The Free-Speech Crisis Colleges Ignore

Let’s imagine that Asian American students reported that they were afraid to raise their voices on our campuses, lest they face violent retribution. Our colleges and universities would be up in arms. We would sign statements, stage demonstrations, and demand that our leaders protect everyone in our community.

But when the threatened students are simply Asians — rather than Asian Americans — we mostly bite our tongues. We’re happy to take their tuition dollars, of course, but we won’t speak up for their right to free speech.

Witness the tepid reaction to demonstrations by brave Chinese students in the United States, who have joined their brethren back home in denouncing Covid lockdowns in China and — more broadly — the repressive regime of President Xi Jinping. Many of the protesters wore disguises or refused to give their full names to journalists, for fear that state-security officials will harass them and their families.

They have good reason to worry. As ProPublica revealed last fall, Chinese intelligence agents have used local informants to intimidate Chinese students on our campuses. Some students avoid taking courses with other students from China because they don’t know who is working for the government — and who might report them to it.

Back in China, meanwhile, state officials have threatened to fire, fine, or jail the families of dissident students in America. After a student at Purdue University posted a letter in 2020 praising protesters who were killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre — still a taboo topic in China — security officials told his parents that they would be “in trouble” unless the student curbed his antigovernment comments. He was also harassed by other Chinese students at Purdue who called him a CIA agent and threatened to report him to the security ministry.

That’s what makes the recent political activity by Chinese students on our campuses so remarkable. Despite the obvious risks to themselves and their loved ones, the students have engaged in candlelight vigils and so-called “blank paper” demonstrations against their rulers. The blank paper symbolizes the fact that “we want to express our mind, but we cannot,” as a Chinese student at the University of Southern California — who gave his name only as Jason — told reporters.

So what are our colleges doing to support Jason and his fellow protesters? Thus far, not much. The harassment of Chinese students violates the most basic principles at the heart of our academic mission: debate, dialogue, and the open exchange of ideas. But so far as I know, no major college leader has expressed their support for the students’ speech rights or condemned Chinese state agents for menacing them.

Such a declaration would be a good first step, but it’s not good enough. Our colleges should also pledge to report to the Department of Justice anyone who spies on our students. The department recently charged five people with harassing and stalking Chinese dissidents. One of them was accused of gathering information about supporters of Taiwanese independence and the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement — both anathema to the Chinese regime — and sharing it with security officials.

That’s illegal, in the United States, unless you register as an agent of a foreign government. So people on our campuses who inform upon Chinese students aren’t simply breaching fundamental academic values; if they’re not registered foreign agents, they’re also breaking the law. Don’t we have a duty to report them, if we find out that they’re spying for Beijing?

We should also urge the Justice Department to probe the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, which has coordinated with the Chinese government to clamp down on dissidents in the United States. Members of the CSSA have tried to block speakers who support Tibetan rights or who condemn the oppression of Uyghurs in Western China. And the CSSA is also suspected of passing information about so-called unpatriotic students to Chinese security officials.

That’s why exiled Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Nathan Law has called for “thorough investigations” of the CSSA’s role “as the extended arm” of the Chinese government in America. Students in CSSA have tried to stop Law from speaking on at least three different campuses, on the specious grounds that he spreads “anti-China” hate and propaganda.

“It’s been an open secret that Chinese and Hong Kong students feel surveilled and are unable to enjoy academic and speech freedom because of the [CSSA] monitoring,” Law wrote last year, after the CSSA urged the University of Chicago to prevent him from giving an invited speech. “This should be addressed by blocking [Chinese] state agents in the schools.”

He’s right. If the CSSA is passing information about dissident students to the Chinese government, our own government has a duty to sanction it. And our colleges should cooperate fully, sharing any evidence of spying that they encounter.

Of course, we don’t want that effort to morph into its own ugly surveillance project. Pro-Chinese students have every right to voice support for their rulers as loudly as they wish, without being accused of spying. But they have no right — none — to inform for that government, or to threaten other students with the same. The first activity is a form of free speech, and the second is a dagger at its heart.

On Halloween, Chinese students and other dissidents in New York donned full-body protective suits to protest Covid restrictions in China. Not incidentally, the suits also shielded their identities from Chinese security officials. “I hope there comes a day when we don’t have to be in disguise, when we can speak out openly,” wrote one protester, who used the pseudonym James.

Anyone who believes in the university — or in democracy — should embrace that hope. At a moment when our campuses have committed to protect expressions of “identity,” we should be outraged and ashamed that people like James cannot safely share theirs. And we must do everything in our power to bring about the day when they can speak openly, without disguise — and without fear.