UNCHARTERED UNCHARTERED TERRITORY TERRITORY Charter changes illustrate the tightening restrictions governing academic life in China
BY Emily Rust ILLUSTRATION Liana Chaplain DESIGN Alex Westfall
Toward the end of 2019, three Chinese universities made international headlines for an event that some deemed a matter of semantics and others saw as an encroachment on the fundamental rights of students and teachers. On December 17, the Chinese Education Ministry announced that it had approved new charters for Shaanxi Normal University, Nanjing University, and Fudan University. Prompting both outside observers and members of the universities to raise concerns about academic freedom, the new charters now include more language that insists on loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Although a great number of revisions were made in the university charters, the change most highlighted on Chinese social media and by foreign media outlets was the Fudan charter’s removal of “思想自由” (freedom of thought). The coverage has focused on Fudan in part because many see it as an unexpected move for that school in particular. Not only one of the country’s most prestigious institutions, Fudan is known to be liberal for a university operating in China. According to the Hong Kong Free Press, Fudan’s student body is “proud of its reputation for relative academic freedom.” The reach of the CCP, China’s sole governing party, has increased across China's society since leader Xi Jinping came to absolute power in 2012. In addition to the removal of “freedom of thought,” over 40 revisions were made to Fudan’s charter—many of which involve the addition of more bureaucratic, Partycentered language. In line with Xi Jinping’s goal of increasing Party influence, certain sentences that previously suggested institutional independence were changed. The word “independently” was removed from the sentences “the school independently and autonomously runs the university” and “teachers and students independently and autonomously conduct academic studies while abiding with the law.” In
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another significant, but predictable, revision, the charter now states that the university must “equip its teachers and employees” with “Xi Jinping Thought.” This political theory, developed by the Chinese leader, was enshrined in the Party constitution in 2017. The charter changes are part of a greater trend in recent years signaling the Party’s increased omnipresence in civil society. Over the last few decades, but especially since 2012, Chinese universities have not operated with academic freedom. The charters' claims of the opposite do not reflect reality—they are more like aspirational mission statements. In China, there are often wide gaps between what is happening on paper and what is happening in real life: the Party insists on being referred to as communist, for example, despite the Chinese economy’s blatant capitalism. With the CCP’s tightening control over Chinese academic life, the fiction of academic freedom has become too inaccurate to maintain. The active decision to remove the aspirational character of the charters makes explicit the intellectual repression that has been obvious for a long time. +++
the messaging app WeChat, which—despite common knowledge that it is closely surveilled by authorities— became the site of other forms of protest in the aftermath. In a letter circulated on the messaging app, an anonymous Fudan alum expressed their hope that the university be “less groveling, flattering, ingratiating.” Needless to say, the letter was swiftly removed. A user of the platform Weibo asked in a post, “If I may dare to ask those who initiated the amendment of the Fudan University charter, how do you expect our generation of Fudan people to face our ancestors?” Similarly, a hashtag relating to the school’s charter change garnered over a million views before it was censored. The announcement of the charter changes came six months after the beginning of the Hong Kong protests, which were first triggered by a proposed extradition bill that would have increased the Chinese government’s control over the territory. Students and campus spaces have played a prominent role in the protests—a connection that reached a climax in mid-November, when police besieged the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Polytechnic University after protesters occupied the campuses. While the process of revising the charters began long before the eruption of the Hong Kong protests, it is difficult to separate the Party’s tightening grip on mainland universities from its feeble control over students in the semi-autonomous territory. Mainland publications have pinned the origins of the protests on the Hong Kong education system, blaming textbooks and curricula for “brainwashing” young Hongkongers.
Virtual and physical forms of resistance to the charter revisions were quickly stifled. On December 18, a day after the revisions were announced, a small group of Fudan students gathered in the university’s cafeteria to sing the school’s official anthem in protest of the changes. The initial charter’s heavily discussed term “freedom of thought” originally came from this anthem’s lyrics. Although fewer than 25 students +++ showed up, the group received widespread recognition and support from Chinese citizens after a video of the The three universities, geographically dispersed, are protest was posted online. not related in any significant way. Fudan University and Those involved in the protest had organized over Nanjing University are considered to be elite schools;
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