Several years ago, a University of Michigan PhD student who had spent years living and researching in China, attended a U.S.-based event commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. But she was worried about speaking at the event. She knew that if she criticized Chinese soldiers gunning down unarmed protesters, students could report her to the Chinese authorities, which could jeopardize her research, her access to interview subjects, and even her entire academic career. Even though it bothered her to do so, she kept quiet. 

A few years later, the student, who asked to remain anonymous, found herself keeping quiet again, on what seemed like a much more trivial matter. In September 2017, she opened Facebook and learned that Chinese customs agents had banned the import of certain soft European cheeses, like Brie and Gorgonzola. The customs agents blamed “too much bacteria,” but because Chinese companies could legally make the same cheese, European trade councils criticized the bizarre move as protectionist.

The news frustrated the student. “I thought, ‘Oh no, where would I get my cheese from now on!’” she told me, and she considered posting about it. But even though the Chinese system would ignore an American graduate student complaining about a Brie ban, she feared criticizing Beijing’s trade policies. “I have no fantasies that my social media presence isn’t being monitored to some extent,” she said. 

So she closed her browser. 

This self-censorship, she told me, “comes through in many creepy and insidious ways.” 

Indeed Chinese Communist Party influence has permeated American society so much that many Americans already engage in self-censorship about China without even knowing it. The type and severity of yielding vary. Some censor themselves on current events involving China, as the NBA did in a major October 2019 scandal. Hollywood’s many accommodations have been well documented. And some prominent figures, such as Henry Kissinger, knowingly or unknowingly parrot Party propaganda and advocate for policies beneficial to Beijing and detrimental to America. 

But academic compromises pose a special problem. People expect companies to compromise for financial gains, and the political and entertainment worlds already bear a deserving reputation for selfishness. But universities and think tanks appear ethical and trustworthy. Often, their compromises remain hidden, or more nuanced and subtle, or sins of omission rather than commission. 

But by convincing Americans of the need to tiptoe around the three Ts — as well as, in recent years, Hong Kong and Xinjiang — Beijing has largely succeeded in the more complicated and pernicious strategy of making Americans overlook its most sensitive issues.

Yet these institutions are among the best sources of information about China. Compromises and censorship within American universities restrict the ability of U.S. policy makers, businesspeople, human rights advocates, and the general public to make smart decisions about how to interact with China. They also limit debate, funnel students and scholars away from topics that may upset the Party, and amplify Chinese propaganda.

In what ways are Americans advancing Chinese propaganda, and why does it matter? Those issues Beijing wants Americans to perceive as the most sensitive are known as the three Ts: Taiwan, Tibet and Tiananmen. Over the last several years, that short list has grown to include the governance of Hong Kong and the situation in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China where authorities have imprisoned more than a million Muslims in concentration camps.

I first learned about the three Ts while studying Chinese literature as an undergraduate at Columbia University. I remember thinking that their avoidance was crucial for surviving in an alien world, and that they were a fixed concept, like a grammar rule baked into the language. 

But by convincing Americans of the need to tiptoe around the three Ts — as well as, in recent years, Hong Kong and Xinjiang — Beijing has largely succeeded in the more complicated and pernicious strategy of making Americans overlook its most sensitive issues: exposing wrongdoing by or criticizing specific policies of top Chinese leaders; encouraging political organizing in China; calling for regime change or suggesting the Party should not rule China. 

“You rarely get them to soften their views overnight, but through a patient process of explanation, incentivization, and rationalization you gradually bring about an evolution in their views so that they begin to avoid certain topics and phrasing that might offend Beijing,” says Joshua Eisenman, an associate professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies China’s foreign policy. “Moving the mountain one stone at a time. That’s where China excels.” 

One of the many tricks the Party plays is convincing the world that its rule over China is inevitable. It’s not. Chinese officials love to remind Americans that “China has 5,000 years of history.” But the Party has ruled for only 72 of those years, far less time than many of the dynasties that preceded it. Suggestions of incompetence, corruption, or iniquity within the Party and the men — and they’re all men — who run it invite existential questions about who deserves to rule China. Should the Party rule China? And if not, what should Chinese citizens and the rest of the world do about it? 

Perhaps no scholar exemplifies this sensitivity more than David Shambaugh, a political science professor at George Washington University and one of America’s best-known China experts. Shambaugh described himself to me as “one of the most candid and outspoken China scholars in the field.”

In March 2015, Shambaugh published a widely circulated article in The Wall Street Journal arguing that “the endgame of Chinese communist rule has now begun.” Shambaugh’s piece forthrightly addressed his views on the most sensitive issue in China. “Communist rule in China is unlikely to end quietly,” he wrote. “Its demise is likely to be protracted, messy and violent. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that Mr. Xi will be deposed in a power struggle or coup d’état.”

After the article came out, Shambaugh faced reprisals from Beijing. “I have been punished by the Chinese government,” he said in March 2018 at an event at the Brookings Institution. “I have paid a personal and professional price.” He added that “Chinese state retribution is real, and that’s a price that everybody has to consider when they say something.” 

When I emailed with him in August 2021, Shambaugh told me that after the article’s publication, he had never had a visa application denied. But, he said, “I was completely cut off (to this day) from invitations from Beijing-based institutions that previously regularly invited me. I was told, informally, that there was a ban on inviting me.”

Writing about the three Ts didn’t hurt Shambaugh’s relationship with Beijing; predicting the collapse of the Party did. 

Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California who shares some of Shambaugh’s views about the Party’s weaknesses, told me he has tried to avoid some of the difficulties Shambaugh has faced, adding that “in my own writing, I don’t use words that will provoke, such as ‘collapse,’ because that is such a sensitive word.” He prefers the word “unraveling.” “It’s a lot safer to describe the process,” he says, “than predict the event.”

Self-censorship is certainly not omnipresent. I have yet to meet an American academic who claims that his or her career has been ruined because he or she offended Beijing. Being blacklisted can even proffer a kind of “dissident bump” in the U.S., with the symbol of Party disapproval helping convince Americans that you’re a valid critic. But after years in an environment where sensitivities about China abound, some scholars (and certainly some academic institutions) learn to be more timid about Beijing, more accommodating of the Party’s worldview and ambitions, and more unwilling to pursue or share potentially sensitive viewpoints — all to the detriment of our understanding of China.

Roughly a dozen scholars I spoke with told me that they don’t self-censor, but sometimes word things differently to avoid offending their Chinese hosts, partners, or students. This was striking since the literal Cambridge English dictionary definition of self-censorship is “control of what you say or do in order to avoid annoying or offending others, but without being told officially that such control is necessary.” 

THE ANACONDA

Many people I interviewed about censorship mentioned a 2002 New York Review of Books article by Perry Link, a noted China scholar at the University of California Riverside who hasn’t been able to enter mainland China since 1995. Link said he doesn’t know exactly why he was blacklisted, but that his work on the Tiananmen massacre cemented his status as unwelcome. 

In the article, Link compared China’s censorship to an anaconda in a chandelier. “Normally the great snake doesn’t move,” he wrote. “It doesn’t have to. It feels no need to be clear about its prohibitions. Its constant silent message is ‘You yourself decide,’ after which, more often than not, everyone in its shadow makes his or her large and small adjustments — all quite ‘naturally.’”

For many scholars, this quiet self-preservation has been the operating principle for decades. Graduate students and younger scholars are often advised not to explore sensitive subjects in their research, so they can preserve visa access. As Dartmouth art historian Allen Hockley said in September 2020, “China scholars need to be careful what they say if they want a career.”

But the stakes have been raised considerably since Link’s essay. With the crackdown in Xinjiang, worsening tensions between the United States and Beijing, and Xi Jinping’s centralization of power, the anaconda is both hungrier and more unpredictable.

The cruel December 2018 detention of the former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig, who was conducting research for the nonprofit International Crisis Group, and the Canadian tour guide Michael Spavor personalized the issue for many Westerners.

“A lot of the new advice we are getting, as graduate students, is to do a project that does not require you to necessarily do fieldwork in China,” Lev Nachman, a PhD student at UC Irvine, told CNN in 2021.

For more established individuals, another new threat arose in 2021: that of actual sanctions. During Joe Biden’s inauguration, the Foreign Ministry announced it was sanctioning 28 Trump administration officials, including the former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and the former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, for “violating China’s sovereignty.” The sanctions not only ban the individuals from entering China but restrict the companies and institutions “associated with them” from doing business with China. 

Pottinger later joined the Hoover Institution, a Stanford University think tank. It’s unclear yet if Beijing will enforce its own laws and close off Stanford’s broad academic or economic ties with China, but it complicates things both for academics and for university lawyers, who work to ensure that Stanford complies with the laws of the countries in which it operates.

Several months later, Beijing went further and sanctioned several European scholars who had produced research critical of the Party, as well as the German think tank MERICS. And in July 2021, Beijing also sanctioned the China director for Human Rights Watch, Sophie Richardson. 

“Repression tactics against China scholars used to be ‘rare but real,’” said the academic Sheena Greitens, who has studied self-censorship and China, in March 2021. “They are increasingly not rare.”

Repression tactics against China scholars used to be ‘rare but real,’… They are increasingly not rare.”

Sheena Greitens, associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who studied self-censorship and China

These incidents can have a chilling effect on college classrooms even back in the United States, especially among junior faculty who don’t have the job security that tenure brings.

“People routinely say no pictures, no recording” from paranoia that Chinese spies will jeopardize someone’s access to China for attending a sensitive event, a professor at an American university told me in November 2018.

While the coronavirus has caused the number of Chinese students physically studying in the United States to plummet, the number of Chinese students enrolled in American universities hasn’t dropped all that much. In the pandemic landscape of 2020 and 2021, more than 300,000 Chinese students attended American universities over Zoom, with many classes recorded.

“I always worry that there are folks in the room who are reporting back on what they’re hearing,” an assistant professor of political science at an American university told me. “And there almost certainly are. Reporting back on each other, too.” 

A white American graduate student, who asked that I identify her race because she believes there is even less freedom for people of color and Chinese Americans to speak openly about China, told me she worried about Chinese students monitoring her speech and behavior. 

“If I said something in the classroom, and a student reported me, then maybe I would be under scrutiny for something,” she said — something that also might jeopardize her ability to get a visa to conduct research in China in the future. 

Generally speaking, those with a more direct link to China have more to lose. A graduate of a PhD program at a top-tier university told me how having relatives in China meant that he and others “face a starker choice about whether they will phrase things in a way that will cause them problems.”

But self-censorship doesn’t just mean tempering criticism of the Party; it can also mean restricting praise. After several years of debate, many academics have grown more aware of Beijing’s influence on the academy. But roughly a dozen scholars and activists have told me privately that because of growing worries in the United States, they’ve felt impelled to criticize China, or withhold praise for the country and its policies, in ways they felt to be intellectually dishonest. 

“[To be honest], any time I praise China, I add ‘although,’ afraid of being seen as a CCP propagandist,” the Stanford University professor Xu Yiqing tweeted in May 2020; “any time I criticize China, I add ‘but’, worrying it’d add fuel to the already hyped-up red scare. That’s something Chinese scholars in the US will have to face for the years to come.”

Victor Shih, an associate professor of political economy at the University of California San Diego, told me he fears the U.S. government, in its attempts to protect American institutions from Beijing-backed spying or industrial espionage, may “cause some degree of self-censorship among Chinese Americans” as they start to fear the consequences of being seen as insufficiently loyal to America. The deplorable rise of violence in the United States against Asian Americans since the start of the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated these fears.

This self-censorship occasionally enters into — and skews — the D.C. policy debate. In April 2020, a foreign policy analyst at a D.C. think tank was editing a white paper on arms control and wanted to include contributions from Chinese military experts. Someone on the Hill told him that if he invited Chinese experts, he risked Congress ignoring the project, because they wouldn’t trust what the Chinese said. 

THE OPT-OUT

There is no good polling in China on sensitive issues. Yet it’s safe to assume that Chinese people hold a wide range of views when it comes to the three Ts and other sensitive issues, and why wouldn’t they? It’s an incredibly diverse country with a multiplicity of viewpoints.

In the thousands of conversations I’ve had with Chinese people over the past two decades, only a small minority expressed offense at perceived American positions on those issues, and only a slightly larger minority shared views on these issues that accorded with Beijing’s.

On the topic of Taiwan, for example, while some Chinese people expressed anger that Beijing hadn’t reclaimed the island, others saw it as a democratic model Beijing should emulate. In April 2018, I guest-taught a Chinese professor’s class on international affairs at a Shanghai university. When I asked the several dozen students how many would join the army to fight against Taiwan, not a single person raised their hand. It’s not that the three Ts aren’t sensitive; they’re just not as sensitive as the Chinese government would have its critics believe.

In October 2019, the owner of the Brooklyn Nets, Joseph Tsai, posted an open letter on Facebook postulating why Beijing reacted so strongly to an NBA general manager tweeting about Hong Kong.

“The one thing that is terribly misunderstood, and often ignored, by the western press and those critical of China,” he wrote, “is that 1.4 billion Chinese citizens stand united when it comes to the territorial integrity of China and the country’s sovereignty over her homeland.” 

But Tsai is describing the political system of a country that marshals many individual views into one political cudgel, not the views of Chinese people themselves. That month, a Chinese Houston Rockets fan named Wang Haoda living in the northeastern city of Liaoning posted a photo of himself holding up a Chinese flag and a lighter.

“I live and die with my team,” he wrote. “Come and catch me.” Several hours later, police came and caught him.

The U.S. needs China scholars in order to better understand these nuances, but unfortunately, instead of rushing to study America’s biggest rival and most important trading partner, American students have been forsaking Chinese studies.

Data released in November 2020 showed that the number of American students in China has dropped by more than 20 percent since it peaked in the 2011–2012 school year. The University of Pennsylvania used to enroll more than 1,000 students in its Chinese classes. Now it’s around 700. It’s not just an American problem; in 2019, a mere 1,434 people studied China at universities in Britain. 

“As China’s power waxes,” The Economist wrote in November 2020, “the West’s study of it is waning.”

Given the tightropes involved — avoiding sensitive subjects for practical and personal reasons, fear of being seen as too soft on China in Washington and too offensive to China in Beijing — it is no wonder American students are opting out. But whether one sees China as an adversary or a partner, maintaining ignorance about the country and its people is a losing strategy. 

Reduced funding for foreign-language learning is further exacerbating the problem. When I started studying Chinese in 2002, my textbook taught me the words for “comrade” and “production brigade” before “sleep” or “school.” Some people scoff at the way the Party — with its clunky talk of “win-win cooperation,” “harmonious society,” and “Politburo Standing Committee” — has cheapened the Chinese language. But to understand China today, one must comprehend Party-speak.

Chinese language instruction, however, has also been swept up in the censorship circus. With limited funding available, many U.S. universities turned to China’s Confucius Institutes for instruction in Chinese language and culture. Overseen by the Chinese Ministry of Education, Confucius Institutes are a global phenomenon, enrolling more than nine million students at 541 institutes in 162 countries and regions around the world, according to the program’s website. Since the organization’s founding in 2004, it has opened more than 100 Confucius Institutes in the United States, the most in the world. 

Many of those have since closed, however, after concerns about censorship. Confucius Institutes encouraged faculty and administrators to step gingerly around issues considered taboo, or risk losing their funding. In 2018, D.C. struck back with Senators Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) supporting legislation that prohibited universities with Confucius Institutes from receiving Defense Department funding for Chinese-language training.

Lawrence C. Reardon, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire, said that before his university opened a Confucius Institute in 2010, it had struggled for years to find quality Chinese instruction. “We pulled a retired person from the community to teach the language, which was a complete disaster,” he told me. The Confucius Institute teachers, Reardon said, provided decent lessons, and he saw no attempt to “influence American thought or students.” More importantly, in 2015 he used the popularity of Chinese studies on campus to persuade the provost to fund a tenure-track position in Chinese literature and languages. 

But in April 2021, the university announced it would close its Confucius Institute, because of concerns from Washington. 

“The federal government has made it increasingly difficult for us to operate the Institute, including the real possibility of losing significant federal research funding if we do not close the institute,” a university spokesperson said. Today, there is less opportunity to study Chinese at the University of New Hampshire than there was a year ago.

Confucius Institutes are not ideal. But unless the U.S. government spends tens of millions of dollars more supporting the study of Chinese, they are necessary. And that predicament reveals an urgent question for the United States: In a world of severed ties, Covid travel restrictions, reduced funding for foreign-language learning and a sophisticated global censorship regime that reaches into American classrooms, how should the United States train the next generation of China scholars?

In this way, the debate over self-censorship is a proxy for the larger and more important debate over how to react to the rise of China. Should the United States protest it? Accede to it? Try to stop it? Should U.S. policy be to live with the Party, strengthen it, weaken it, or overthrow it? It’s a conversation begging for a national debate. 

Excerpted from AMERICA SECOND: How America’s Elites are Making China Stronger by Isaac Stone Fish. Copyright © 2022 by Isaac Stone Fish. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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