CHINESE STUDENTS CUT OFF Stripped of communications by law, students claim lack of university support

DANIEL DASSOW Editor-in-Chief

Without warning last Friday morning, hundreds of Chinese and Chinese American students were cut off from their primary means of communication with friends and family: Chinese social media apps supported by a campus Wi-Fi connection.

The day before, Republican Gov. Bill Lee signed the latest in a string of bills from the Tennessee state legislature aimed at limiting expression and access for a minority group. The law, which has been called a “TikTok ban,” prohibits the use of any social media app based in China on the internet networks of public colleges and universities.

State and federal officials, including President Biden, have expressed concern about the use of data collected by TikTok, the video sharing platform owned by the private Chinese company ByteDance, which has thousands of employees in the U.S. and has denied any connection to or control by the Chinese government.

But while measures against TikTok in other states and universities, including a total ban on the app in the state of Montana, have taken aim at TikTok alone, the Tennessee General Assembly and Gov. Lee went further in singling out China and its people.

The scale of the action against Chinese apps would be roughly equivalent to the state legislature prohibiting the use of GroupMe, Slack, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch and Snapchat on campus internet in one swoop.

For Chinese students, the greatest loss was not TikTok, but WeChat, an app whose reach in China and among Chinese people across the world is difficult for non-Chinese people to understand. In 2018, the app became the largest standalone mobile app in the world with over 1 billion active users. It is the primary platform by which Chinese students text, call and video chat not only with each other, but with family and friends back home.

“The heartbreaking thing is that they also blocked WeChat,” said Jinning Wang, a third-year doctoral student in electrical engineering. “WeChat is the most popular social media platform in China and over the world regarding the Chinese people. I rely on this software to keep in touch with my family and friends back home, but then you cannot access it through the UT network.”

The law took effect immediately, upending the social lives of Chinese students who spend much of their time on campus and do not have access to a personal network or a signal that can fully support their apps. Wang said he is considering transitioning to remote work so that he can maintain contact with his family.

Just as the COVID-19 pandemic and a wave of anti-Asian violence, largely in urban areas, had begun to fully wane, the law has made Chinese students begin to question if Knoxville is a place protected from anti-Chinese sentiment and legislation.

Adding to their concerns is the lack of support or communication they have received from the university. Outside of a mass email sent to the entire UT System on Friday from Chief Information Officer Ramon Padilla, Chinese students have received no communication from UT officials, according to Gao Chang, a junior studying music performance and president of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association.

“I know the law is the law, but maybe there is something UT can do. The law is not very clear. I don’t think they can make a university block all of a group of students’ connections with their family,” Chang said.

Senate Bill 0834/House Bill 1445, introduced by Senator Jon Lundberg and Representative Jeremy Faison, is part of what has become a pattern for the Republican supermajority in the Tennessee State Legislature: creating bills without collaborating or providing warning to the stakeholders, in this case Chinese students, who must deal with the fallout.

In its original form, the bill prohibited the use of video sharing platforms headquartered anywhere outside the U.S. on campus internet. It was later amended to prohibit the use of any social media app based in China on campus internet, narrowing the measure to one nation, yet broadening it to include a litany of platforms.

The law has left students unsure of what measures they can legally take to continue using their social media, including the use of a VPN, or “Virtual Personal Network,” which can negatively affect American platforms.

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