The current title implies that China wants control of universities foreign to (outside of) China, not foreign universities operating inside China. That China has foreign universities operating inside it at all is a concept foreign to most of us. Heck, it’s probably news to most people inside china as they are relatively new things.
I’m not sure what you expect from NYU Shanghai, of course the government is going to meddle and make students take political indoctrination classes. That’s just how China is. I’m more surprised anyone would expect otherwise.
The Chinese government breaks their promises all the time as convenient, they’ll only pretend to open up a bit and then promptly close things back up once they got what they wanted. That should have been, and most probably was, expected also.
even if they were genuinely surprised, there's nothing stopping them from pulling out, is there? sure, the government can seize the campus or whatever, but the real value to them is the branding + profs, both of which can be unilaterally revoked.
What costs? I bet the government paid for the campuses. It has an incentive to keep citizens inside their borders. Universities already charge top-dollar for admission of overseas students, so they might not make much more trading a price drop for a volume rise.
They definitely have some exposure, NYU shanghai for example is a huge effort from both shanghai municipal sources and NYU proper. The government does provide subsidies in the form of land, but the venture typically books land appreciation right away which they are loathe to lose (the same thing happened with Microsoft’s Beijing campus). So perhaps it is more accurate to say they have something to lose even if their initial investment wasn’t that large.
> The Chinese Communist party has ordered foreign-funded universities to install party units and grant decision-making powers to a party official, reversing an earlier promise to guarantee academic freedom as President Xi Jinping strengthens political control over all levels of education.
Sounds like Xi Jinping is really gearing up for possible re-education of college students with communist ideals and more importantly, party loyalty. Also rejection of human rights, educational freedom, and democratic ideas. Will this affect China's already low innovation capability? most likely.
EDIT: also, there have been alot of these desperation moves by the communist party this year. From recently banning Katy Perry from performing in China because she wore a Taiwan flag in 2015, to banning Winnie the Pooh. There must be panic within the party halls regarding the economic decline.
That explains why Apple and all the big Android manufacturers are basing their designs and innovations on what comes out of the Chinese phone makers, oh wait..
Does China need to go down the traditional route to innovation when everyone else volunteers it to them and installs the manufacturing means and capital into their country voluntarily?
There might even be a curious second order effect that can help cancel out the lack of independent thought through censored education, due to the increase of means from disrespecting restrictive intellectual property ideas.
good question; I think the answer is yes, they will now. China used to have the bargaining power to entice companies to come to China, to give up their technology, and then eventually, those companies would lose the Chinese market to a local copycat, and eventually the global market. Because of its growth.
Now, China doesn't have that anymore. Anyone can guess that the government reported 7% growth rate isn't consistent with the capital outflow, restriction of money moving out, factory shutdowns, banning of bitcoins, etc. For example, recently, China had to relax the foreign ownership of its financial companies. And Tesla might be able to wholly own its operations in China.
I admit, I don't have intimate knowledge about their industry. But many top ML/AI practitioners have acknowledged their capabilities in this area. Besides, you seem to be putting a lot of weight on pure "inventions" whereas there is considerable value in "standing on other's shoulders" and move ahead, so to speak.
> Sounds like Xi Jinping is really gearing up for possible re-education of college students with communist ideals and more importantly, party loyalty.
Why should they be any different from anyone else. Look at the re-education that is happening here in the US and europe. It looks like there is a serious re-entrenchment by the major powers ( US, China, Russia, EU ) to take control over the narrative of their masses.
> Also rejection of human rights, educational freedom, and democratic ideas. Will this affect China's already low innovation capability?
What makes you think human rights, educational freedom and democratic ideas have anything to do with innovative capabilities? The most innovative peoples the last 200 years was americans. And we had slavery, jim crow and most people didn't have the right to vote. And the 200 years before that, the most innovative people were the europeans, who were living in monarchic systems and were enslaving most of the world.
> EDIT: also, there have been alot of these desperation moves by the communist party this year. From recently banning Katy Perry from performing in China because she wore a Taiwan flag in 2015, to banning Winnie the Pooh.
They always do petty things like that. Brad Pitt was banned before.
> There must be panic within the party halls regarding the economic decline.
Perhaps. But nothing you wrote indicates that they are panicked.
I wish I could ask them how long they think they can keep the outside world outside? And wouldn't the shock for the Chinese people just be that much worse when control over the information inevitably breaks down? I've posted this more than once but I'll so it again because it's ridiculous how relevant this quote from a 20~ year-old game (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri) describes our current political state of affairs so well.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
I don't get how the irony doesn't just hit them like a brick. Foreign universities but with central control, like what's the point of even having a foreign university then, just send your kids to Chinese universities if you're that worried they might learn things they "shouldn't". Better yet, stop sending them to university at all since you don't seem to understand the fundamental reason of higher education and you seem to worry about how impressionable and susceptible they are to western thought and the possibility that they might actually learn to form their own opinions.
What you think the “whole point” of higher education is is very Western-centric.
You might need freedom of thought to become a philosopher or sociologist, but you certainly don’t need it to become an engineer, mathematician, businessman, etc.
No, I'd argue that same freedom of thought is precisely what gives us in the West a huge edge over those who fear losing control over their proletariat as we are able to innovate and create far better, and to think those things aren't important for engineers, mathematicians and businessmen is not borne out by economic results. Success in business especially relies greatly on being able to innovate.
> when control over the information inevitably breaks down
That's quite an assumption. The CCP appears to be getting better, not worse, at controlling information. They are accumulating institutional experience and technical competence. I see no obvious reason beyond reflexive 20thC shibboleths why this direction should inevitably reverse.
The second law of thermodynamics does not seem to apply here. Without a source of energy entropy must increase. Using the second law as an analogy of the information situation in China one would say you are correct if there was no external entity actively trying to suppress information. But there is in the case of China. Thus the second law analogy does not apply.
"Entropy may be understood as a measure of disorder within a macroscopic system. The second law of thermodynamics states that an isolated system's entropy never decreases. Such systems spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium, the state with maximum entropy."
They aren't able to suppress information completely which is why they resort to the sort of shambolic behaviour described in the article. They lost control of it when the internet became widespread and since then they've been trying their best to firewall and block and censor, for what? Why censor anything if there is no appetite for it anyway? We can assume therefore that there is some percentage of the Chinese population that wants to know and will know despite their governments efforts.
From what I read (no first hand experience, and based only on relatively shallow news & nonfiction reading), the CCP's aims don't rely on complete control of information. They want political control of the public sphere, for which purpose all they need to do is keep infractions below the surface. There's a nod-nod-wink-wink with the emerging middle class: "pretend in public that everything is as the Party says, whether you privately believe this to be true or not, and we'll deliver the goods". They don't require loyal hearts, just broad obedience.
What they're vulnerable to isn't information leakage, but a future failure to deliver the goods (in which respect they're not that much different from liberal democracies). So far 3 decades of predictions that they would fail to continue holding a lid on the public sphere, and 10 years of predictions that they would fail to deliver the goods, have all been wrong. Which is unsurprising given that those predictions were rarely based on anything more substantial than a priori and ahistorical liberal dogma.
In terms of the analogy it’s not an isolated system. There is an energy input; the active suppression of information. Therefore the second law does not apply.
Control of information fails, not because the organisation controlling gets worse at it, but because it gets better at it.
This may sound counterintuitive, but it's not.
The issue is that organisations that can control information want that power for a reason. That reason is always the same: it's economic. Even in the west, where control is much less pervasive. They want it, frankly, so they can steal from "the people" without them noticing.
Currently China is lying about economic things. And people don't care. The government says things are going well, and it appears things are going well. Until that changes there won't be large scale changes. But there's kinks: How many people got fired in the massive mine cuts last year (everything growing at 7% per year, then "boom!", massive protests followed by executions in a dozen cities. Protests that were big enough that suppression didn't work. Everybody knew someone who was aware of the protests). How badly the metals industry is doing. And the macro Chinese economy. How many loans, and where. People are currently largely trusting the official stats despite them being somewhat obviously falsified. There's a few high profile somewhat-loony exceptions (e.g. Kyle Bass). This can't end well ...
And once it hasn't ended well, needless to say, people notice once the cheese is actually gone. No amount of information control is going to change that. That's when information control fails. That's when people start trusting the word of a drunk sailor more than the official newspaper. That's when every organisation that matters switches to it's own internal information gathering.
That will happen. It's a matter of time. There's lots of variables in it, but how good the CCP is at controlling information is not actually one of the variables.
"And wouldn't the shock for the Chinese people just be that much worse when control over the information inevitably breaks down? "
Surprisingly this may not be the case.
Sitting next to a young Chinese national at the train station who goes to school in the USA ... he told me he likes that the 'state controls the press' for the following reason: 'because some crazy person could just, you know, get a knife and start killing people'.
It was all rather odd: that it's all about public safety, and avoiding 'crazy people with knives' - but oddly - he was living mostly in the USA. I asked him 'do you feel unsafe right now, in the US, that someone could come at you with a knife'? He replied that he did not. But the irony was lost on him.
There are a lot of people who support the 'one state / one party' thing even if they might disagree with some of the tactics here and there, they just see it in a different way.
In much the same way Russians on some level are very aware of Putin's curruption and yet look past it.
He most likely isn't aware of the big knife attacks in China because of censorship. But once the party collapses or the censorship breaks down (whichever comes first), Chinese citizens will find lots of bad information out in the open. Things that will make them angry, like the billions of dollars communist party bosses have escaped with to other countries. Or that their water supply is grossly contaminated.
It's starting to feel like China is a version of NK where they're allowed to leave the country (presumably in order to share the fruits of their 'logic' such as the case you mentioned).
Maybe not - but - the state will grab up people's passports for whatever reason they want, whenever they want.
Of course this happens everywhere, but it's a pretty big deal when it does happen.
I think China is kind of odd - because you don't immediately get the sense that the government is watching everyone. I mean - there are far fewer people in prison. But the 'eye' is there and if you do specific things ... well ... the silent alarm is tripped.
China really isn’t like the DPRK. It’s not like you are under surveillance, or anyone cares what you say or think as long as you don’t have a big audience. Well, it used to be like that, but things changed in the 80s, progress has been made.
It is just frustrating that there are so many regressions. The opening up of the mid-late 80s was of course crushed after 6/4, but then there was the opening up that happened before the Olympics that was then throttled back really quickly (and indeed, internet censorship became much more harsh than it ever was). Annoying to say the least.
The Chinese people seem pretty patriotic (some others would say indoctrinated), to the extent that breakdown of the great wall would hardly cause any disruption.
This probably has more to do with economic success then the effectiveness of the great firewall. The firewall itself probably persists because of bureaucratic inertia more than anything else.
I formed this opinion after reading an article posted here about the influence CCP exerts over Chinese Expat students in the US.
Not sure if it's really worth going into the politics for this one since news like this is becoming all too common. But that patriotism has a lot to do with how China unites its very heterogeneous people firstly under a contrived 'Han' ethnic identity but also by drumming into them the idea that they owe everything (i.e. their modern standard of life) to the Communist party thanks to the Chinese economic boom.
The same Communist party who laid waste to virtually all of China's culture and tradition and killed off their intellectual and aristocratic elite. Now they get to have their opinions made for them even when they're not physically present on the Chinese mainland. What progress!
All patriotism comes out of propaganda to some extent or the other. I don't mean to say that everyone is the same.
But there is little to be gained in a discussion, where one feels that one country's patriotism is "true" and the other's is "fake" because of pure propaganda.
In China's case, sure the government is actively covering their misdeeds. But that isn't the point I was referring to. All I'm observing is the CCP has been pretty successful in convincing (or indoctrinating) their people, to the extent that a one-off event like disabling the firewall would have practically negligible effect in disrupting the society.
Being the fierce defenders of academic freedom that they are, the foreign universities affected will no doubt now withdraw from China to the extent that their current contracts allow.
What we've got here is failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it. Well, he gets it. I don't like it any more than you men.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 102 ms ] threadalso, paywall bypass: facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.ft.com/content/09ecaae2-ccd0-11e7-b781-794ce08b2...
I’m not sure what you expect from NYU Shanghai, of course the government is going to meddle and make students take political indoctrination classes. That’s just how China is. I’m more surprised anyone would expect otherwise.
2. They don’t really care and already expected this.
I believe these are also JVs with lots of Chinese capital involved.
Sounds like Xi Jinping is really gearing up for possible re-education of college students with communist ideals and more importantly, party loyalty. Also rejection of human rights, educational freedom, and democratic ideas. Will this affect China's already low innovation capability? most likely.
EDIT: also, there have been alot of these desperation moves by the communist party this year. From recently banning Katy Perry from performing in China because she wore a Taiwan flag in 2015, to banning Winnie the Pooh. There must be panic within the party halls regarding the economic decline.
There might even be a curious second order effect that can help cancel out the lack of independent thought through censored education, due to the increase of means from disrespecting restrictive intellectual property ideas.
Now, China doesn't have that anymore. Anyone can guess that the government reported 7% growth rate isn't consistent with the capital outflow, restriction of money moving out, factory shutdowns, banning of bitcoins, etc. For example, recently, China had to relax the foreign ownership of its financial companies. And Tesla might be able to wholly own its operations in China.
Why should they be any different from anyone else. Look at the re-education that is happening here in the US and europe. It looks like there is a serious re-entrenchment by the major powers ( US, China, Russia, EU ) to take control over the narrative of their masses.
> Also rejection of human rights, educational freedom, and democratic ideas. Will this affect China's already low innovation capability?
What makes you think human rights, educational freedom and democratic ideas have anything to do with innovative capabilities? The most innovative peoples the last 200 years was americans. And we had slavery, jim crow and most people didn't have the right to vote. And the 200 years before that, the most innovative people were the europeans, who were living in monarchic systems and were enslaving most of the world.
> EDIT: also, there have been alot of these desperation moves by the communist party this year. From recently banning Katy Perry from performing in China because she wore a Taiwan flag in 2015, to banning Winnie the Pooh.
They always do petty things like that. Brad Pitt was banned before.
> There must be panic within the party halls regarding the economic decline.
Perhaps. But nothing you wrote indicates that they are panicked.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
You might need freedom of thought to become a philosopher or sociologist, but you certainly don’t need it to become an engineer, mathematician, businessman, etc.
That's quite an assumption. The CCP appears to be getting better, not worse, at controlling information. They are accumulating institutional experience and technical competence. I see no obvious reason beyond reflexive 20thC shibboleths why this direction should inevitably reverse.
"Entropy may be understood as a measure of disorder within a macroscopic system. The second law of thermodynamics states that an isolated system's entropy never decreases. Such systems spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium, the state with maximum entropy."
They aren't able to suppress information completely which is why they resort to the sort of shambolic behaviour described in the article. They lost control of it when the internet became widespread and since then they've been trying their best to firewall and block and censor, for what? Why censor anything if there is no appetite for it anyway? We can assume therefore that there is some percentage of the Chinese population that wants to know and will know despite their governments efforts.
What they're vulnerable to isn't information leakage, but a future failure to deliver the goods (in which respect they're not that much different from liberal democracies). So far 3 decades of predictions that they would fail to continue holding a lid on the public sphere, and 10 years of predictions that they would fail to deliver the goods, have all been wrong. Which is unsurprising given that those predictions were rarely based on anything more substantial than a priori and ahistorical liberal dogma.
This may sound counterintuitive, but it's not.
The issue is that organisations that can control information want that power for a reason. That reason is always the same: it's economic. Even in the west, where control is much less pervasive. They want it, frankly, so they can steal from "the people" without them noticing.
Currently China is lying about economic things. And people don't care. The government says things are going well, and it appears things are going well. Until that changes there won't be large scale changes. But there's kinks: How many people got fired in the massive mine cuts last year (everything growing at 7% per year, then "boom!", massive protests followed by executions in a dozen cities. Protests that were big enough that suppression didn't work. Everybody knew someone who was aware of the protests). How badly the metals industry is doing. And the macro Chinese economy. How many loans, and where. People are currently largely trusting the official stats despite them being somewhat obviously falsified. There's a few high profile somewhat-loony exceptions (e.g. Kyle Bass). This can't end well ...
And once it hasn't ended well, needless to say, people notice once the cheese is actually gone. No amount of information control is going to change that. That's when information control fails. That's when people start trusting the word of a drunk sailor more than the official newspaper. That's when every organisation that matters switches to it's own internal information gathering.
That will happen. It's a matter of time. There's lots of variables in it, but how good the CCP is at controlling information is not actually one of the variables.
Surprisingly this may not be the case.
Sitting next to a young Chinese national at the train station who goes to school in the USA ... he told me he likes that the 'state controls the press' for the following reason: 'because some crazy person could just, you know, get a knife and start killing people'.
It was all rather odd: that it's all about public safety, and avoiding 'crazy people with knives' - but oddly - he was living mostly in the USA. I asked him 'do you feel unsafe right now, in the US, that someone could come at you with a knife'? He replied that he did not. But the irony was lost on him.
There are a lot of people who support the 'one state / one party' thing even if they might disagree with some of the tactics here and there, they just see it in a different way.
In much the same way Russians on some level are very aware of Putin's curruption and yet look past it.
He most likely isn't aware of the big knife attacks in China because of censorship. But once the party collapses or the censorship breaks down (whichever comes first), Chinese citizens will find lots of bad information out in the open. Things that will make them angry, like the billions of dollars communist party bosses have escaped with to other countries. Or that their water supply is grossly contaminated.
Of course this happens everywhere, but it's a pretty big deal when it does happen.
I think China is kind of odd - because you don't immediately get the sense that the government is watching everyone. I mean - there are far fewer people in prison. But the 'eye' is there and if you do specific things ... well ... the silent alarm is tripped.
It is just frustrating that there are so many regressions. The opening up of the mid-late 80s was of course crushed after 6/4, but then there was the opening up that happened before the Olympics that was then throttled back really quickly (and indeed, internet censorship became much more harsh than it ever was). Annoying to say the least.
Not so much 'surveillance' but watchfulness anyhow.
This probably has more to do with economic success then the effectiveness of the great firewall. The firewall itself probably persists because of bureaucratic inertia more than anything else.
I formed this opinion after reading an article posted here about the influence CCP exerts over Chinese Expat students in the US.
But there is little to be gained in a discussion, where one feels that one country's patriotism is "true" and the other's is "fake" because of pure propaganda.
In China's case, sure the government is actively covering their misdeeds. But that isn't the point I was referring to. All I'm observing is the CCP has been pretty successful in convincing (or indoctrinating) their people, to the extent that a one-off event like disabling the firewall would have practically negligible effect in disrupting the society.
Season 3 of Mr Robot hasn't gone far enough IMO.