But this time the outrage over a Dalai Lama speech was coming from a different source: the students themselves, the very people who were supposed to be basking in their newfound freedom to access information censored in their home country.
That reaction surprised many Americans who had taken for granted the idea that Chinese students becoming “more like us” meant falling into lockstep with mainstream American political values. Conversations with, and surveys of, Chinese students revealed a far more complex picture.
A 2016 Purdue University survey of over 800 Chinese students at a Big Ten school revealed that exposure to America was no guarantee of more positive opinions about U.S. political values. Students in the survey were asked whether their time in the U.S. left them with more positive or more negative impressions of both the United States and their home country. When it came to the United States, the students were evenly split: 26 percent gained a more positive view of America, while 29 percent had a more negative view (44 percent reported no change).
On views of China, the results skewed positive: 44 percent reported a more positive view of their home country, while only 17 percent felt more negatively toward their home country during their time abroad. When asked about their views on democracy as a form of government, the students were divided: 37 percent either agreed or strongly agreed that it is the best form of government, while 28.1 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed with that statement (35 percent felt “neutral”).
Chinese students may not have wholeheartedly embraced America’s take on liberal democracy, but they did tap into the protest zeitgeist on U.S. college campuses. The UCSD controversy played out during a period of major tumult on U.S. college campuses, with student protests often shutting down public lectures by people they deemed objectionable. Chinese students at UCSD were now latching onto the vocabulary of those protests: “diversity,” “inclusive spaces,” and “respect for all cultures.” They deployed it in public statements and hundreds of Facebook comments criticizing the decision.
Some called the decision “insulting” to Chinese students’ heritage; others compared it to inviting Osama bin Laden or white supremacist David Duke to deliver the commencement. One Chinese student captured the zeitgeist in a melodramatic hashtag: #ChineseStudentsMatter.
THE LONG ARM OF THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT
Not everyone saw the protest as a shining example of student activism. Many media accounts of the affair cited a claim by the Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA) that it had been in touch with the Chinese consulate, pointing to that contact as evidence that the Chinese government was using student groups to censor political speech abroad. The incident put CSSAs in the national spotlight, and journalists began investigating how the “long arm” of the CCP was reaching onto American campuses.
Most universities with a large contingent of Chinese students play host to a CSSA chapter. Those chapters act as hubs for Chinese students on campus: organizing orientation events, hosting job fairs with Chinese companies, and putting on the school’s annual Chinese New Year Gala. For many Chinese students, the CSSA is the organization that gives them a sense of community and helps them find their footing on a foreign campus.
CSSAs also maintain relationships with the Chinese government, often via the nearest Chinese embassy or consulate. Chapter presidents often gather at the consulate once per semester for meetings or dinners, and the chapters provide the consulates with student volunteers for public events. In return, the embassy or consulate will appropriate a certain level of funds to each CSSA, often between a few hundred and a couple thousand dollars per semester. That money goes toward organizing events like the New Year Gala, a major undertaking with mountains of food and lots of live performances.
But money from the embassy also sometimes goes toward political activities. In early 2018, Foreign Policy reporter Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian began publishing a series of reports on the ways the Chinese government mobilizes CSSAs for its own purposes. When President Xi Jinping was visiting Washington, D.C., in 2015, the Chinese embassy reportedly asked local CSSAs to bring students out to line the streets for his motorcade, offering twenty dollars to each student who came out. During a major CCP political gathering in the fall of 2017, the consulates reportedly asked the CSSAs to organize “watch parties” on campus for Chinese students and to send back pictures and reports on the events. In other pieces, Allen-Ebrahimian described how a reference to Taiwan—the self-governing island locked in a multidecade dispute with the PRC—was removed from her personal biography at an event sponsored by the Confucius Institute.
American analysts began to refer to these activities as “influence operations”—an umbrella term for any attempts by the Chinese state to affect American institutions or alter the parameters of discussion on U.S. soil. Several CSSA student officials interviewed by Allen-Ebrahimian said that the consulates had increased the emphasis on political activities in recent years, beginning around 2016.
“I feel like the tendency is that the consulate tries to control CSSAs more and more,” one chapter president told Foreign Policy. “I don’t think this student group should be involved with government in any way.”
Speaking with CSSA officials at several California universities, I got a mixed bag of responses about political pressures. Yin Yikai, the president of the Stanford CSSA, said that his group received little funding and no political marching orders from the nearby consulate. He described the events in San Diego as an “extreme” case and said that his organization focused on safety issues and social events.
But members of other CSSAs described a rising emphasis on “political education,” particularly during major CCP events like the Nineteenth Party Congress in the fall of 2017. Along with organizing watch parties on their home campuses, CSSA presidents were reportedly required to write an essay on what the “spirit of the Nineteenth Party Congress” meant to them.
In one instance, a CSSA member told me about being asked to report on the activities of fellow Chinese classmates. The student attended a historically Christian university and said that the local consulate was worried these students would be targeted for conversion by Christian groups. They described being invited to the consulate multiple times and asked by the consul general which students were falling under the influence of Christian groups. When I asked if the consulate did anything based on the information, they said the consulate would only act if the students appeared to be forming religious groups “like Falun Gong,” a persecuted spiritual group in China.
What was most striking—and troubling—about that conversation was that despite having lived in the United States for over six years, the students appeared to have no idea that reporting on the religious activities of other students would be seen as a deep affront to American values and freedoms. To them, low-level surveillance of your peers’ religious beliefs just felt like business as usual.
HIS HOLINESS AT UCSD
But even during the Dalai Lama affair at UCSD, the picture was more complicated than it initially appeared. Yes, the CSSA was spearheading the Dalai Lama protests, and yes, they had contacted the consulate about the event. But conversations with the actual students involved revealed that it wasn’t the Chinese government pulling the strings.
While delivering a lecture at UCSD in 2018, I arranged to meet Lisa Hou, a junior and an officer in the school’s CSSA. Lisa is from a midsize city in southwest China, and before arriving at UCSD she had hoped to study philosophy. But upon arrival she discovered that her English wasn’t up to the obtuse verbiage of philosophy. When it came to improving her language skills, it didn’t help that her roommate and almost all the girls on her freshman dorm’s hall were other Chinese students. Lisa decided to major in math and computer science, and she joined the CSSA.
She said news of the Dalai Lama’s visit triggered an immediate reaction among Chinese students, including herself. That reaction didn’t stem from a deep-seated hatred of