Intellectual property theft and China’s treatment of foreign companies have been major drivers of tension between Washington and Beijing.
“Use Huawei,” says China: U.S. intelligence agencies are concerned that China is listening in on conversations President Donald Trump has on his unsecured iPhones, per a report last Wednesday in The New York Times. Current and former American officials who spoke to the Times on the condition of anonymity have determined that China hopes to use what it learns from the president’s calls—with friends such as Blackstone Group CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman and former Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn—to prevent its trade war with the U.S. from escalating further. The Chinese are also building an “informal network” in which Chinese businessmen and others connected to Beijing “feed arguments to the friends of the Trump friends” in the hope that their messages will eventually be delivered to the president.
President Trump called the story “soooo wrong!” in a tweet on Thursday, but Beijing’s response was even more remarkable. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying replied that “there are those in America who are working all-out to win the Oscar for best screenplay” and suggested the report was “fake news.” Hua advised that “if they are very worried about iPhones being tapped, they can use Huawei,” referring to the Chinese telecommunications goliath that has struggled to tap into the U.S. market due to political pressure regarding security concerns.
Knife attack at Chongqing kindergarten: A knife-wielding woman attacked students at a kindergarten in Chongqing on Friday, injuring 14 children before she was stopped by teachers and guards. The children were all sent to hospitals for treatment, but there has been no word on the extent of their injuries. The suspect, a 39-year-old woman with the surname Liu, was immediately arrested and later charged with intent to commit homicide.
The New York Times notes that knife attacks are not uncommon in China and often target schoolchildren. Nine children were killed in a stabbing attack at a school in northwestern Shaanxi province last April. In June, two children were killed in a knife attack at a Shanghai school. Guns are tightly regulated in China and are rarely acquired by private citizens.
Benjamin Wilhelm is WPR’s newsletter and engagement editor.
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