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The Hill
01-08-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Colleges must speak up for their Chinese students
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said all the right things last week after Hong Kong issued arrest warrants for 19 pro-democracy activists in other countries, including in the U.S. 'The extraterritorial targeting of Hong Kongers who are exercising their fundamental freedoms is a form of transnational oppression,' Rubio declared in a statement. 'We will not tolerate the Hong Kong government's attempts to apply its national security laws to silence or intimidate Americans or anyone on U.S. soil.' But we already tolerate the transnational oppression of one large group on our soil: Chinese students. And for the most part, our universities have kept silent about that. That's because of the billions of dollars that Chinese students bring to American colleges, of course. We're already facing an expected decline in Chinese enrollment because of the Trump administration's threats against international students, which higher-education leaders have rightly condemned. But if we really cared about those students — and not just their tuition fees — we would also speak out against the Chinese government's extraterritorial targeting of their fundamental freedoms. Anything less makes us look petty, scared and small. In a report issued last year — titled 'On my campus, I am afraid' — Amnesty International showed how Chinese and Hong Kong students in the U.S. and Europe faced surveillance and intimidation from Chinese authorities. Students reported being photographed and followed at protests, and that their families back home had been harassed. At Georgetown, for example, a Chinese law student who handed out pamphlets denouncing China's 'zero-COVID' policies was videotaped by members of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, an organization sponsored by the Chinese government. They told him that the pictures would be sent to security officials in China. And soon after that, his family was interrogated and warned that they could face penalties if he continued to speak out. None of this is news, unfortunately. In 2021, ProPublica reported that Chinese intelligence agents were using local informants to threaten and harass students in America. Some Chinese students said they avoided taking courses with other students from their country, because they did not know who was working for the government — and who might report on them. And in 2020, when COVID forced universities to move online, the Wall Street Journal revealed that some professors had told Chinese students that they wouldn't be evaluated on class participation. The faculty didn't want their students to feel the need to speak up and risk getting on the wrong side of Chinese security officials, who were likely monitoring them on Zoom. 'There is no way I can say to my students, 'You can say whatever you want on the phone call and you are totally free and safe,'' one Harvard professor admitted. But most of our university leaders are keeping quiet about the matter. They don't want to take any risks, either, with so much money at stake. A welcome exception is Purdue University, which denounced Chinese spying after ProPublica revealed that one of its students was harassed by security agents for posting a letter about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. That's a taboo topic in China, which has prohibited public discussion and commemoration of the event. 'Any student found to have reported another student to any foreign entity for exercising their freedom of speech or belief will be subject to significant sanction,' declared Mitch Daniels, Purdue's president at the time. 'We regret that we were unaware at the time of these events and had to learn of them from national sources,' Daniels added, referring to the 2021 ProPublica report. The rest of us have no excuse, especially now. Everything we have learned over the last four years confirms the same fact: China is intimidating students at our institutions. And so is the Trump administration, of course. It has arrested and deported international students who made pro-Palestinian comments. And it has been screening the social media accounts of student visa applicants to find 'any indications of hostility toward the citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles of the United States.' Nobody knows what that means, so applicants have been scrubbing their accounts of material about Barack Obama, Kamala Harris and anything else that might put them in the administration's crosshairs. To me, that sounds more like China than America. Our most important founding principle is freedom of expression. And we are flouting it by harassing our international students, even as we accuse them of being hostile to it. But we can't make a persuasive case against Trump's assault on freedom if we ignore the Chinese attacks on it. Anticipating that many international students won't be allowed to come here, some universities — including my own — are creating online courses and programs to serve them. That's a great gesture, but it also leaves the students even more vulnerable to harassment by internet snoops back home. And that's why we have to speak up for the students and make it clear that we won't tolerate intimidation of them, just as Rubio said. Thomas Jefferson — who knew something about America's founding principles — swore 'eternal hostility against every form of tyranny.' He didn't care where it came from. Neither should we.
Epoch Times
24-04-2025
- Business
- Epoch Times
Trump Finds Inadvertent Allies in His Trade War With China
Commentary Chinese exporters have lost a proverbial gold mine in the United States. Since 2018, Washington's tariffs and other trade restrictions have increasingly blocked imports of Chinese products. Meanwhile, independent of Washington's agenda, American buyers, after difficult experiences with China during COVID-19 and its aftermath, have decided to diversify their sourcing away from China. Now, with the latest round of tariffs from the Trump administration, it looks as though these exporters have all but lost the American market. They have accordingly scoured the world for alternative buyers only to discover how difficult and expensive it will be for them to find substitutes. Over the last decade or so, the distance between the United States and China has grown apace. It began even before President Donald Trump's first term in the White House. By 2014 and 2015, complaints by American businesspeople had grown loud about how Beijing subsidizes domestic Chinese producers and imposes onerous demands on foreign producers doing business in China. During Trump's first term, he responded to these complaints in 2018 and 2019 by imposing tariffs on select Chinese goods. He claimed the aim was to pressure Beijing into abandoning the practices about which American businesspeople had complained. Then, the pandemic and its aftermath, along with Beijing's zero-COVID restrictions, interrupted trade flows, convincing buyers in the United States and Europe to Related Stories 4/20/2025 4/17/2025 Although Joe Biden criticized the 2018–2019 tariffs during his campaign for the White House in 2020, he kept the levies in place once in office and for the same reasons as Trump had imposed them. As tensions rose, Biden imposed additional trade restrictions, offering subsidies for companies to manufacture semiconductors in the United States and banning the sale of chip manufacturing equipment to China. As Biden left office, he imposed a 100 percent tariff on Chinese-made electric vehicles (EVs), parts, and batteries. After Trump's return to the White House, he has added still Because Europe has also shown hostility to China trade, imposing tariffs on Chinese-made EVs and parts, Chinese producers have turned their search for substitutes to Southeast Asia and the Middle East. So far, it has not gone as well as these producers would like. A good part of the problem facing Chinese exporters is that all potential buyers, wherever they are located, know how much the Chinese need sales. As reported by South China Morning Post, one Whereas the Americans would get credit only after the first order was completed and they had cooperated with the seller for six months, buyers in Asia and the Middle East now commonly receive 90-day payment terms and sometimes do not need to pay for up to 120 days after the shipments arrive. Making matters still more difficult for Chinese sellers is the relative lack of contract enforcement in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, compared to the United States. With few ways to pressure their new buyers, Chinese sellers have suffered great payment delays and sometimes outright theft. It almost seems as though the third world has allied itself with Trump against Beijing. Behavior in Southeast Asia and the Middle East seems geared, if unintentionally, to get Chinese businesspeople to pressure Beijing to make some accommodation with the White House and allow a return to the American market. Of course, Beijing cannot do that. It would, for one, signal weakness, something Chinese leader Xi Jinping could not abide for both domestic and diplomatic reasons. What is more, a coordinated reduction in tariffs between the United States and China would entail a loss of control over China's economy that neither Xi nor the Chinese Communist Party could accept. So it looks as though this matter will carry on as recently—to the extreme discomfort of Chinese producers. Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
