Britain shouldn’t treat Chinese students as Communist agents

Universities in the West can roll over too easily for the Chinese Communist Party. Jesus College, Cambridge, has been a case in point, as Charles Moore pointed out recently in the magazine. The University of Queensland in Brisbane last year appointed a sitting Chinese diplomat as a visiting professor; while MIT and the University of Sydney are among just a few of the universities partnering in research with Chinese tech companies that aid China’s surveillance state. It’s no surprise that this raises growing alarm about the influence of the CCP on our campuses. But it can be hard to separate the personal from the political – increasingly, the Chinese people are being thrown into the mix.

In much of the conversation surrounding our campuses, Chinese students have often been seen as sleeper agents ready to click into action at the flick of a switch in Beijing. Take a 2019 report from the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.