‘Use the past to serve the present,’ declares the website of the China Centre of Jesus College, Cambridge. It seems a sensible motto, until you know that it’s the first half of a maxim of Chairman Mao’s, and that the second half is ‘make the foreign serve China’.
The China Centre is directed by Professor Peter Nolan, a fellow of Jesus and an expert on China’s economy. In the 1980s, he studied China’s collective farms and edited a volume that referred to itself as ‘a preliminary attempt to construct a new socialist political-economic strategy for Britain’.
Nolan helped to advise Wen Jiabao, China’s former prime minister, on entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001 and later appeared as an expert witness before the US Senate, arguing against a ‘strict insistence’ on ‘WTO rules in full’ for China. He ran workshops bringing together Chinese state-owned corporations and western multinationals. An influential communist scholar-official has credited him with a study of American defence companies, so that China can close the gap in military technology. Make the foreign serve China indeed.
When students mention the ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang, Nolan is quick to belittle them. The head of Jesus’s student union, Aurelio Petrucci, suggested in a 2020 meeting of the Jesus China Centre advisory committee that the CCP abuse of the Uighurs amounts to ‘cultural genocide’. Nolan’s response was heavy on sarcasm: ‘I would be grateful if you could give us maybe an hour’s lecture on Xinjiang, its history and the role of the Weiwu’ers [Mandarin for Uighurs].’ He then told Aurelio he should be ‘trained to think in a different way’.
One of the reasons Nolan feels so comfortable suggesting re-education programmes to students is that he has support from Sonita Alleyne, appointed Master of Jesus to some fanfare in 2019.
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