Chinese universities have no right being on world rankings

https://www.yahoo.com/news/chinese-universities-no-being-world-155634588.html

 

The Telegraph
Opinion
Chinese universities have no right being on world rankings
Matthew Henderson
Fri, September 29, 2023 at 11:56 AM EDT·3 min read
130

Tsinghua University
Major Chinese universities have recently surged to the top of league tables comparing the performance of eminent academic institutions worldwide.  This is understandable given the massive resources the Chinese Communist Party has poured into scientific and technical research over the last decade, in pursuit of a systematic effort to outstrip the rest of the world as the main powerhouse of innovative development and reap the geostrategic benefits this would yield.

But what of the means whereby this progress has been and continues to be achieved? The control which the Chinese state exerts over its own centres of excellence and the contempt in which it holds the true aims of academic freedom should disqualify them from fair comparison with universities in free societies, just as PRC athletes, pressured by the State to win by whatever means, are sadly so often found to have broken the accepted rules of sporting competition.

What does this amount to in practice?

Chinese academics, whether at home or abroad, are subject to draconian national security laws compelling them to work for the interests of the Party. Under the policy known as civil-military fusion, Chinese scientists, civilian as well as military, are encouraged to seek access to foreign research programmes. Foreign participation in such research in China is allowed only as far as it furthers this acquisitive agenda.

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The utility of such efforts will be obvious in context, particularly where Chinese and foreign laboratories have co-operated in innovative work on such fields as real-time digital face recognition, quantum computing, nanotechnologies with strategic military applications and the like. China’s growing command of cutting-edge new military capabilities has been greatly accelerated by penetration, both covert and in open sight, of Western institutions which are largely indifferent to and unprotected from predatory intent.

Clearly the CCP wouldn’t allow foreign participation in its military-led domestic R and D. Other disciplines capable of strengthening authoritarian rule – including digital and other forms of surveillance and espionage – remain a dangerously grey area for foreign collaboration because the moral risk of engagement is more easily blurred.

Lack of openness is endemic in almost every other field. Could a Western academic carry out meaningful research in China on almost any aspect of study related to China’s minority cultures, be they Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian or any other? What about religious and philosophical research, studies on economic development, or even work on climate change and other environmental issues in the regions concerned?

Much has been said about the importance of co-operation with China on global health. But this did not prevent harms from Sars, nor from Covid 19; nor, it must be feared, will it prevent a future pandemic from emerging in China and spreading world-wide.

The politicised state of Chinese epidemiology, virology, vaccine research and other aspects of health science, largely as a consequence of covert military involvement, has been exposed by the Covid pandemic. While foreign experts have been involved in the past, surely now only the most naïve or compromised institutions would wish to remain engaged with such a congeries of malign disinformation.

So, if foreign scholars working in or with Chinese universities cannot study and publish freely there, cannot rely on patent and other protection, cannot obtain free access to Chinese primary sources and informants – in sum, cannot in any way operate save according to the will of a hostile political system – in what way is it meaningful to compare the universities, say, of St Andrews, Copenhagen or Yale with those of Tsinghua and Peking?

Last year, the Times Higher Education chief knowledge officer commented that recent changes in university league tables show “a real shift in the balance of power in the global knowledge economy, away from the traditionally dominant Western world”. He is quite right. But the zero-sum, adversarial agenda of the Chinese Communist Party has been a major driver of this shift; and the results are as harmful to academic freedom and excellence as they are global peace and security in general.

 

https://www.nationalreview.com/author/matthew-henderson/

 

Matthew Henderson

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Matthew Henderson, the director of the Asia Studies Center at the Henry Jackson Society, served with the U.K. Foreign and Commonwealth Office for 29 years, after studying Chinese language and civilization at the Universities of Cambridge, Peking, and Oxford.