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the Chinese government retaliated by banning students and scholars with funding from the Chinese government’s China Scholarship Council from attending UCSD. Other US universities have come under similar pressure when they have contemplated inviting the Dalai Lama or his associates to campus. Academic authorities at one Washington, DC, university were even warned by the Chinese embassy that if an event concerning Xinjiang went ahead, they risked losing their Confucius Institute.

CSSAs also serve as a channel of political “peer monitoring” of Chinese students, constraining the academic freedom of Chinese students on campus—and thereby also undermining core principles of free speech and academic freedom. This issue has become more serious over the past several years, as the political environment in China has tightened and Chinese students widely fear that things they say on campus (even in class, at other campus activities, or in private conversations) that contradict official PRC policies are liable to be reported to the Chinese authorities and risk putting their families into jeopardy back home.

A very public example of this kind took place during the commencement ceremonies at the University of Maryland in May 2017, after a Chinese student was selected as the commencement speaker. When Yang Shuping praised the “fresh air of free speech” and contrasted what she had found in the United States with China—and her comments went viral on the internet and social media in China—she received an avalanche of email threats, and her family in China was harassed.²² Another well-reported incident occurred at Duke University in 2008 when a twenty-year-old female undergraduate student became caught up in a pro-Tibetan independence demonstration. She was vilified online, and her parents were harassed back in China.²³ In other cases, Chinese government authorities have visited students’ families in China and warned them about their children’s allegedly subversive statements abroad.

In Australia, another kind of disturbing phenomenon has occurred: Several instances have occurred in which Chinese students have recorded professors’ lectures that were deemed critical of the PRC and then uploaded them onto the internet, thereby prompting harassment of the lecturers on social media.²⁴ There is no evidence that this has occurred on American campuses to date. But the presence on campus of a student organization linked to the Chinese government creates an understandable concern that faculty lecturing on politically sensitive topics might fear that their lectures are being monitored and thus self-censor themselves. This prospect is especially concerning when it involves a faculty member who, because he or she needs to travel to China for research or other professional purposes, feels under duress.

Gifts and Grants

Thanks to growing wealth accumulation in China, prosperous Chinese are beginning to develop the practice of philanthropy and to exercise giving both at home and

Universities
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