But the official indulgence of all students — not just Chinese ones — has led to a strange culture of suspicion in universities. In the past, lecturers sought among their new cohort the keen students who might excel. Now they can’t help looking for the ones who might complain. Sadly, it is often fellow academics and administrators who are the complainants, reporting colleagues for “unacceptable” words and content, worried that difficult lecturers will jeopardise the university’s ranking.

In this fraught environment, the Higher Education bill was seen as a positive intervention, even though protecting free speech by legal statute — with the possibility that a judge might be the final arbiter of what’s acceptable — is clearly not the same thing as a truly democratic culture of free expression. It was not a silver bullet, but it was a shot across the bows of those who attempted to police language and cancel academic inquiry with which they disagreed.

But were UK universities and Government agencies nervous about aggravating the Beijing authorities, not known to be fans of free speech, because it might imperil China-based British campuses and their recruitment of lucrative Chinese students?

The loss of monetary returns — at a time of domestic financial crisis in the university sector — was certainly a factor. Today’s universities are big business machines, in which education is merely a means to an end: that is, to recruit yet more paying students.

I used to teach at a university in China, and when we were told by the university’s embedded CCP official that we had to monitor class attendance, all the Western lecturers rebelled and the scheme was dropped. Fast forward 10 years and such a scheme in the UK has been implemented without a peep of rebellion from lecturers. Students have to swipe their ID cards at the start of every lecture to record their attendance and failure to do so, especially by foreign nationals, is passed on to the Home Office. Clearly, British universities that advertise their wellbeing support networks have few qualms about threatening to revoke visas if students do what they have always done and fail to show up to class.

Meanwhile, for years now Chinese undergraduates have been excited to be part of an outreach programme that gives them the opportunity to escape authoritarianism and transfer to a freedom-loving British university. On arrival, many have found that the West’s much-vaunted educational excellence was in short supply. Others, not necessarily just Party apparatchiks, enjoyed their new-found liberty to chastise Western intellectual authority.

The Chinese Government has weighed up the pros and cons of doing business with British universities. On balance, it is pleased that Chinese youths are returning from the UK not indoctrinated in the ways of freedom and liberty but instead cognisant of new techniques of intellectual restraint and subject suppression. They have discovered that the British Government unilaterally undermines free speech. What a tragic lesson to learn.

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Austin Williams is the author of “China’s Urban Revolution” and director of the Future Cities Project. He is course leader at Kingston School of Art.

Future_Cities

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