Shutting the gates of academia: American universities cut ties to Huawei and Confucius Institute
- The University of Minnesota ends programmes with both after US government efforts to restrict the relationships
- Decisions made in a political climate of growing concern and suspicion about China, encouraged by the Trump administration
As US government efforts to restrict American academia’s ties to two Chinese organisations gather steam, many of the country’s best schools have done just that.
Huawei Technologies, the private global Chinese tech giant, and Confucius Institute, a Beijing-linked body that promotes China’s language and culture, have been targeted by US lawmakers and numerous federal departments for very different reasons, but the American government believes both undermine its interests.
Huawei, which now makes headlines daily owing to Canada’s detention of the company’s chief financial officer at Washington’s request, rapidly emerged as a global competitor to US tech giants including Cisco Systems and Apple. Confucius Institute’s direct ties to the Chinese central government have sparked complaints from American professors, who saw in the organisation a soft-power play to curtail academic discussion of subjects that Beijing tries to bury.
Stanford University, University of California’s flagship Berkeley campus, and other schools made their decisions to cut ties with Huawei quietly, with media reports about them trailing internal announcements by days or weeks. But many others, including Harvard University, are still mum.
The silence within academia about their connections with Huawei and Confucius Institute may signal an inability to assess the legality of these ties and the consequences of declaring a break with them. These decisions are being made in a political climate of growing concern and suspicion about China, encouraged by the Trump administration, during a trade war and national security debate that have brought Washington-Beijing relations to a low ebb.
Details about Huawei’s involvement with US universities and the US government’s response are “moving very fast for [the schools] and they have real equities involved, and the terms of this debate haven’t yet been defined”, said Robert Daly of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson Centre.