So You Want To Study In China? Read This First.

Dear College Student,

Welcome back to school! Great to hear you are interested in China! It’s the right subject if you care about the future of the United States and the free world. But you should know that when you study China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) studies you back — hard.

For instance, if you travel to China, all devices you bring will be hacked; any email or other accounts you access from those devices will be exploited; and you yourself will be monitored and assessed by Chinese intelligence professionals.

Your professors might not have mentioned this.

“Academics who study China,” the economist Carsten Holz wrote in a still-accurate 2007 article, “habitually please” the CCP “through the research questions we ask or don’t ask, through the facts we report or ignore, through our use of language, and through what and how we teach.” Almost two decades ago, Holz identified China scholars’ acceptance of surveillance and internalization of propaganda in exchange for access: “We benefit from our connections in China to obtain information and insights, and we protect these connections” by not offending the CCP. It’s like studying the Mafia, he concluded — and few dare make that comparison out loud.

The exceptions prove the rule, as the party has punished the rare scholars of forbidden topics by denying them visas – from Perry Link, Andrew Nathan, and Orville Schell, who published an anthology on China’s massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989, to Adrian Zenz, the German anthropologist who exposed the party’s genocide in Xinjiang in 2018.

Few Americans understand that the CCP assigns the highest priority to 1) defending against foreign academic infiltration and 2) co-opting foreign academia in service of its own goals. This is because the CCP was basically founded in the library of Peking University, as young scholars, encouraged by Soviet Comintern representatives, read about Marxist-Leninism. The party’s origin story is thus testament to the fact that students, and the ideas they’re exposed to, matter.

This connects to the CCP’s treatment of foreign universities as well. To wit, the young Chinese Communists created their Red Army by pretending to ally with their rivals, the Nationalist Party, in a “united front” against foreign imperial powers. This alliance enabled the CCP to infiltrate the Nationalists’ military academy, Whampoa, and secretly recruit cadets there. The People’s Liberation Army centennial that China will observe next year marks the anniversary of the day these cadets threw off their Nationalist uniforms and revealed their new communist allegiance. Nationalist naivete about the identity and ambition of their putative partners enabled this operation to succeed.

American academics’ naivete serves a similar purpose today.