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Xi Jinping wants to ensure that they don’t teach liberal thinking

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Filing into a graduation ceremony to the strains of Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1” is quintessentially American. As they did so in May, clad in violet-coloured gowns, students at the campus in Shanghai of New York University (NYU) may have reflected on the oddity of this cultural transplant: not just the music, but their whole experience as undergraduates. Relations between China and the West—especially America—are becoming increasingly tense. China is trying to purge its universities of liberal thinking. Yet here were nearly 400 students, about half of them Chinese, getting their bachelor’s certificates from a Chinese outpost of American academe.

Since Xi Jinping took over as China’s leader in 2012, he has tightened controls over university education. Several liberal scholars have been dismissed. Lecturers have been ordered to stop using imported textbooks that are deemed to promote Western values. Universities have been told to become “strongholds of the Communist Party’s leadership”. Under Mr Xi, few students have dared to stage protests. But in November small demonstrations broke out in several cities, and on many campuses, over harsh covid-related lockdowns. Pro-government commentators accused “foreign forces” of stirring the unrest. It has surely made the party even more wary of Western influences.

But ventures such as NYU’s in Shanghai seem a world apart. Some are even expanding. This year NYU’s campus in the city’s financial district, Pudong, moved to a glitzy new nine-storey building designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, a New York-based firm that also drew the blueprints for Pudong’s most iconic skyscraper, the Shanghai World Financial Centre. It has twice as much classroom space as NYU Shanghai’s previous location. In August Duke Kunshan University (DKU) in Kunshan, a city near Shanghai, is also due to move to new premises. The joint-venture campus—involving Duke University in North Carolina, Wuhan University and Kunshan’s government—will cover more than 33 hectares, twice as large as the current one. In Suzhou, a nearby city, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University has 23,000 students, making it China’s largest academic joint venture. Last year it opened an additional campus, with room for 10,000.

NYU Shanghai and DKU were founded around the start of Mr Xi’s rule, and Liverpool’s venture seven years earlier (following the pioneer in this field, the University of Nottingham, which launched a campus in the city of Ningbo in 2004). But even as Mr Xi grew increasingly anti-Western, more such ventures were introduced, albeit on a smaller scale. In all, well over half of China’s more than 1,230 universities have co-operative projects with foreign or Hong Kong counterparts. Over the past decade, the number of such schemes—most of them involving universities from English-speaking countries—has increased by a third. They range from ten full-blown universities to a plethora of smaller ventures such as joint departments or institutes inside Chinese campuses.

One of China’s aims is to boost the quality of its universities by helping them learn how foreigners run such institutions. Another is to help local governments fulfil their economic ambitions. It is no accident that several of the biggest ventures are located in Shanghai and cities nearby. Shanghai is the country’s financial centre; its hinterland is a base of high-tech manufacturing. Officials hope that foreign universities will attract talent for such industries.

Compared with enrolment in the rest of China’s university system, the number of students in foreign-run programmes is small: fewer than 600,000, according to state media, or less than 2% of the total number of students in China. But that does not stop the party from worrying. Even though most of the joint ventures’ students focus on subjects such as science and business that are unlikely to touch on politically sensitive topics, officials are nervous that foreign professors and their textbooks might spread heretical views.

In 2017 the central authorities issued a classified directive on “party building” in foreign-run academic programmes. It said the venture’s party chief (the Chinese partner always has one) should sit on the governing board. This was often the case already. At DKU, however, the party secretary did not have a voting right. Allowing her to vote could have changed the balance between the American and Chinese representatives, says Denis Simon, who was then DKU’s executive vice-chancellor. It would have required rewriting the joint-venture agreement, he says. The Americans were not keen to do so. That issue “was never fully resolved”.

But the party is getting twitchy. In 2020 Chongqing University of Education (which has numerous foreign partnerships) published its own guidelines for implementing the central government’s directive. They clearly reflected the mood in Beijing. The university instructed that Chinese teachers and students in joint-venture arrangements should “consciously resist corrosion by all kinds of erroneous Western thoughts and decadent ideas”. Social media such as WeChat should be used to help “manage” student party members during their periods of study abroad, it said. Party branches should “keep abreast of the thinking of students and teachers” and use “supervisors” to monitor classes.

There have been ominous remarks, too, by Chinese staff in joint ventures. In 2021 a party official at the University of Liverpool’s wrote that party committees should make sure no one with “ideological problems” is appointed to faculty. They should “resolutely stop the spread of erroneous thinking”. The party chief of Nottingham Ningbo, in an interview that year with state media, said: “If the school makes mistakes on important issues such as ideology, then there is no value in the school’s existence, and it needs to be closed.” In 2018 Stephen Morgan, then a professor at Nottingham Ningbo (now retired), says he was pressed to step down from its board. He blames the party: he had written an online article critical of Mr Xi. “A lot of the party people would not even look at me or say hello to me for at least a year,” he says.

The vice-chancellor of NYU Shanghai, Jeffrey Lehman, remains stoical. “Within our academic community, academic freedom has been fully honoured,” he says. “Academic freedom was the clear understanding from the very beginning. And if the Chinese government is ever no longer comfortable with that, we can shut down.” Responding to the party official’s remarks, the University of Liverpool said it was “absolutely committed to academic independence” and the joint venture had “freedom of speech enshrined in its core values”.

For all its fretting, China shows no sign of wanting to chase away prestigious university brands that have already established a high-profile presence. But Mr Morgan believes that no new ventures involving humanities or social sciences are likely to be approved. In March the government said that on Hainan, an island province, foreign universities specialising in such areas as engineering and medicine could set up campuses on their own—unlike existing ventures, which must have a Chinese partner. A party secretary, however, will still be required on their boards. ■

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This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline “A for effort, Xi for control”

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China

July 22nd 2023

• →Can academic joint ventures between China and the West survive? 
• →A clue to China’s true covid-19 death toll
• →Germany’s new strategy for dealings with China
• →How China trains its journalists to report “correctly”
• →China’s foreign minister goes missing

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From the July 22nd 2023 edition

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Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

⇒Explore the edition.css-v7aorn{margin-top:0.875rem;}.css-v7aorn +.eq1asik0{margin-top:3rem;padding-bottom:0;}.el1rg701+.css-v7aorn{margin-top:0;}.css-9ejc71{position:relative;border-bottom:0;border-top:0.0625rem solid var(–mb-colour-greyscale-london-85);color:var(–mb-colour-greyscale-london-35);}.css-9ejc71 .ebxshaw0{margin-top:0;}.css-9ejc71 >.e5z0ibw0>*{padding:var(–mb-spacing-md) 0;}.css-9ejc71 >.e5z0ibw0>*:nth-of-type(2){border-top:0.0625rem solid var(–mb-colour-greyscale-london-85);}@media (min-width: 37.5rem){.css-9ejc71 >.e5z0ibw0>*:nth-of-type(2){border-top:0;}}.css-9ejc71 >.e5z0ibw0 .e5z0ibw0{gap:var(–mb-spacing-sm);}.css-yb4x8x{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-items:stretch;-webkit-box-align:stretch;-ms-flex-align:stretch;align-items:stretch;-webkit-box-pack:start;-ms-flex-pack:start;-webkit-justify-content:flex-start;justify-content:flex-start;}@media (min-width: 37.5rem){.css-yb4x8x{-webkit-flex-direction:row;-ms-flex-direction:row;flex-direction:row;}}@media (min-width: 37.5rem){.css-yb4x8x{-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}}@media (min-width: 37.5rem){.css-yb4x8x{-webkit-box-pack:end;-ms-flex-pack:end;-webkit-justify-content:flex-end;justify-content:flex-end;}}.css-1j1j36d{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-flex-wrap:wrap;-webkit-flex-wrap:wrap;-ms-flex-wrap:wrap;flex-wrap:wrap;row-gap:0.6rem;-webkit-column-gap:var(–mb-spacing-sm);column-gap:var(–mb-spacing-sm);}ShareReuse this content.css-169lzn0{position:relative;-webkit-align-self:auto;-ms-flex-item-align:auto;align-self:auto;display:none;}@media (min-width: 80rem){.css-169lzn0{grid-column-start:9;}}@media (min-width: 89rem){.css-169lzn0{grid-column-start:13;}}@media (min-width: 80rem){.css-169lzn0{grid-column-end:13;}}@media (min-width: 89rem){.css-169lzn0{grid-column-end:17;}}@media (min-width: 80rem){.css-169lzn0{grid-row-start:1;}}@media (min-width: 80rem){.css-169lzn0{grid-row-end:span 4;}}@media (min-width: 80rem){.css-169lzn0{display:block;}}.css-169lzn0:last-child::after{height:0;}.css-1y1zooy{display:inline;}.css-1y1zooy >*+*{margin-top:2rem;}.css-1y1zooy >*:only-child{margin-top:1.25rem;}.css-1y1zooy >*:last-child{position:-webkit-sticky;position:sticky;top:1.5rem;}.css-mqgbir{margin-top:6rem;}.css-mqgbir .ds-section-headline{margin-bottom:1rem;}

More from China

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Chinese authorities try to stop parents gaming the exam system (again)

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They will go to great lengths to try

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China’s alarming sex imbalance

By 2027 one in six young Chinese men won’t be able to find a partner

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Behind DeepSeek lies a dazzling Chinese university

It models itself on Stanford, and is in the tech hotspot of Hangzhou

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Panama symbolises the Sino-American struggle for influence

The superpowers use soft and hard power

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Tensions with the West are fuelling China’s anxiety about food supplies

Grain pains are growing

Hail China’s new “ice-and-snow economy”

The country is betting on winter sports and tourism to boost growth in its rustbelt

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Источник: www.economist.com