Chinese diplomats are encouraging the harassment of Hong Kong students and their supporters at universities overseas as protests in the semi-autonomous city enter their third month.
Analysts regard the recent public statements as an audacious display of Beijing’s ambition to exert foreign influence.
“It is deliberate that they are dismissive of what is going on, saying ‘your so-called freedom of expression,’” Dean Cheng, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center, told the Washington Examiner.
A political crisis has gripped Hong Kong in the last two months, with hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people taking to the streets in what started as a denunciation of an extradition bill perceived as a permission slip for Chinese Communist authorities to engage in “legalized kidnapping” of the former British colony’s residents. As the pro-democracy demonstrations have spread, so have the crackdowns, and now pro-Beijing students are having high-profile confrontations with Hong Kong students and their supporters abroad, with the public support of senior Chinese officials.
“The Consulate General expresses its appreciation to the students for their spontaneous patriotism, and opposes any form of secessionism,” a spokesperson for the Chinese consulate in Auckland, New Zealand, said last week. “We strongly condemn those engaged in activities of demonizing the images of China and [the Beijing-backed Hong Kong] government, inciting anti-China sentiment and confrontation between mainland and Hong Kong students, through distorting the factual situation in Hong Kong under the pretext of so-called freedom of expression.”
A senior Chinese diplomat in Australia issued a similar statement a week earlier after a group of roughly 300 pro-Beijing demonstrators responded to a protest at the University of Queensland by playing the Chinese national anthem and ripping a megaphone from the hands of Drew Pavlou, 20, an organizer leading chants critical of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Video of the incident appeared to show pro-Beijing counterprotesters throwing urine on their opponents.
“In a sense this is the Chinese government’s domestic practice applied overseas,” Denny Roy, a senior fellow at the East-West Center in Hawaii, told the Washington Examiner. “But obviously there is a potential contradiction in trying to maintain a good national image while at the same time doing something disrespectable, in this case Beijing organizing activity that foreign countries will see as an outrageous intervention in their sovereign political systems.”
The New Zealand confrontation was a smaller affair, a fight between a handful of pro-democracy students “and three Chinese men, believed to be students,” that ended when a young woman from Hong Kong called security after being pushed. Larger demonstrations could be in the works, to judge from social media messages calling for pro-Beijing students to assemble in the university library (attendees were “told not to bring any weapons,” a story in the New Zealand Herald observed).
China’s support for the “patriotic” students in these confrontations troubled some analysts but drew uneven responses from the respective governments. Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne called for “all foreign diplomatic representatives to respect” the rights of free speech and peaceful protest. “The government would be particularly concerned if any foreign diplomatic mission were to act in ways that could undermine such rights, including by encouraging disruptive or potentially violent behavior,” she added.
New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters was far more modest, affirming “the right to peaceful protest and freedom of expression” without publicly rebuking China’s envoys. David Seymour, leader of the ACT party, criticized Peters for that omission, writing that the consulate’s praise of “a group of students who assaulted a peaceful protester” “encouraged disruptive and violent behaviour and undermined the rule of law.”
Cheng cautioned against regarding every pro-Beijing student as “an agent” of China’s Communist Party, but he added that the consul generals’ shows of support for the confrontations are a deliberate “slap” to Australia and New Zealand, which Chinese officials see as “the easiest targets among key U.S. allies to peel off,” given their economic ties to the regional heavyweight.
“Chinese officials behave as if China, by virtue of being a big and important country, is entitled to special consideration and privileges in its relationships with foreign countries,” Roy concurred. “Beijing’s attitude seems to be that once a partner nation realizes China is a valuable economic partner, the next step is to leverage that relationship to advance other parts of China’s agenda, and the Chinese seem to expect the partner to play ball.”
The confrontations on Australasian university campuses come as U.S. officials are raising concerns about Chinese authorities exploiting students at American universities for academic espionage and censorship.
“There are credible reports of Chinese government officials pressuring Chinese students to monitor other students and report on one another on behalf of the Chinese government,” Marie Royce, assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs, said last week in Washington. “Chinese officials are also known to pressure and pay Chinese students to participate in Communist Party-sponsored political protests and counter-protests. We can and will push back hard against the Chinese government’s efforts to chill free speech on American campuses.”
China responded to similar criticism in June by warning prospective students about the “risks” of studying in the United States, with one official claiming that Congress and the Trump administration “are accusing Chinese students and scholars in the United States of launching ‘nontraditional espionage’ activities and causing trouble for no reason.” Some American campus administrators argue that the Trump administration has fallen into “racial profiling” of ethnic Chinese students. Royce, vowing that the government would “protect all students, especially Chinese students, from authoritarian government control,” emphasized that only “a very small percentage of the greater population” of Chinese students have been denied visas over suspicions of espionage.
“Coercion of even a single Chinese student or scholar in the United States is unacceptable, and there is no excuse for the Chinese security apparatus to put at risk the U.S. visas granted to its own citizens,” she said.
The campus controversies are emblematic of a dynamic that is driving U.S.-China competition across a range of theaters, including the trade war and the Trump administration’s suspicions about cutting-edge Chinese telecommunications giants.
“There’s nothing in China that is outside the boundary and reach of the CCP, at least in theory,” Cheng said. “And that extends overseas in the sense of a Chinese corporation acting overseas still presumably will be influenced and maybe receive instructions from the government. … Individual students? No. But if there’s a Chinese student group organized by mainland Chinese, that probably gets pretty fuzzy real fast.”
