Top Australian University Urges Students to Complain About Foreign Interference

A student walks around the University of New South Wales campus in Sydney, Australia, on Dec. 1, 2020. AP Photo/Mark Baker

A top university in Australia is urging students and academics to report “foreign government harassment” they see in classrooms as a human rights group warns that academic freedom in the country is increasingly under threat.

In emails sent in June and July, the University of New South Wales (UNSW), one of Australia’s Group of Eight universities, asked staff and students to submit complaints about any foreign interference, referring to Human Rights Watch’s report that pro-Beijing groups are intimidating those who criticize the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

“We developed an awareness campaign which included an email from our Vice-Chancellor to all students and staff on the topic ... The campaign made it clear that students and staff are free to express their views in classes or online discussions, and that anyone who acts on behalf of a foreign government to limit this expression is contravening our codes of conduct and will face consequences,” reads the university’s 2022 annual report.

“Senior complaints managers also received specific briefings around how to identify and handle this type of harassment, including options to refer the matter to UNSW staff with expertise in foreign interference risk.

“This campaign will now be repeated annually to ensure new students and staff members are captured.

“It has a chilling effect,” George Williams, deputy vice-chancellor of UNSW, told the Sydney Morning Herald. “As you can imagine, that’s the sort of thing we look out for very carefully because a foreign government has tremendous power.”

In an incident involving academic freedom in 2020, the UNSW faced backlash after giving in to protests from Chinese students and deleting a tweet criticizing the crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong by Elaine Pearson, an adjunct lecturer in law at the university and president of Human Rights Watch Australia.

Students gathered at the graduation ceremony in Clancy Auditorium at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, on Nov. 9, 2018. Jessie Zhang/ Epoch Times

Former Senator: Aussies Would ‘Rise Up’

In response to the UNSW’s new campaign, former Labor MP Michael Danby said that Australians would “rise up” to fight back against pro-Beijing groups even though we are a friendly nation.

“Beijing and its embassy should be warned that interference in Australia, whether it’s persecuting citizens like Kevin Yam… or attacking students, like in the case of Drew Pavlou, or now at the University of New South Wales, is off limits,” he told Sky News on Aug. 16.

UNSW Library Lawn and Library building, with a clock in the foreground, circa 2009. unsw.flickr/Flickr CC BY 2.0 ept.ms/2haHp2Y

“We are a proud country, and no matter how many pro-Beijing advocates you have in your pocket, say this to the Chinese ambassador, people will rise up against you.

“We smile, and we’re nice, and we’re happy Australians, but it’s intolerable, and this has got to stop.”

In July, the Hong Kong police offered $1 million (US$127,650) bounties to arrest eight pro-democracy activists overseas, including Kevin Yam, an Australian citizen now living in Melbourne and Ted Hui, a former Hong Kong politician.

In 2020, Drew Pavlou, a human rights activist who was studying at the University of Queensland, was violently attacked by Chinese students for criticizing the CCP’s infiltration of Australian universities and supporting the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.

After Global Times, the CCP’s official media outlet published an article naming Mr. Pavlou as one of the organizers of what it called an “anti-China event,” his social media feeds were flooded with violent comments, and he received death threats. Mr. Pavlou was later expelled from the university.

Universities Should Take Half the Blame

Mr. Danby, who once helped promote Australia’s Magnitsky-style human rights act, admitted that half the problem should be attributed to the Australian universities.

Michael Danby MP, introduces the Magnitsky Bill (The International Human Rights and Corruption Bill 2018) in the Lower House of the Australian Parliament on Dec. 3, 2018. Parliament of Australia

“Unfortunately, half the problem is the universities,” he said. “They’re sending off people to do projects in China. They’re co-running courses with communist institutions. And we just saw something recently at the University of Melbourne with Michael Wesley [deputy vice-chancellor] promoting this. That’s a big problem.”

The University of Sydney, another Group of Eight universities in the city, has also recently been criticized for taking a soft approach to Beijing’s influence and propaganda on campus.

In a video on the Chinese social media app Douyi, the Chinese version of TikTok, an international student speaking in Mandarin welcomes students to the communist thought study session, all the while with the USYD’s name and badge looming large in the background.

“Everyone is talking about China’s Sydney campus. Isn’t the Youth Great Study coming?” the USYD student wrote in a July 26 post introducing the video.

“Learn new thoughts and strive to be a new youth. Welcome to this Youth Great Study Online League lesson,” the student says before launching into a poetic quote.

The post and its references to the university were criticized by fellow international USYD students like Aaron Chang, a Chinese democracy activist who is known for dressing as Winnie the Pooh to satirise CCP leader Xi Jinping.

Mr. Chang said that the study group is a communist indoctrination program that all university students in China under the CCP’s one-party rule are compelled to study.

“This is an app that basically all students in China have been victimized by… I hope the school [USYD] can condemn this mandatory learning,” he previously told The Epoch Times.

A peaceful protest by Aaron Chang at the University of Sydney was smashed by pro-Beijing youths for several days (Supplied).

The university replied that the ability of its students and staff to learn, research, and collaborate in an environment free from interference is a priority.

“If anyone in our community has experienced or is aware of that kind of behaviour, we urge them to let us know so we can look into it and provide appropriate support,” a USYD spokesperson of the university said in an email.

Australia the Weak Link of Western World

Australia is considered to be the weak link of the Western world, according to the editorial series How the Spectre of Communism is Ruling Our World, published in 2018 by The Epoch Times.

In Chapter 18, The CCP’s Global Ambitions, the authors pointed out that Australia has been the “CCP’s testing ground for soft-power operations in its strategy of periphery diplomacy.”

The editorial cited Australian scholar Clive Hamilton’s book Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia which discusses how Beijing reached its long arm into Australian society.

“Despite awareness of the CCP’s infiltration and influence on Western society, and particularly its infiltration and control of overseas Chinese communities, most well-meaning Westerners naively thought that the main purpose of the Party’s strategies was ‘negative’—that is, to silence the voices of critics and those with different political opinions,” reads the editorial.

“However, Hamilton says that behind the ‘negative’ operations are the CCP’s ‘positive’ ambitions: to use ethnic Chinese immigrants to change the framework of Australian society and to have Westerners sympathize with the PRC so as to allow Beijing to build up influence.”

“In this way, Australia would be transformed into the Party’s helper in its goal of becoming an Asian superpower and then a global one.”