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As part of a hard-line speech on China Thursday, Vice President Pence said that China seeks to exert pressure on scholars, students and universities abroad to toe the Chinese Communist Party line. He specifically cited the case of a University of Maryland, College Park, student from China, Yang Shuping, who came under heavy criticism back home after giving a spring 2017 commencement speech in which she praised “the fresh air of free speech” in the U.S.
“The Communist Party’s official newspaper swiftly chastised her, she became the victim of a firestorm of criticism on China’s tightly controlled social media and her family back home was harassed,” Pence said. “As for the university itself, its exchange program with China -- one of the nation’s most extensive -- suddenly turned from a flood to a trickle.”
Asked about Pence’s claim that its exchange programs with China “suddenly turned from a flood to a trickle,” Maryland declined to release enrollment data for this fall, which it said would be released later this year, but said that the number of students from China on the campus increased from fall 2016 to fall 2017. However, the university said that there “has been a noticeable decline in the number of training programs run by the university’s Office of China Affairs.” A spokeswoman declined to say whether this decline is believed to be fully or partially attributable to the response to the Yang Shuping commencement speech.
The former director of the Office of China Affairs until this past summer, Nathaniel Ahrens, declined to comment. A recent report from the Wilson Center on Chinese political influence and interference in American higher education said that the executive training programs run by that office had “experienced disruptions” since the Yang Shuping speech in 2017. The report also said that groups of municipal- and provincial-level government officials from China stopped attending Maryland’s executive training programs for a period of time as a retaliatory move after the Dalai Lama gave a speech at Maryland in 2013 (the Chinese government considers the Tibetan spiritual leader to be a dangerous separatist).
Three professors at Maryland who study topics related to China all said that the training programs have taken a hit, but they were not aware of broader impacts in terms of the number of Chinese students enrolled at the university. A fourth professor, Chengri Ding, a professor in the School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning, distinguished between government-sponsored and self-paying students, and suggested that the Chinese government cannot control or influence the choices of individual self-supported students or scholars of where to study. He said that the Chinese government’s anticorruption drive has made it harder for government officials to travel overseas and could be a factor in smaller numbers of government-sponsored officials coming to Maryland for training programs.
