https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/china-american-universities-administrators-must-fight-beijing-authoritarian-influence/
The CCP seeks to make American campuses less conducive to open inquiry, and more dangerous for students and professors. It can’t be allowed to succeed.
With many American universities conducting classes online during the fall semester, some college professors are worried that the Chinese Communist Party will attempt to monitor lessons about topics that are politically sensitive to Beijing. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday on the steps that instructors are taking to protect their students from CCP surveillance as U.S.–China relations continue their downward trajectory amid the coronavirus pandemic and China’s Draconian crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong.
The digital classroom is ripe for potential security breaches. Video-conferencing platform Zoom, which is widely used by universities, has in recent months faced allegations that it bows to pressure from the Chinese government. In June, for example, Axios reported that the company had temporarily suspended the account of a U.S.-based dissident for his participation in a virtual panel about the Tiananmen Square Massacre. But even for universities that use different video-conferencing software, the possibility of surveillance still exists. Under the new Hong Kong national-security law, Beijing claims the authority to prosecute anyone, Chinese or otherwise, who engages in what it deems subversive speech outside of China. Beijing has already charged American citizens for such actions. And while Chinese students have been hassled for things that they do and say in the United States before, the law’s astounding claim of universal jurisdiction puts them at greater risk.
All of this has alarmed a number of American educators. Rory Truex, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton, told the Journal that he will warn his students that his course touches on topics of concern to the Chinese government. He’s also introducing a system whereby students will submit work labeled with numeric codes, not their names, so that they are not linked to the views that they express in written assignments. In a commentary for China File, Truex and four other instructors have also offered advice for how educators should navigate the difficulties of securing their online classrooms against CCP surveillance by, among other things, setting policies on recording class sessions.