Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

So You Want To Study In China? Read This First.

[Wikimedia Commons/Public/Donghae Fang]

Dear College Student,

Welcome back to school! Great to hear you are interested in China! It’s the right subject if you care about the future of the United States and the free world. But you should know that when you study China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) studies you back — hard.

For instance, if you travel to China, all devices you bring will be hacked; any email or other accounts you access from those devices will be exploited; and you yourself will be monitored and assessed by Chinese intelligence professionals.

Your professors might not have mentioned this.

“Academics who study China,” the economist Carsten Holz wrote in a still-accurate 2007 article, “habitually please” the CCP “through the research questions we ask or don’t ask, through the facts we report or ignore, through our use of language, and through what and how we teach.” Almost two decades ago, Holz identified China scholars’ acceptance of surveillance and internalization of propaganda in exchange for access: “We benefit from our connections in China to obtain information and insights, and we protect these connections” by not offending the CCP. It’s like studying the Mafia, he concluded — and few dare make that comparison out loud.

The exceptions prove the rule, as the party has punished the rare scholars of forbidden topics by denying them visas – from Perry Link, Andrew Nathan, and Orville Schell, who published an anthology on China’s massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989, to Adrian Zenz, the German anthropologist who exposed the party’s genocide in Xinjiang in 2018.

Few Americans understand that the CCP assigns the highest priority to 1) defending against foreign academic infiltration and 2) to co-opting foreign academia in service of its own goals. This is because the CCP was basically founded in the library of Peking University, as young scholars, encouraged by Soviet Comintern representatives, read about Marxist-Leninism. The party’s origin story is thus testament to the fact that students, and the ideas they’re exposed to, matter.

This connects to the CCP’s treatment of foreign universities as well. To wit, the young Chinese Communists created their Red Army by pretending to ally with their rivals, the Nationalist Party, in a “united front” against foreign imperial powers. This alliance enabled the CCP to infiltrate the Nationalists’ military academy, Whampoa, and secretly recruit cadets there. The People’s Liberation Army centennial that China will observe next year marks the anniversary of the day these cadets threw off their Nationalist uniforms and revealed their new communist allegiance. Nationalist naivete about the identity and ambition of their putative partners enabled this operation to succeed.

American academics’ naivete serves a similar purpose today.

What this means for you is that if you go to China and investigate any of the large number of sensitive topics, you could be subject to an exit ban or jailed. The Dui Hua Foundation estimates that roughly 200 US citizens are detained in China, and this summer alone China has imprisoned two American scholars, the Berkeley PhD student Min Zin and the seismologist Youlin Chen, on vague espionage charges, prompting the US State Department to declare them “wrongfully detained.”

Or, if you go to China and aren’t careful, you could end up recruited — like Glenn Duffie Shriver, a student from Michigan who studied abroad in Shanghai, took money from Chinese intelligence to write essays and apply for a U.S. government job, and served four years in federal prison after pleading guilty under the Espionage Act.

You don’t need to take these risks to learn about China or to contribute to our understanding of it.

Figure out ways to study the mainland remotely — e.g., by using overhead imagery, interviewing refugees and third parties, and consulting historical sources, social media, and memoirs. For language training, go to Taiwan. Be creative. We’re living in a veritable golden age of sensors and open-source data.

If you’re still determined to go to China, approach your trip like an anthropologist doing field research on a super technically adept version of the Mafia. For your own protection, inform the U.S. embassy before your arrival of where you will be staying and for how long. Bring burner electronic devices, and know that every account you access from China — including via a burner — will be exposed. In other words, if you don’t sever the connection to your normal digital life, you might as well be sitting in Chinese intelligence headquarters typing in your passwords.

Behave as if you’re being filmed at all times, including in your dorm or hotel room, and keep track of who approaches you and who wants to stay in touch. If you ever apply to work for the U.S. government, these are details you’ll need to disclose.

Holz ended his 2007 article with a series of provocative questions about the impact of academics’ conformity with the CCP’s directives. When, he asked, will the party progress from constraining scholarship to constraining Western freedom more broadly? And “to what extent are China researchers guilty of putting their own rice bowl before honest thinking and teaching?”

Consider those words as you embark on your China study — and if Holz’s essential reading isn’t on your syllabus, ask yourself why not.

Jacqueline Deal is Co-founder of the American Academy for Strategic Education, Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and Advisor to State Armor.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.