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the United Kingdom have also established Chinese Communist Party cells.’ The use of
the CSSA UK to monitor dissent among Chinese students in the United Kingdom is a
direct violation of the principles of the United Kingdom’s democracy.
Institutions created or managed by the Chinese authorities include the country’s
twenty-nine Hanban-managed Confucius Institutes as well as the new Peking
University HSBC Business School Oxford Campus—the first overseas campus of a
Chinese university. These institutions have triggered some concerns. They openly
discriminate against certain groups, such as Falun Gong practitioners who are excluded
from employment, as North American cases have shown." Reportedly, agreements
with universities that host Confucius Institutes require adherence to Chinese law
according to Hanban policies and they are subject to nondisclosure agreements."' The
concern that these institutions practice (self-)censorship is somewhat mitigated as long
as the authorship of censored accounts is clear and robust and critical discussion takes
place elsewhere in the United Kingdom.
Activities benefitting from Chinese funding or commercial ties with China are all
the more concerning when Chinese influence is less easy to trace. It is impossible
to tell, for example, if Huawei’s donation to Chatham House’s Asia-Pacific program
will affect this venerable institution’s independence and if UK universities’ self
censorship on their Chinese campuses will bleed into their home bases.” It is clear,
on the other hand, that funding provided to research students and researchers who
come to the United Kingdom from China leads to self-censorship. The increased
role of the China Scholarship Council, a PRC-funded grant provider, is therefore
of great concern, as it clearly would not approve projects that might anger China’s
government. UK-based publishing in China gives rise to concerns about censorship,
as in the case of Cambridge University Press temporarily censoring the online version
of its journal China Quarterly in China to accommodate government censorship
requests.4
China’s treatment of UK-funded educational institutions in China is also of concern
in Britain. In June 2018, the University of Nottingham’s campus in Ningbo removed
its associate provost, Stephen Morgan, after he wrote an online piece criticizing the
results of China’s Nineteenth Party Congress.’ Nottingham has previously given the
appearance of buckling to Chinese pressure. In 2016, Nottingham abruptly shut its
School of Contemporary Chinese Studies just as students were preparing for exams. The
action led to the departure of its director, Steve Tsang, a China scholar known for his
integrity and independence from Beijing. Sources close to the incident said that PRC
pressure on the university played a direct role in the closure of the institute. Tsang is
now the director of the China Institute at the School of Oriental and Africa Studies at
the University of London.
Appendix 2
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