When Matthew Belanger arrived in Shanghai during a record-breaking heatwave in the summer of 2013, it felt, he says, like the beginning of “a once in a lifetime experience.” 

Belanger, an art professor, had just left his tenure-track position at the City University of New York to be one of the first faculty members at NYU Shanghai, New York University’s new venture in China and the first ever Sino-U.S. joint-venture research university. The new gig offered travel and adventure, but Belanger says he was also drawn to the opportunity “to participate in the development of a new university.” 

NYU Shanghai, which was founded in partnership with East China Normal University, lived up to Belanger’s expectations. In the first few years, Belanger co-founded two art programs at the new school, drawing inspiration from his own experience as a graduate student at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He was also on academic planning and curriculum committees, and he served as an assistant dean for the emerging media programs, helping students make interactive art using different technologies and mediums.

He was quite pleased with the set up, that is until February 2017, when an ache in his lower back turned into immobilizing pain and sent him to the hospital for a week. He became, for a time, dependent on a wheelchair and other walking aids, and in the months afterwards, he was passed over for what he believed was a promised contract extension and promotion. He voiced concern over what he perceived to be discrimination based on his new disability to NYU’s Office of Equal Opportunity, but he ended up asking them to hold off on investigation fearing retaliation.

“There have been many ups and downs since then,” says Belanger, who recently returned to Shanghai after spending two years in the United States. Last February, he filed a lawsuit in the Southern District of New York against both NYU and NYU Shanghai alleging discrimination. The case is still in early stages — the second round of mediation ended last month without success — but in response to Belanger’s allegations, both NYU and NYU Shanghai are arguing that they are not the same venture, that NYU has no legal control over decisions made by NYU Shanghai, and that the U.S. court has no jurisdiction over NYU Shanghai.

The defense’s logic has raised some eyebrows since NYU has insisted from the outset that it has “absolute control” over NYU Shanghai, which grants NYU degrees, and analysts say it has exposed some of the tensions — and limitations — of American universities operating in China. 

“Matt’s lawsuit is bringing up all of the ways in which these overseas campuses are filled with loopholes,” says Rebecca Karl, a Chinese history professor at NYU who has been a vocal critic of NYU Shanghai since it was founded in 2012. “Some of these loopholes,” she says, “are huge enough to leap through.”

Belanger says he expects to be covered by U.S. disability law since Title VII of the Civil Rights Act has an extraterritorial provision. Depending on the nature of arrangement, U.S. citizens hired at overseas subsidiaries of U.S. companies are protected by Title VII, but legal observers note that one of the key aspects of applying the law is the element of control. 

“The statute permits a U.S. citizen working overseas for a non-U.S. entity to nonetheless pursue a Title VII or disabilities claim if that foreign entity is controlled by a U.S. entity,” says Kevin Connelly, an attorney at McDermott Will & Emery who is not involved in Belanger’s case. 

Matt’s lawsuit is bringing up all of the ways in which these overseas campuses are filled with loopholes… Some of these loopholes are huge enough to leap through.

Rebecca Karl, a Chinese history professor at NYU who has been a vocal critic of NYU Shanghai

The question of how NYU’s control over NYU Shanghai is structured, then, is of paramount importance — not only for Belanger but for an academic community that is increasingly caught in a hurricane of geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China. 

The facts appear pretty straightforward: In accordance with Chinese regulations and as with many joint ventures established in China, NYU Shanghai is ultimately controlled by the Chinese authorities, with NYU acting as something like a minority shareholder.¹NYU’s lack of control over NYU Shanghai in this regard is analogous to that of a minority shareholder,” NYU’s general counsel wrote in 2020 to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Legally, it is a Chinese entity with independent status, and NYU Shanghai, not NYU, was Belanger’s employer. 

“People have this understanding that NYU owns and operates a campus in Shanghai, but it’s not the case,” says Michael Gow, an assistant professor at Edge Hill University Business School in the UK who was once a postdoctoral fellow at NYU Shanghai. “A Sino-foreign joint venture university such as NYU Shanghai is actually a completely independent Chinese university, which effectively offers franchised NYU degrees to students that are enrolled there.” 

This reality is hard to square with how NYU Shanghai was pitched to American audiences. As Jeffrey S. Lehman, NYU Shanghai’s founding vice chancellor, told a congressional committee in 2015, NYU only agreed to establish a campus in Shanghai if NYU “would have absolute control over the school’s curriculum, faculty, teaching style, and operations, and that it would receive an ironclad guarantee that it could operate the school according to the fundamental principles of academic freedom.”

At the time, Lehman was mostly addressing Congress’s concerns about China’s influence on academic freedom at American universities, but Belanger’s lawsuit has highlighted what some say is a contradiction in Lehman’s promise. If the Shanghai venture does not have to abide by U.S. laws and regulations in one area — for example, Belanger’s employment — then can NYU really claim to be in full control of NYU Shanghai? 

“When NYU needs it to be, it’s fully their campus. But when they need protection, then it’s really not their campus; it’s a foreign entity,” says Jason E. Lane, dean of the College of Education, Health and Society at Miami University in Ohio and an expert on international branch campuses. “They want to play both sides.”

“Mr. Belanger’s case is entirely without merit,” NYU Shanghai said in an official statement to The Wire. “He was not subject to discrimination of any kind. Mr. Belanger is an employee of NYU Shanghai in China. Accordingly, any employment claims he may bring are supposed to be litigated in Shanghai under applicable Chinese law, not in New York under American law. The legal issues are unrelated to NYU’s academic decision-making authority at NYU Shanghai, which has continued unimpeded since its founding.”

Despite this gray area, supporters of NYU Shanghai maintain the campus represents both a symbolic achievement and a tangible, real world benefit. It is, after all, one of the last remaining bridges for meaningful interaction between two countries increasingly at odds.

“NYU Shanghai, as far as I can tell, is the closest to an American university experience Chinese students will get in China,” says Eric Hundman, assistant professor of political science at NYU Shanghai. 

The question Belanger and others are asking, however, is if being “close” to an American university standard is good enough. 

‘CROSSING BOUNDARIES’

New York University Shanghai first opened its doors to students amidst a series of biblical-like calamities. The fall of 2013 saw rainstorms and floods that made international news and the semester ended, in December, under a cloud of thick gray smog that many in the community referred to as “air-pocalypse.”

Nevertheless, the campus was founded with a distinctly optimistic and forward-looking mission. John Sexton, NYU’s president from 2002 to 2015, first explored the idea of opening a Shanghai branch in 2008 after a trip to China, and a 2011 article in The New York Times described his vision for it as a modern version of the Italian Renaissance.

“The idea,” Sexton told The Times, “is that in a century where more and more people as well as ideas are operating beyond national boundaries, the professoriate and the talent class will be highly mobile,” he said.

As the vision started to become a reality, Sexton turned to his friend Lehman for advice. 

Lehman — who had once been a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens — had roughly a decade of experience building academic partnerships between American and Chinese higher education institutions. While he was a dean of the University of Michigan Law School from 1994 to 2003, he arranged for several law professors to go to China’s Peking University for a summer. He also pushed for closer relationships with China during his brief stint as president of Cornell University from 2003 to 2005. By the time Sexton reached out to him, Lehman was living in China, serving as dean of the Peking University School of Transnational Law, a school that he had helped found.²Lehman told a congressional committee in 2015 that he was urged to contribute to the rule of law and help found the school by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and C.V. Starr Chairman Hank Greenberg, the billionaire and former chairman of AIG, who has long had financial interests in China. 

“When I first moved to China in 2008, I believed it was going to become the most important partner to the United States in the 21st century,” Lehman, who is now 65 years old and lives in Shanghai, tells The Wire. “That conviction, which ultimately drew me to NYU as NYU Shanghai’s founding vice chancellor, has been with me for a very long time.”

NYU was not the first American university to establish a presence in China. In 1986, for instance, Johns Hopkins University opened the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, which helped pioneer joint studies programs. But Lehman says he and Sexton wanted to do something “relentlessly experimental and relentlessly different.” He said NYU negotiated absolute control over the design of the programs as well as the choice of curriculum and faculty, and promised to offer the high standards of an American education in China and even award to Chinese graduates the same NYU degrees that U.S.-based students receive in Shanghai.

The exact conditions of the arrangements were never made public, but NYU Shanghai became the first American university to receive independent legal status from China’s Ministry of Education — an arrangement that Duke University soon mimicked with Duke Kunshan University, a joint venture with China’s Wuhan University. For many, NYU Shanghai seemed like a catalyst for educational reforms in China.

“It made a lot of sense at the time. The Sino-American relations were fairly stable, U.S. companies were increasing their efforts to expand market-share in China, and China was and is the leading sender of international students to U.S. higher education,” says Jason Lane, the scholar at Miami University in Ohio. “There were a number of good reasons for a U.S. institution to consider establishing an outpost there.”

The joint venture started small eight years ago, with just 300 students and 40 faculty members. Today, it is home to nearly 2,000 undergraduate and graduate students and 200 faculty members. Its student population approximates the control structure, with about 51 percent of the student body from China and the rest from overseas, mostly the United States. With 19 majors offered, ranging from interactive media arts to neural science, tuition costs roughly $54,000 for international students and $32,000 for Chinese students, which is government subsidized. The faculty is largely selected by NYU, in New York. Belanger, for instance, says he was interviewed for his NYU Shanghai position by a senior provost at NYU. 

Some critics, though, suspect professors are also screened for loyalty to the cause before sending them to Shanghai. For instance, Karl, the Chinese history professor at NYU, says she applied several times to teach at NYU Shanghai, but has been rebuffed.

“They are clearly under some sort of pressure, both their own pressure but also pressure from elsewhere, to construct a very lockstep, congenial sort of place,” Karl says. “Congenial to the extent that everybody agrees with whatever they’re doing.” 

Lehman, though, says he often invites critics to see the Shanghai campus for themselves. Representative Chris Smith (R-NJ), who presided over the 2015 congressional hearing, went on to visit and gave a speech criticizing China at an event at NYU Shanghai.

There are, of course, tight-rope aspects of operating an American-style university in the middle of Shanghai. Students might be safe on campus, but once they step off campus they are in a nation ruled by the Communist Party, where censorship is the norm and western-style academic freedom is unwelcome.

Some students say they are drawn to NYU Shanghai for precisely this unique experience. Kevin Orellana, an American, decided to apply to NYU Shanghai because he believed it would help him stand out during a job search. He graduated in 2019 after four years at NYU Shanghai with a major in computer science and is now a software engineer in Seattle. 

“My experience was that, in the classroom, you can say just about anything you want. And you can ask any questions you want. The school is very tight-knit. We were all cognizant of the fact that we wanted to create a space where people could say just about anything,” he says. Classroom topics, Orellana says, included typically controversial subjects in China, such as Taiwan, Chinese censorship and the Great Firewall. He doesn’t recall anyone saying they felt uncomfortable or censored talking about taboo topics, but he also notes that that doesn’t mean it never happened. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a trend,” he says about self-censorship among Chinese students.

The NYU Shanghai staff and students enjoy free access to an uncensored internet³The Chinese authorities heavily censor the internet inside of China, blocking western media outlets, social platforms and even Google searches. while on campus, but in at least two cases, textbooks arrived on campus with blacked out text, according to a student publication. (In each case, NYU Shanghai quickly resolved the issue and distributed proper textbooks.) And both supporters and critics say self-censorship is likely.

“One of the general dynamics in the Chinese system, and at Chinese universities in particular, is that there’s a lot of reporting on other students for making inappropriate statements or things like that,” says Hundman, who teaches at NYU Shanghai. “And there has been a general sense that students are more concerned about that on our campus.” 

It is designed to operate as a ‘tub on its own bottom,’ neither subsidizing the rest of NYU nor being subsidized by the rest of NYU.

 

Jeffrey S. Lehman, NYU Shanghai’s founding vice chancellor

NYU Shanghai has also come under scrutiny because of the lack of transparency regarding its finances. But Michael Gow at Edge Hill University says it’s unlikely that NYU generates any profit from NYU Shanghai since Chinese regulations usually don’t allow it. “The only possible way they can cover costs is if there’s some kind of provision for this in the joint-venture contract — for example, for degree design approval,” he says.

The contract has never been made public, but in Lehman’s congressional testimony he said that NYU doesn’t profit financially from NYU Shanghai. “It is designed to operate as a ‘tub on its own bottom,’ neither subsidizing the rest of NYU nor being subsidized by the rest of NYU,” Lehman says.

Indeed, from the outside at least, NYU Shanghai appears to be thriving. For the fall semester, the school plans to move to a brand new 1.2-million-square-foot campus designed by the renowned architectural firm Kohn Pedersen Fox.

“It’s spectacular. And it’s innovative,” Lehman says. “The design is about crossing boundaries of all kinds — crossing intellectual boundaries, departmental boundaries, cultural boundaries. We just can’t wait to move in.”

BOILING POINT

Lehman’s optimism for the future paints a stark contrast to some other international schools that have, in the past year, announced a partial retreat from the country. Harvard University, for instance, relocated its Chinese language program from Beijing to Taipei, pointing to worsening geopolitical relations between the two countries and a “perceived lack of friendliness” from the host university as reasons. 

Several British private schools with branches in China are also reportedly leaving because they fear that stricter limitations on international education by the Chinese Communist Party will constrain what they can teach and result in decreased education quality and a potential risk to their reputations. Westminster School, for instance, pulled out from a project that would have built six schools in China by 2028.

“I think any university that is from a democratic country — that is used to operating with real independence — fundamentally has to give up some of that independence in order to have a campus or joint center inside mainland China,” says Sophie Richardson, the China Director at Human Rights Watch, which put out a “Code of Conduct” for academic institutions operating in China.

Still, the decision to retreat, Richardson says, is not an easy one for schools to make. “It’s hard to argue for shutting off what may still be a far more open environment than what would otherwise be on offer to people. The desire to provide a cosmopolitan, robust academic experience inside the mainland is an unimpeachable goal. But there’s a reason it’s really hard to do.”

Observers note that since NYU Shanghai and other Western universities entered China, the country and its relationship with the outside world have changed significantly. In 2013, news about an internal CCP document called ‘Document Number Nine’ broke. The document listed seven dangerous Western values, including democracy, human rights and freedom of press, and called on Party members to be vigilantly resistant to “infiltration” by outside ideas. Beijing followed up with a harsh crackdown against independent thinkers, including jailing dissidents, human rights lawyers, academics and journalists. 

Given the atmosphere in China in recent years, some experts are skeptical that American-backed institutions like NYU Shanghai will be able to maintain academic freedom and integrity.

“When these [joint] campuses are started, there is a real effort to try to mimic the curriculum of the home campus as much as possible, [but] it’s never going to be exactly the same because context matters,” says Lane, at Miami University. “There’s going to be differences between Shanghai and New York. Eventually, you’re changing the curriculum to adapt to the local demands.”

When these [joint] campuses are started, there is a real effort to try to mimic the curriculum of the home campus as much as possible, [but] it’s never going to be exactly the same because context matters… Eventually, you’re changing the curriculum to adapt to the local demands.

Jason Lane, dean of the College of Education, Health and Society at Miami University in Ohio and an expert on international branch campuses

Those adaptations, Lane says, are often reasonable and expected — American labor law, for instance, doesn’t need to be taught in China. But when institutions like NYU Shanghai get used to accepting compromises, Lane warns it might become more difficult for them to recognize how China’s control is tightening. 

“What might end up happening is that campuses might be more willing to accept some of those restrictions, because they’ve been there for 10 years and have a significant commitment to that institution,” says Lane. “Whereas if those restrictions had been in place at the very beginning they likely might not have agreed to them.” 

In other words, NYU Shanghai could end up like the boiled frog: it never would have jumped into boiling water, but after crawling into tepid water, it may not realize it’s getting hotter.

When asked about censorship, Lehman insists that academic freedom was always an essential condition for NYU Shanghai.

“Everyone understood from the beginning that if NYU Shanghai could not safeguard academic freedom within our community, we’d shut down and go away,” Lehman says.

Even though Matthew Belanger’s disability lawsuit isn’t about academic freedom, it has laid bare just how difficult simply shutting down and going away would be. In the administrative structure of NYU’s “Global Network” that the defense submitted, it shows that NYU Shanghai leadership reports to NYU’s president, Andrew Hamilton, and is below NYU Shanghai Chancellor Tong Shijun. Tong, however, does not report to Hamilton. And as the head of a Chinese institution, Tong is the Party Secretary, and ultimately appears to have control over the institution and answers to the Chinese Communist Party.

“NYU’s lack of control over NYU Shanghai in this regard is analogous to that of a minority shareholder,” NYU’s general counsel wrote in 2020 to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

What remains to be determined, Lane notes, is if this is a legal argument to protect NYU from a lawsuit. Or if, he asks, “it is indicative of a larger shift that has been occurring because of changes in China — where NYU views its home campus’s influence over the Shanghai campus dissipating.”

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