How strained US-China relations are playing out in American universities
As bilateral ties between the two superpowers deteriorate, hundreds of thousands of mainland Chinese students at universities in the United States are caught in the middle. And as witnessed at New York’s University of Rochester, political discourse can often turn ugly
Last November, in the dead of night, dozens of paint-wielding students descended into a concrete tunnel. They were decked out all in black, faces hidden behind surgical masks. Everyone had been advised to remove any identifying markers, tell a trusted friend where they were headed, and leave their phones behind to avoid being tracked.
They scrawled messages such as “Re-education camps are prisons”, “We are all Hongkongers”, and “Save Tibet, our people are burning”. Then, in the red and yellow of the Chinese flag on the tunnel entrance, “CENSOR THIS”.
It was the third such paint job in as many days at the University of Rochester, in New York state. Much of what appeared had been there earlier in the week, but hours after the originals were put up, a group assembled by a Chinese student organisation covered them with their own messages, to counteract those critical of China with “positive energy”, they said.
The university tunnels were built to allow warm passage between buildings during frigid winters, but for nearly half a century, one stretch has been open to paint on, providing a focal point for campus political discourse, and over the preceding few months the discourse had been ugly. The “tunnel wars”, as they came to be known, were the culmination of an acrimonious semester.
As the coronavirus outbreak has spread, already abysmal United States-China relations have been thrown into a tailspin. Caught in the middle are nearly 370,000 Chinese students enrolled in American universities, 2,300 of whom attend the University of Rochester, 19 per cent of its student body.
The Trump administration recently barred Chinese graduate students with links to universities with ill-defined connections to the Chinese military from entering the US. Republican Senator Tom Cotton suggested one policy response to make China “pay the consequences” for Covid-19 could be to “stop allowing hundreds of thousands of Chinese students to come to our universities, many of which are the children of Communist Party officials”.