Australian universities have prided themselves as bastions of freedom and learning, but they have failed at protecting students of Chinese heritage who were being harassed for their support of democracy and freedom, according to human rights advocates.

A human rights group has had to bring this to the attention of university leaders and push them to protect their students, as well as staffers who felt heat from Chinese agents and people influenced by the Chinese Communist Party.

This was examined during a discussion on Chinese interference in Australia sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Sophie McNeill, the Australia researcher for Human Rights Watch based in Western Australia, discussed the problem and the ongoing efforts protect academic freedom. 

The CSIS is a nonprofit policy research organization founded in 1962 that focuses on national security issues.

Charles Edel, the Australia chair and CSIS senior adviser, served as the moderator. Edel previously worked as a professor of strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College, and also taught at the University of Sydney.

McNeill is a former investigative reporter with ABC TV’s “Four Corners” program, where she produced programs on the Hong Kong protest movement and the mass arbitrary detention of Xinjiang’s Muslims by the Chinese government. She was also a foreign correspondent for the ABC and SBS in the Middle East, and is author of “We Can’t Say We Didn’t Know: Dispatches from an Age of Impunity.”

McNeill said when she joined Human Rights Watch in 2020, most of the discussion on foreign interference in the university sector focused on national security due to many concerns about the development of dual-use technology, academics participating in CCP-sponsored talent programs, research partnerships with state-run entities.

But there was a more pressing and human issue, she said.

“We found there was something missing from the debate there, and it is what lies at the heart of every university, which is the students and the staff, and how foreign interference and the harassment and intimidation and coercion that comes with it means that their rights were being violated,” she said. “We really wanted to try and change the debate and bring people on board and get them to see this through a human rights angle. 

"What's unique about Australia is we really do have an overreliance on full-fee-paying students coming from mainland China," she added. ''Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, approximately 10% of all students in Australia were from China.”

That’s high compared to the United Kingdom, where 6% of students are from China. Only 3% of Canadian college students are Chinese, and only 2% of students on U.S. campuses are from China.

“What we found is that because of this overreliance 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,” McNeill said. “That's what they first told Human Rights Watch when we started talking to them about this in 2019. 

"By mid-2020, we decided we need to dig into this further," she added. "And I started working on that report that you mentioned. I interviewed nearly 50 students and staff across 17 universities in six states and territories across Australia, and yet the findings were incredibly disturbing. We found that Chinese pro-democracy students in Australia had to alter their behavior, they had to self-censor to avoid threats and harassment, harassment from their fellow students to avoid being reported on by those fellow students to authorities back home.”

In addition, a majority of faculty members interviewed said they practiced regular self-censorship when talking about China.

“These academics interviewed said that how to discuss China in the classroom had become a major issue in their professional lives,” McNeill said.

What is equally troubling is that Chinese students who had been harassed because they were pro-democracy were reluctant to talk about it with school officials, she said.

“They might have tried to call the local police or the Australian Federal Police and that's another issue, they didn't get the attention it warranted from those agencies,” McNeill said. “That has changed a bit now, but they also just didn't want to ever raise it with their university. 

"When we asked them about this, they just said they didn't feel that the universities were sympathetic to their point of view and that they really felt that the universities were giving priority to maintaining relationships with the Chinese government rather than their safety and the safety of these students,” she added.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the use of online instruction raised new concerns for student security, the study revealed, but universities did nothing to advise their faculty, critics argue.

Students reported being contacted by police because of their activities on Australian campuses, McNeill said. In some cases, parents were approached by authorities.

“The key takeaway from all of 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,” she said. “What really struck me with these students is the great hopes that they had had for their experience in Australia, how they had specifically wanted to come because they wanted to be free from this influence. They wanted to explore new ideas, they wanted to get to seek out and appreciate the democracy that we have in Australia.

“But they didn't have that freedom and it was heartbreaking hearing how alone and how fearful these very young people who were so far from home and that these institutions that were receiving a lot of money from their fees weren't protecting them,” McNeill added. “One of the key recommendations to universities was that they actually could do something practically to protect these students. First of all, they needed to just start talking about it. There was no deterrence for this kind of harassment and intimidation because the university just never wanted to discuss these issues.”

She also learned that many Chinese students felt uncomfortable in dealing with the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, which often has ties to the local Chinese consulate or embassy.

At first, universities responded well, McNeill said. The University Foreign Interference Taskforce produced a set of guidelines to help schools deal with these challenges.

“For the first time, they started talking about self-censorship, the corrosive impact of that, the need for new reporting mechanisms and how harassment was having an impact on students and staff,” she said.

She said two universities in New South Wales, the University of Technology, Sydney and the University of New South Wales, have both begun new education programs on their campuses.

McNeill noted it’s important to realize the students doing this harassing and intimidation of their fellow students on Australian campuses also are victims because they didn't know any other way.

“They were encouraged by the WeChat bubble that they lived in to act in this manner,” McNeill said. “They were encouraged from everything that they had heard growing up, to be suspicious of people showing support for pro-democracy and to want to report them. They knew that they could receive rewards for doing engaging in such behavior. We really were careful to frame them as also being victims here and that they needed the guidance and the leadership from these universities to tell them that, ‘No, this wasn't acceptable.’”

She said Australia can provide a vital lesson on this to the United States.

“So my American colleagues have been contacted by U.S.-based academics and students who have raised similar incidents, which is why we want to continue this work in the U.S.,” she said. “But my key message would be that this requires a whole of government response and I think this is something where Australia can perhaps lead the way for the U.S. in how our university sector is responding and the efforts that our government is putting into talking to the sector about managing countering foreign interference."