Are Hong Kong students safe in British universities?

There are far more Chinese students in British universities than there are from the entire Commonwealth. Many universities have been accused of indulging the Chinese regime in return for the students and the money. Now that Beijing has imposed its draconian security law upon Hong Kong, will Hong Kong students in British universities be safe to return in October? Beijing now seeks to control them. What assurances can British universities give Hong Kong students that it will protect them from intimidation from fellow students acting on the orders of the Chinese embassy in London? The new law claims the right to punish Hong Kong people for offences committed anywhere in the world. Will our universities protect such students? Will they restrain bodies like the China Centre at Jesus College, Cambridge, when it repeats lines from the Chinese Communist party which runs all Chinese universities? Cambridge (and others) fell for Chinese ‘soft power’. How will it behave as that power turns rock hard?

Last month, Dr Priyamvada Gopal, of Churchill College in the same university, tweeted ‘White Lives Don’t Matter’. She was abused online and received threats of violence. Cambridge issued a statement: ‘The university defends the right of its academics to express their own lawful opinions, which others might find controversial… [It] deplores in the strongest terms abuse and personal attacks.’ Dr Gopal was promptly promoted to a professorship. Perhaps professorial chairs should not be handed out as prizes because the person promoted has expressed apparently racist sentiments, but the university was surely correct to defend Dr Gopal’s free-speech rights. So it should protest when the universities with which it associates infringe those rights themselves. This week, Xu Zhangrun was detained (after a year’s house arrest) for criticising the ‘personality cult’ of Xi Jinping. He is the author of the most famous dissenting essay in China during the Covid crisis, ‘When Fury Overcomes Fear’.