A Human Rights Watch researcher shared the fears of Chinese pro-democracy students in Australia of being harassed and intimidated, and of Australian academics who focus on China of being recorded and doxed by nationalistic Chinese students.
"There's a lot of concern about foreign interference in the university sector. What's unique about Australia is that we really do have a reliance on full-fee paying students coming from mainland China,” Sophie McNeill of Human Rights Watch said during a discussion hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “So before the pandemic, approximately 10% of all students in Australia were from China and what we've found is that because of this over-reliance on these students as an income stream, universities were turning a blind eye to these issues surrounding the academic freedom of Chinese students and staff working on China because they were worried about blowback from Beijing, and they pretty much denied that there was a problem here. That's what they first told Human Rights Watch when we started talking to them about this in 2019.”
CSIS Australia Chair Charles Edel hosted a discussion on Aug. 18 with Australia's experts on foreign interference: John Fitzgerald, John Garnaut and McNeill.
“I interviewed nearly 50 students and staff across 17 universities in six states and territories across Australia, and the findings were incredibly disturbing,” McNeill said, according to the event recording. “We found that Chinese pro-democracy students in Australia had to alter their behavior, they had to self-censor to avoid being reported on by those fellow students to authorities back home.”
In 2020, there were 211,965 Chinese students enrolled at Australian schools, the Global Times reported. International students contributed $29 billion (USD) to Australia’s economy in 2019.
“More than half of the faculty that we interviewed said that they practiced regular self-censorship when talking about China – how to discuss China in the classroom had become a major issue in their professional lives,” McNeill said on the recording. “The fear of being recorded by nationalistic Chinese students and doxed online was a big fear that they had...[students they interviewed] didn't feel that their universities were sympathetic to their point of view.”
Some Australian academics have been told by university management to not discuss China in the classroom or hold China-related events, the BBC reported, citing McNeill's report. A tutor defending a Taiwanese student had personal details shared on Chinese social media.
“They really felt that their universities were giving priority to maintaining relationships with the Chinese government. The key takeaway from all this was just this great fear and anxiety and stress that these students were experiencing on a daily basis, as well as academics focusing on China,” McNeill said, the event recording reported. “What really struck me about doing these interviews with these students is the great hopes that they had for their experience in Australia – how they specifically had wanted to come because they wanted to be free from this influence. They wanted to explore new ideas but they didn't have that freedom.”
University of Technology Sydney adminsitrators told students in the spring that they had a right to be free from intimidation and state-backed harassment, McNeill wrote in a report for ABC News.
“Here in Australia, the culture, customs and rules are different. You can disagree about anything. You can have different opinions in class. You can write about your beliefs and opinions,” she said.
McNeill said this problem is not exclusive to Australia. The president of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. took down posters criticizing the Beijing Winter Olympics and the Chinese Communist Party at the request of a Chinese student organization.
