Chinese Government’s Communist ‘Party Cells’ Spy At U.S. Colleges
In attempts to tighten ideological control over Chinese citizens studying abroad, the Chinese Communist Party established “Party branches” at universities in the U.S., including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Party cells are an expansion of President Xi Jinping’s strategy to extend Party control globally and insulate students from negative opinions about China’s Communist Party.
Beijing sometimes asks members to report on the behaviors and beliefs of their Chinese classmates. Worldview’s Jerome McDonnell recently spoke with Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, who broke the story for Foreign Policy magazine.
Below are some interview highlights.
The origins of these cells:
Allen-Ebrahimian: The Chinese Communist party under Xi Jinping has been working to expand its global reach, and one way he’s doing that is with party cells at American universities. Party committees at universities in China have been insisting that Chinese students from those universities who go abroad form party branches or party cells on the campuses of their host universities.
Why the Chinese Communist Party created the cells:
Allen-Ebrahimian: They say they’re forming these groups to “resolutely resist the corrosion caused by harmful ideology,” and that’s a direct quote. If Chinese Communist Party members go abroad, Xi Jinping does not want them to be influenced by the ideas of democracy, rule of law, liberal values, freedom of speech. President Xi wants control over the party and members, so he doesn’t want them to bring these “harmful” ideas back to China.
I think where it really gets out of line is when it’s used to report on other Chinese students. I spoke with a Chinese student who participated in a semester-long exchange program on the campus at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. This student was there in the fall of 2017, and when they returned to China, the students who had been essentially made to be members of this party branch were required to sit down in one-on-one meetings with an adult back on campus and talk about the potential anti-party thought of other students.
The Chinese Communist party attempts to exert extreme ideological control back in China, and that should not be happening on the campuses of American universities. Inside this country and on our campuses, we should have academic freedom and that freedom should extent to Chinese students here in this country.
On whether these cells go against university policy:
Universities typically allow freedom of assembly for student groups, but the challenge with these kinds of groups is that this is not Chinese students themselves saying “I really love the party, I really love Xi Jinping, let’s form a group on campus open to anybody to discuss the wonderful Communist party ideology.” This is a foreign political party that rules over an authoritarian state giving top-down directives to Chinese exchange students and visiting scholars to form these groups. These groups have not followed university procedures to register these groups on campus, they don’t make their meetings public, they haven’t opened up the group to any university student as a member.
On the role of Chinese students at American universities:
Chinese officials and even people from the embassy here believe that they can use Chinese students and the tuition that they pay as a lever of power over universities. I think that it’s possible, but I think an even bigger concern is that the Chinese students themselves must be seen as deserving of all the protection and all the services that universities promise them by accepting their money. This is a case of a foreign political party trying to control students in America. The Chinese students themselves are the target, they’re the victim, and they need to be protected while they’re inside US borders.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. Click here to hear the entire conversation, which was adapted for the web by Anna Waters.
