BY HANK REICHMAN

The AAUP has joined with 18 21 other organizations in a statement released today by PEN America in response to reports that the FBI has urged universities to develop protocols for monitoring students and scholars from Chinese state-affiliated research institutions.  The full statement and list of signatories may be found here and at the end of this post.

The statement declares that “calls to monitor individuals solely based on their country of origin violate norms of due process and should raise alarms in a democracy.  If there are articulable concerns about specific individuals because of their activities and affiliations, those should be pursued without regard to the individual’s country of origin.”  The statement adds, “The pursuit of scientific knowledge should be advanced under conditions of intellectual freedom without political or ideological restrictions.”  The signatories “advise universities to zealously safeguard their independence — to maintain their commitment to academic freedom, to uphold the principle of due process, and to respect the privacy rights of students and faculty, no matter their national origins.”

In addition to PEN America and the AAUP, signatories include the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Association of University Presses, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and Scholars at Risk.

In the Fall of 2017 the AAUP released a report, prepared by a subcommittee of Committee A, on “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom,” which highlighted how growing concerns about national security and espionage have led to increasing restrictions on and threats to the global exchange of scientific research and the academic freedom of American scientists to interact with foreign colleagues.  Specifically, the report noted the targeting of Chinese and Chinese-American faculty members as spies.  Temple University physicist Xiaoxing Xi, for example, was arrested at gunpoint in 2015 for allegedly sharing classified technology with the Chinese government.  Charges were later dropped when it became clear the technology shared posed no threat to U.S. interests.

Xi was arrested during the Obama administration but pressure on China over trade, technology and security has intensified under President Trump, prompting federal officials to more aggressively police efforts to steal intellectual property and innovations, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.  In April, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray said China is taking “a societal approach to stealing innovation in any way it can” from universities and other sources. “I do think that the academic sector needs to be much more sophisticated and thoughtful about how others may exploit the very open, collaborative research environment that we have in this country,” Wray told the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. Lawmakers have proposed bills to prevent academic espionage.

The FBI has for some time been concerned about potential Chinese espionage in academia.  As the AAUP’s 2017 report documented, an April 2011 report prepared by the bureau’s Counterintelligence Strategic Partnership Unit argued that while “most foreign students, researchers, or professors studying or working in the United States are here for legitimate and proper reasons,” some are “actively working at the behest of another government or organization.”  The FBI added that “some foreign governments pressure legitimate students to report information to intelligence officials.”

“The open environment of a university,” the FBI then claimed, “is an ideal place to find recruits, propose and nurture ideas, learn, and even steal research data, or place trainees who need to be exposed to our language and culture—a sort of on-the-job-training for future intelligence officers. Foreign intelligence services have been taking advantage of higher education institutions and personnel for many years, either through deliberate stratagems or by capitalizing on information obtained through other parties.”

In Senate testimony in 2018, FBI director Wray claimed that Chinese “professors, scientists, students [in] basically every discipline” working in the US may be covertly gathering intelligence for the Chinese government.  Speaking to a House of Representatives panel that year, former national counterintelligence executive Michelle Van Cleave called the U.S. “a spy’s paradise,” declaring that U.S. R&D is “systematically targeted by foreign collectors to fuel their business and industry and military programs at our expense.”  China, she added, “easily tops the threat list.”

In June, The Committee of Concerned Scientists sent a sharply worded letter to President Trump urging an immediate end to “the campaign of intimidation of ethnic Chinese scientists.”  The committee said they were being subjected to video surveillance and searches of their email accounts, correspondence and phone calls.  “Ethnic profiling and indiscriminate investigations of Chinese scientists have no place in our country,” the letter said. “Besides damaging the image of the United States, it is also damaging to our national security by inflicting irreparable harm on some of our best scientists and making them think about leaving the country.”

Washington, D.C. attorney Peter Zeidenberg is defending about twenty ethnic Chinese scientists and scholars against charges related to China.  Two of Zeidenberg’s clients, a Chinese-born couple, Xiao-Jiang Li and Shihua Li, both Emory University professors and naturalized U.S. citizens, were among the authors of a study on gene editing in mice that was hailed by the National Institutes of Health as a promising advance in the quest to treat Huntington’s disease.  In May, however, the Lis were fired from Emory and their lab shuttered.  The university charged that the professors failed to fully disclose foreign sources of research funding and the extent of their work for institutions and universities in China.

The suggestion that either of the scholars had hidden the fact that they had extensive and ongoing connections to their native country was absurd, Zeidenberg said.  They both worked as visiting professors at Jinan University in Guangzhou and regularly described collaborations there in their academic presentations.  Both worked entirely on openly shared research, with nothing that was proprietary or classified, Zeidenberg added.  “They’re geneticists – they’re not making anything, they’re not making an end product,” he said.  “Nothing is classified – nothing, nothing, nothing.”

Zeidenberg said the Lis were fired without any kind of due process that might clarify the accusations against them.  Emory made no suggestion whatsoever that the couple were involved in classified or proprietary work, the attorney said, adding that the complaint against them appeared to involve possible technical paperwork violations concerning the disclosure of contacts with China.  “There hasn’t been an opportunity to review evidence, to answer charges, to understand the allegations, and to give a response,” he said.  “It’s a kangaroo court.”

The pressure on Emory and other institutions appears to be driven entirely by FBI agents who have “no understanding, sympathy or appreciation for what the role of these scientists is, and [who] view [research] collaboration as sharing with the enemy”, Zeidenberg said.  “American scientists are the most successful in the world because they share and they collaborate,” he said.  “That whole culture absolutely makes no sense to agents who are looking at this.”

In addition to the Lis, three Chinese-American scientists at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, which is currently on the AAUP’s list of administrations censured for violations of academic freedom, were also dismissed for similar concerns.  The journal Science reported in June that an aggressive effort by the National Institutes of Health, apparently prompted by the FBI, has led to additional dismissals that remain confidential.  According to that report, the NIH has since August 2018 “sent roughly 180 letters to more than 60 U.S. institutions about individual scientists it believes have broken NIH rules requiring full disclosure of all sources of research funding.”  A University of California San Diego scientist from China resigned after the campus put him on leave while it reviewed whether he had disclosed all outside funding and contacts, a university official confirmed to the Los Angeles Times.  In July, UC’s Board of Regents approved plans for a systemwide audit to identify risks related to “foreign influence.”

As the Washington Post noted, “It is hard to overstate the importance of China for U.S. colleges and universities. China is by far the leading supplier of international students to the United States, with more than 130,000 graduate students and 148,000 undergraduates enrolled in 2017-2018.  Those students bring vital tuition dollars into the U.S. system.  China’s own universities are also rapidly developing research capacity that the United States cannot ignore.”  Still, growth has slowed amid trade tensions, with the number of students rising 3.6% last year — or roughly half the pace of the previous year.  The share of Chinese government-sponsored students refused visas increased to 13.5% in the first three months of this year, compared with 3.2% in the same period of 2018, according to new Chinese government data reported in Bloomberg News.

“Annual student visa renewals, which previously took about three weeks, are now dragging on for months,” Bloomberg reported.  “One of the students said they were leaning toward returning home after graduation, worried that the scrutiny of Chinese scholars could continue for years.”  The Trump administration vowed in its 2017 National Security Strategy to review visa procedures and consider restrictions on foreign science, technology, engineering and mathematics students from designated countries to ensure that intellectual property is not transferred to competitors.  In Spring 2018, the U.S. State Department said it would limit visas for Chinese students studying science and engineering.

In a related move, the Department of Defense recently announced that it would no longer fund Chinese-language programs at universities that also host Confucius Institutes.  San Francisco State University was one of some eight institutions that closed its Confucius Institute in response.  The AAUP in 2014 called on universities to terminate contracts with Hanban, the agency of the Chinese government that sponsors the institutes, unless protections for academic freedom and university autonomy were guaranteed.  San Francisco State, however, had updated its  agreement to conform with these criteria, officials claimed, before being compelled by the government to close the program.

Leaders of several major US research institutions – including Stanford, Yale and Columbia universities; the University of California at Berkeley; the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – have written open letters urging government officials to respect legitimate research partnerships with China and other countries.

Denis Wirtz, vice provost for research at Johns Hopkins University, lamented what he called a “palpable” level of anxiety among foreign-born scholars.  Wirtz, a Belgian immigrant, told the Washington Post that universities must reassure foreign scholars that they are welcome, or else they will leave.  “These people have options,” he said.  Pushing them out would be “really shooting ourselves in the foot.”

Leslie E. Wong, who retired this summer as president of San Francisco State University, told the Los Angeles Times that what used to be routine trips to China to attend university alumni events became fraught with anxiety.  “The paranoia started seeping in,” Wong said.  “You think, ‘Oh my god. The records show I go to China.’ You become sensitive to the fact that your last name is Wong and you go to Asia.  It’s sort of a niggling thing in your head that says let’s be careful, keep extra diary notes, keep all of our I’s dotted and Ts crossed.”

Here is the full text of and list of signatories to the statement released today:

STATEMENT IN RESPONSE TO REPORT THE FBI IS URGING UNIVERSITIES TO MONITOR CHINESE STUDENTS AND SCHOLARS

According to recent public reports, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other government officials have advised some U.S. universities to develop protocols for monitoring students and scholars from Chinese state-affiliated research institutions. This move seemingly stems from growing suspicion that the Chinese government is engaged in espionage of American higher education, with the aim of stealing data and intellectual property. However, this is an area where the government must tread carefully.

Some recent incidents suggest concern with the mounting global reach of Beijing’s tech-enabled authoritarianism is valid; but calls to monitor individuals solely based on their country of origin violate norms of due process and should raise alarms in a democracy. If there are articulable concerns about specific individuals because of their activities and affiliations, those should be pursued without regard to the individual’s country of origin. Disclosure requirements, information sharing and export control enforcement all offer powerful means to protect against intellectual property theft and espionage without resorting to tactics that cast suspicion on potentially hundreds of thousands of students and scholars. Federal agencies need to clarify and specify their concerns, and ensure that their efforts do not trample on individual rights nor on the principle of free and open academic inquiry and exchange.

More than 340,000 Chinese students are reportedly studying in the U.S., as of last year. If not conducted with care, this move risks hampering the future recruitment of talented foreign students and scholars to American shores. This move could also significantly impede the training of new scientists, as well as damage ongoing projects. The pursuit of scientific knowledge should be advanced under conditions of intellectual freedom without political or ideological restrictions.

Further, to the extent that China or other governments are utilizing international students and faculty in the United States as a means to carry out spying or to furtively funnel information back to officials at home, such activities infringe upon the academic freedom of those scholars as well as the institutions that host them and must stop. Unless researchers possess a formal and disclosed government affiliation, they must be permitted to pursue their work free from state interference or involvement. Failure to adhere to this principle violates the precepts of academic freedom and threatens global scholarly exchange.

China’s government is notorious for its aggressive use of surveillance. Efforts by the United States to fend off the global arm of autocracy must not mimic the very tactics it professes to reject. As concern on these matters grows, we advise universities to zealously safeguard their independence–to maintain their commitment to academic freedom, to uphold the principle of due process, and to respect the privacy rights of students and faculty, no matter their national origins.

ACPA – College Student Educators International
American Association of University Professors
Asian American Unity Coalition
Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Pennsylvania
Asian Pacific Islander American Public Affairs Association
Association for the Study of Higher Education
Association of American Colleges and Universities
Association of University Presses
Chinese American Citizens Alliance
Chinese Biopharmaceutical Association
Chinese For Affirmative Action
Defending Rights and Dissent
Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
Heterodox Academy
International Society of Political Psychology
National Coalition Against Censorship
OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates
Ohio Chinese American Association
PEN America
Scholars at Risk
United Chinese Americans
80-20 Educational Foundation

The forthcoming Fall issue of Academe magazine devoted to academic freedom around the world, which I am guest editing, will feature an article about challenges to academic freedom in China and in Chinese studies, as well as articles on academic freedom issues in Canada, the United Kingdom, the European continent, Brazil, and Russia.