Among the many free speech fights waged today, one especially worrying trend is intensifying: transnational repression. Even as they fly under the radar of many people, efforts to censor and control speech about authoritarian governments in the United States continue unabated, online and off.
The
Chinese
government has been especially prolific in this effort. In recent months, U.S. federal agencies have
charged
dozens
of people with crimes related to their work spying on and harassing dissidents on behalf of the People’s Republic of China. The alleged acts included the creation of floods of fake social media accounts intended to threaten Chinese government critics and surveillance operations conducted out of a secret “police station” working in New York City.
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Even more worryingly, these acts of censorship, surveillance, and even violence against critics of authoritarian governments are taking place on U.S. college campuses. Indeed, with its status as a hotbed for student activism and political debate, higher education is a rich target for the censors, as myself and my colleagues at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression can attest.
For example, when the “white paper” protests swept China, college students around the world joined them in solidarity — and learned that even in the U.S., speech isn’t always free. Some student activists’ messages in support of China’s protesters were
defaced
and even
set on fire
, and isolated acts of
violence
were committed against demonstrators.
Weeks before the protests took off, Xiaolei Wu, a student at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, intimidated a fellow student for posting pro-democracy flyers on campus, threatening to “chop [her] bastard hands off” and report her to China’s state security agency. Wu has since been
charged
with stalking.
Though they spiked last year, acts of censorship and threats of violence on U.S. campuses have long predated the most recent round of widespread protests in China. At Cornell University, a student from Hong Kong was
assaulted
last summer after posting flyers, which were frequently torn down, supporting victims of human rights abuses in China. Peers of a Purdue University student who spoke openly about the Tiananmen Square massacre threatened to
report
him to authorities back home in China. Ministry of State Security officials visited the student’s parents, who warned him to stay silent. At campuses including the
University of Chicago
,
Johns Hopkins University
, and
Brandeis University
, students have attempted to cancel or disrupt events featuring critics of the Chinese government.
At times, administrators have even pitched in to aid the censors, such as when George Washington University’s president temporarily threatened to
unmask
student critics of the CCP ahead of the Beijing Olympics, and a Harvard Law vice dean
interfered
with an event about human rights in China to protect the university’s relationship with the country.
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As a new academic year begins, universities should take this as an opportunity to create a fresh start. For too long, administrators have been unwilling to speak out about the threats authoritarian countries pose to their community’s free speech rights. That hesitation is perhaps due in no small part to some of those universities’ close financial ties and partnerships in China in particular. After all, it’s uncomfortable to tout a university partnership in a country while acknowledging its government’s efforts to silence its critics on your campus.
But our students, whether they hail from down the street or across an ocean, deserve better. They should know that if they choose to exercise their right to speak out against oppressive governments, the universities they attend will have their backs and won’t look away from censorship or, worse, actively suppress their rights. American campuses should be among the freest places in the world for students to dissent against the authoritarians who seek to silence them. If they fail in that mission, it won’t just be higher education that suffers.
Sarah McLaughlin is a senior scholar on global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and author of a forthcoming book about transnational repression in higher education.
