A top university in Australia is urging students and academics to report “foreign government harassment” they see in classrooms as a human rights group warns that academic freedom in the country is increasingly under threat.
“Senior complaints managers also received specific briefings around how to identify and handle this type of harassment, including options to refer the matter to UNSW staff with expertise in foreign interference risk.
“This campaign will now be repeated annually to ensure new students and staff members are captured.
“It has a chilling effect,” George Williams, deputy vice-chancellor of UNSW, told the Sydney Morning Herald. “As you can imagine, that’s the sort of thing we look out for very carefully because a foreign government has tremendous power.”
Former Senator: Aussies Would ‘Rise Up’
In response to the UNSW’s new campaign, former Labor MP Michael Danby said that Australians would “rise up” to fight back against pro-Beijing groups even though we are a friendly nation.“Beijing and its embassy should be warned that interference in Australia, whether it’s persecuting citizens like Kevin Yam… or attacking students, like in the case of Drew Pavlou, or now at the University of New South Wales, is off limits,” he told Sky News on Aug. 16.
“We are a proud country, and no matter how many pro-Beijing advocates you have in your pocket, say this to the Chinese ambassador, people will rise up against you.
“We smile, and we’re nice, and we’re happy Australians, but it’s intolerable, and this has got to stop.”
In 2020, Drew Pavlou, a human rights activist who was studying at the University of Queensland, was violently attacked by Chinese students for criticizing the CCP’s infiltration of Australian universities and supporting the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong.
Universities Should Take Half the Blame
Mr. Danby, who once helped promote Australia’s Magnitsky-style human rights act, admitted that half the problem should be attributed to the Australian universities.In a video on the Chinese social media app Douyi, the Chinese version of TikTok, an international student speaking in Mandarin welcomes students to the communist thought study session, all the while with the USYD’s name and badge looming large in the background.
“Everyone is talking about China’s Sydney campus. Isn’t the Youth Great Study coming?” the USYD student wrote in a July 26 post introducing the video.
“Learn new thoughts and strive to be a new youth. Welcome to this Youth Great Study Online League lesson,” the student says before launching into a poetic quote.
Mr. Chang said that the study group is a communist indoctrination program that all university students in China under the CCP’s one-party rule are compelled to study.
“This is an app that basically all students in China have been victimized by… I hope the school [USYD] can condemn this mandatory learning,” he previously told The Epoch Times.
The university replied that the ability of its students and staff to learn, research, and collaborate in an environment free from interference is a priority.
Australia the Weak Link of Western World
Australia is considered to be the weak link of the Western world, according to the editorial series How the Spectre of Communism is Ruling Our World, published in 2018 by The Epoch Times.“Despite awareness of the CCP’s infiltration and influence on Western society, and particularly its infiltration and control of overseas Chinese communities, most well-meaning Westerners naively thought that the main purpose of the Party’s strategies was ‘negative’—that is, to silence the voices of critics and those with different political opinions,” reads the editorial.
“However, Hamilton says that behind the ‘negative’ operations are the CCP’s ‘positive’ ambitions: to use ethnic Chinese immigrants to change the framework of Australian society and to have Westerners sympathize with the PRC so as to allow Beijing to build up influence.”
“In this way, Australia would be transformed into the Party’s helper in its goal of becoming an Asian superpower and then a global one.”