Well, buried in the middle of this article is an important point:
> In fact, as of the fall 2019 semester, Gerber had been officially enrolled only at the university in China, not at St. Gallen.
So he was a Swiss person doing a PhD at a Chinese university. His relationship with the professor at the Swiss university was an unofficial one, so the word 'dismissal' here is pretty misleading. No information about what happened to his actual PhD program at the Chinese university that I noticed.
The actual evidence of chinese influence?
> She said she had received a message from a Chinese doctoral student doing research at a Canadian university.
So, it sure sounds like some people had their feelings hurt.
My totally made-up hypothesis on this article: honest reporter researched a story, realised it was pretty weak, then when they wrote it up shuffled things around a bit to give an exaggerated impact, but couldn't bring themselves to lie or leave out any facts.
There's information on his Swiss PhD program in the article. The Swiss University advised him to de-register so he could maintain years of eligibility or whatever, and the Swiss advisor continued to supervise him obviously. The University had told him that re-registering upon his return would be "no problem" with the support of the advisor. So he kind of got caught in a transitional stage where he has no options if a dispute with the advisor arises. Maybe it's not fair to criticize the University administration for this, but it's not accurate to simply describe him as unaffiliated and making up fake news or something.
As for the Canadian student, the quotes from the professor herself are what say the complaints came "from China". Perhaps she meant from the Chinese student in Canada, but if so that's her error, not the author's.
It does not pass the smell test. This is not an error one would make. Imagine one gets an email from Z, X-Y <xyz...@ucanuckistan.ac.ca>, then why would one describe this as "emails (ed: plural!) from China"?
My theory that fits the evidence given is that the professor is withholding the real "angry emails from China" because she thinks if those are published, then she definitely won't get a travel visum anymore and thus negatively impact her career.
It's possible. It's also possible that this was the only email, but she got a warning from some Chinese government agency through another channel.
There is of course also the distinct possibility that the professor was personally offended by the tweet (or imagined the offense taken) and made up the "emails from china" to make it seems more impactful.
I agree. This take is supported by the fact that the Prof refuses to reveal the email address of the Canadian student. My guess is similar to yours. She received emails e. g. from a Chinese consulate but is not allowed to reveal that fact - so she made up this "Canadian student" story.
Well, you would be surprised. It seems attempting to censor Twitter and other publications is part of their job. They even review German children books:
And that's the whole point of this piece of misinformation. "Came from China" doesn't mean that the country of China was involved, but that people in China involved didn't want this or that. It could similarly be a problem with news that "came from Switzerland", or that "came from USA", but of course the media wants to play the game of China (the country) as a bad actor.
It's not the people of China, who should be free to criticize their government and talk about any topic. It's the CCP that stops them and others worldwide.
More along the lines, 'Even in Switzerland the political pressure of China affects the freedom of speech'.
The part that you leave out is that the university actually recommended to the student that he should terminate/suspend his enrollment in the first place. To me it looks like the university is using the fact that he wasn't enrolled anymore as some kind of damage control to distance itself from the events.
You are right, the actual facts are not very strong (in terms of legal action), but I think it is a good 'I have nothing to hide...' example.
The swiss university had advised the student to be enrolled only China in order to make it easier for him to complete his PhD at the swiss university afterwards. The swiss university is now evading their moral responsibility by hiding behind the convenient legal situation.
The professor explicitly cut ties with the student because she was afraid to lose her ability to get a visa for China. It's unclear how she came to this conclusion, but I don't see how she can conclude this just from a message she got from a student in Canada. Chinese authorities must have made it clear at some point that they are ready to punish either this or any slightest misstep like this. And it's really an insignificant incident: someone who is not officially her student, has basically no followers because he just created his account, tweets a little and deletes everything as soon as the professor finds a problem with it.
I'm not familiar with universities outside the ETH rules (ETHZ/EPFL only) but students are paid a salary at these universities and hold dual status as employees and students. I'm not sure if their tuition is waived. Even if they pay the same tuition as masters or bachelors students this is usually around 800-900 CHF per semester, the cost of 2-3 months health insurance. Not money you want to pay if you don't have to, but it isn't UK or US fees.
However there are definitely time limits. You would find it hard to be enrolled on a doctoral programme for 6 years or more especially if you aren't about to imminently graduate, and this is likely the main motivation behind the advice given the proposed 3 year break in China.
Only PhDs are paid. I think the salary scale starts at around 51,000 CHF. That's a lot for other countries but it isn't for Switzerland. The exact amount is public knowledge and you can find it if you look. It is slightly higher for ETHZ, but not much.
Also the following account of his experience in China, which certainly served as a greater pretext than the tweets of an account with 10 followers:
> A Chinese professor there told him that his Ph.D. topic was «boring» – a euphemism for being too critical of the government. As a part of his fellowship, he also had to attend classes, and says today he couldn’t believe how much censorship took place in the course of everyday university life. When he submitted an essay on reeducation camps, he received the lowest grade possible. In an email to his professor in St. Gallen, he wrote: «Maybe I've just been unlucky.»
I am deeply bothered by this totalitarian allergic reaction to criticism at even the lowest level. However as someone who is intimately familiar with life in the soviet union, this is not simply a case of bad luck if one takes actions that significantly increase one's radar signature to the censorship arm. If you are perceived as being "troublesome" by those who stand to lose much through being affiliated with someone openly critical of the regime, they may well take action to smooth out this political perturbance in their lives. They may do so whether they are staunch believers in the status quo or simply wishing to remain neutral at worst.
Now I am not saying he should not have done what he did, but he should have been more aware of the possible outcomes to avoid being so blindsided.
It would have been far more effective to relay his thoughts through more sympathetic channels. If the first person one's government criticism goes through is not a fan, that is a shaky start for one's efforts. A support network is needed. One can't shout into the void alone.
I wouldn't want to be his sponsor either. It just shows either a complete misunderstanding of the power dynamics of an outsider doing research in China, or poor judgement.
> I wouldn't want to be his sponsor either. It just shows either a complete misunderstanding of the power dynamics of an outsider doing research in China, or poor judgement.
If your priorities are power dynamics, that would make sense. But there are other priorities, such as freedom of speech and open inquiry, which are more important, on which research and knowledge and freedom itself are based.
Speaking as someone who has been through the academic dance party, I wouldn't want to attend an academic institution in Switzerland. I've heard of many breakups between students and their advisors, although this seems particularly ill advised, but I've never heard of the institution kicking the student out immediately. Or of the other faculty not finding a place for him.
Their dedication to academic integrity is suspect.
They didn't have to kick him out. He was withdrawn from school, had a falling out with the PhD advisor he needed to get back in, then sued the school. After he sued the school and lost, professors really didn't want to be his advisor.
But unofficial relationships matter in science. For example, I am currently doing an unpaid internship in the hopes of getting a paper out of it. If the professor cancelled it, I might be left with nothing to show for months of hard work, similar to the guy in the story. That kind of thing is not uncommon at all at the PhD level.
> So he was a Swiss person doing a PhD at a Chinese university
He'd been advised by Gallen to deregister with a plan for how and when to re-enroll. It's pretty obvious in retrospect that they did this so they could have a trapdoor under him just in case something went bad in China.
Almost. Since the "Neue Züricher Zeitung" changed to their current editor-in-chief in - I wanna say 2015 - they have moved to towards a more politically right-wing, conservative position.
From how this position is expressed in germany-austria-switzerland, "china=bad, universities too liberal, someone think of my country!" is not an uncommon sentiment.
and certainly there's no reason why so many students from .cn, even .tw, do use, for instance, WeChat merely for 'clean', 'non-political', absolutely superficial messaging only but other Apps/Protocools speaking frankly -- ofc only to those whom they know and decided to trust
get out there : speak to students, any level, from any spot in .cn, be that .HK, or any mainland-.cn spot
if u succeed in establishing a bi-laterally trustet basis for discussion, well, then u achieved a lot in the first place
it was pretty different some 7-10yrs back, give or take; depended much more on where ppl originated from, where relatives/friends in .cn were stationed
it turned significantly worse -- from my pov, judged on the basis of experience of my real-life contacts -- i can pin-point the date : the day after that day when in .HK the Victoria Park got crowded peacefully for the first time and clips of it made top headlines, the other yr
there is no argument of whatever twisted nature which could whitewash what's been going on for some time : in the arts, for instance, we do not have a single contact in .cn who not yet experienced what suppression of the .cn-govt kind can amount to. in specific fields of neuroscience, i can speak of myself, it worsened dramatically, in particular, when all the paper-mills, fakes & fraud in sciences and faked-publications widely made news progressively
right now, as we speak, there are 3 ppl from .cn in that part only of the univ college bldg i'm currently in, who told me, that they perfectly well know what's expected from them not make their friends and relatives in .cn pay for their 'a-social' behaviour. on a regular basis they post some crappy pics to fb/ig but no personal comment other that 'happy b-day', or so.
their wording, in private, on this whole issue of soc-nets and what to do, more importantly, what not to do, is way more blunt and precise : suffering is the term most frequently employed
a very well-known artist, who sadly died the other month, spoke about his experiences in .cn when visting a friends art-circle in .cn for quite a few months. he was not the man to be easily scared. he'd worked a lot on what nazi-phekkers did, their ideology, their crimes. he had been attacked by french presidential candiates, amongst one not shy to send him her creeps to his doorstep interfering disturbingly with his installations & exhibitions [till they realised it boosted reception of his art but not their malicious intent]. as he did put it, to him too, there was no big difference in what it must have been like in the 3rd reich and what he experienced over there.
systems are much alike. badges, and brand names, may differ tho
techniques might have improved, aims and malicious intent not
Thank you! I am glad to see people are actually reading the articles. Last time this was published no one even bothered to note that there was no intervention from China whatsoever. Following the same logic a hotel worker losing their job because an American tourist complained can say that the United States got them fired..
The comments critical of the CCP in this thread prove that confirmation bias is alive and well. There are many things to critique about China obviously but this particular instance is not one of them.
Yes, there is no concrete intervention that the CCP did. Still, a supervisor broke off their contact with a promising student based on either the fear of retribution or personal feelings of nationalism. That culture is the product of CCP censorship and many people don't want it in the western world.
Honestly, if I were a professor and my PhD student was overly critical of the US online, I too would distance myself. Visa applications are hard enough as they are.
Eh - I knew Arab students who couldn't get their visa renewed for some years after Sep 11. They were involved in antiwar protests, etc. The fact that the US put many of its own anti-war activists on no-fly lists despite not having any evidence they were threats makes this pretty easy to believe.
Happy ending here: he was admitted to the country a week later, on his second attempt, in time to start classes.
(I'm not making excuses for the---dire---state of our immigration policy as a whole. But I was happy to see that this particular case worked out in the end.)
The article mentions a single tweet with a comic depiction that includes possibly exaggerated Asiatic features. Whether this kind of thing qualifies as “racist”… opinions may differ, especially since the article does not provide the original image.
Some comments might be off the mark, but the article itself is completly honest about the fact that they cannot prove that any chinese officials were even involved in this mess.
The underlying criticism is more that the professor (and if you want to extrapolate swiss institutions as a whole) engaged in some "working towards the fuhrer" behaviour. She took very drastic steps (ruining this students career) on the basis of what would be in the interest of the CCP.
And I would argue that this behaviour is very much incentivized by the CCP. Take a look at how censorhip within the country works: The laws are often quite vague, but enforcement is draconian. This leads people and institutions to guess what the government would want and act (self-censor) accordingly.
This is an article spun to make controversy out of nothing.
The narrative is that a student tweeted something critical about China, and the CCP pressured his advisor into dropping him.
The reality is that the student published a tweet that "depicted a comic character that had been altered and had stereotyped Chinese features, with yellow skin tone and slit eyes". This understandably was perceived as racist by a Chinese student in Canada, who complained to the advisor. The advisor agreed and dropped her racist-seeming doctoral student.
The CCP wasn't involved. Nobody cared about his criticism of China. It was his racist-looking tweet that got him dismissed.
Edit: But yes, the CCP can have a chilling effect on free speech. See the Blitzchung controversy. This article is just a non-story.
The advisor who dismissed the student changed their story multiple times, didn't name the accuser, and contradicts the Ph.D. students records of his matriculation and attendance. Furthermore she has a motive, if she is truly under political pressure or is intimidated by the diplomatic consequences of being associated with a critic of CCP. She is a China researcher, so being barred from entering China could be a fatal blow to her career. Finally, the last thing she wants is a viral story in fairly reputable newspaper of record.
I cannot directly refute your claims, only call them into question. But I think that is the crux of the story here anyway, to question. What affect is the mass surveillance and blanket censorship of China having on Western institutions of open inquiry? Are the tendrils of the PRC police state stretching into places we assume will always be bastions of free speech? I don't think we can definitively answer these either way today.
Almost the entire article is spun telling only one part of the story, and only towards the very end do they, at least, reveal the other side, which shows that the student published a racist cartoon, and that it was just some random person who complained to the professor. It feels misleading and deliberate that, from the start, they mention that they've seen the emails which confirm the student's account, but withhold the rest of the information (the racist image; the deregistration affair) until near the end.
It's convenient to believe that your enemy is so fragile that they're threatened by a twitterer with a dozen followers. I don't see how that does one any good outside a feeling of smug superiority. China is building a frightening amount soft power through trade deals and building goodwill. That's what people should be talking about, not China supposedly censoring angry opinions that can be found anywhere else on the internet.
China is not at all worried about small Twitter followers. But if China shows they will shut down even the most inconsequential dissent. Then real dissent will know that, if they speak up, they will be shutdown very hard.
> It's convenient to believe that your enemy is so fragile
There is ample evidence that they are butt-hurt by the tiniest criticism – intentioned or not, real or imagined, by inclusion or by omission – which would not even count as an affront under most other circumstances. The psychic trauma that is amenable to a degree for this response unfortunately is deeply seated and difficult to shake loose.
Until I see it, I'm not going to believe that cartoon is racist. I mean seriously, Asian people have skin that is somewhat more yellow and somewhat narrower eyes. With the way the media manipulates anything, the lack of a photo is a pretty strong sign that the cartoon ISN'T significantly racist (just as the lack of race in the title in a act of police brutality is a strong sign that the victim is white).
I'm afraid I may have dragged you down with me. Johnny thought he saw CCP behind the tree, so the surrounding transnational region needs to be firebombed as a precautionary measure. One has to go along with it, or one is immediately court marshaled as a secret CCP sympathizer.
Anyway, now that we're at the bottom of the comment thread and just talking to each other, thanks for vouching for me. You probably saved me from being hammered even deeper into the downvote pit.
The professor should be fired and the university punished (doubtful), but the student was also an idiot to do what he did. It’s not like he was some random guy who just tweeted at China, he lived in wuhan for years and has actual family there now, being critical of a totalitarian government in that scenario is the height of monumental stupidity. It’s ironic that the article paints him as methodological and thoughtful because he seems anything but in his actions.
But nominally, you can be a political fool in Switzerland without professional consequence.[a] It seems he is being forced to play by the social rules of China in Switzerland. It's fair to say his tweets could jeopardize his ability to return to China and secure a professorship or research position, but to suffer professional consequences in Switzerland, in the heart of Europe, for Chinese political incorrectness is unprecedented.
[a] For example, in America you can post on Facebook about MAGA or tweet about BLM and you will rarely if ever lose your job or doctorate candidacy.
You found an incredibly ripe cherry to pluck with this one! Literally anyone with a beef can attempt to derail a hiring decision nowadays. People are getting unhired because someone dug up old Instagram videos where they say the N word while singing rap lyrics as a teenager. It’s absolutely insane, and you cherry picked one example that is not even remotely representative of this phenomenon as a whole.
Chinese government is of course far more authoritarian but it is wise to point out that things have been worsening in US academia over the last couple of years.
My rebuttal would be that in the US there is a strong cultural reaction against such "political correctness", while CCP seems to be doubling down on the necessity of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics with Xi Jinping as the nation's steward.
Only if the post praises BLM and criticizes MAGA... Lots of people have lost their jobs (and even dropped from public funded colleges) because of this. Not sure if you are really not aware of this, or if your comment is not in good faith.
I had a quick search and i only found one case - a Michael J Dale covered in various outlets alleging dismissal for MAGA support back in 2018. However, i cant find that the case actually went to court. It appears Michael has decided against testing his claim in court?
I can find some cases for the opposite - dismissal for criticising president Trimp:
Jeff Klinzman had his day in court and was awarded a payout.
Rob Rogers didn’t go through courts but former employer on record in the Guardian newspaper confirming reason for his dismissal was his criticism of trump.
Craig Silverman again didn’t go via courts but his previous employer confirmed the reason for his shows termination.
Allegations that don’t appear to have gone to court yet:
Cases (as in court cases) are just the easily visible tip of the iceberg. We do not see the aggrieved who did not make their story public for whatever reason.
MAGA proponents are not fools and know when to keep their opinions to themselves, I've noticed. My last company was openly hostile to the last President as a matter of informal policy, and there was much polite nodding in supposed agreement.
> Only if the post praises BLM and criticizes MAGA... Lots of people have lost their jobs (and even dropped from public funded colleges) because of this.
I've never heard of such a thing. Could you give a specific example of these "lots of people"?
Additionally, this framing - of MAGA vs. BLM - is also unreasonable. Hiring processes are by design discriminatory; people don't just hire at random. There's no reason to assume public statements by a candidate that appear to fall in a pro-BLM bucket would be as attractive to the hiring process as statements that fall in a MAGA bucket would be unattractive; those two things likely have nothing to do with each other when it comes to hiring.
In other words, regardless of actually instances of discrimination, this framing looks chosen to try and create or sustain the so-called culture war.
from the context of the article it seems like he's getting his PhD in Chinese studies, and obviously that likely means you will have relations to China, which is what the professor in question was worried about.
It's a little bit like majoring in Iranian studies, insulting the Ayatollah and prophet on Twitter and then being upset when you get barred from the country and people start professionally ditching you. Like, when you pursue an academic career with close ties to a country with a very different political set of values I would assume you understand the kind of diplomatic issues you can run into?
His PhD was about environmental damage in China. That is not something cultural or diplomatic. It does not require close ties with China, though it does help to have access.
Nothing here means you shouldn't criticize China. In fact, the premise of the research becomes moot if you cannot criticize China.
it evidently is or else we wouldn't be having this discussion right now. Everything in China is political which everyone knows who has ever interacted with Chinese institutions. (which you probably will if you study environmental damage in China).
It's really not that surprising that a professor is not going to associate with someone who posts vaguely racist cartoons to his ten followers on twitter if it costs them their visa.
If you really want a career that involves studying aspects of a foreign culture you better learn to navigate the waters or you won't have a career, that's not really a new thing. If you're an archaeologist you probably won't be one for long if you insult the governments that let you access your dig sites, is that really a scandal?
I think it actually requires both diplomacy and cultural awareness.
If you want to study the ‘damage’ that a country is doing, it seems like it would serve you well to avoid ruffling too many feathers so that you can do your work in peace and without being accused of bias.
I mean it sort of is though. There are no elections in China, the CCP has total control over the government. You can claim that a country isn't defined by its government, but many would disagree.
There is so much more to China and the people who come from there than its communism, even though its communism calls the shots. That's sort of how this mess of Cross-Strait relations came about. What is China and what is not is by no means a resolved question. Let's hope for a peaceful resolution.
As I said in another comment, in the U.S., if you’re an African American studies PhD student and you post a racist cartoon depicting black stereotypes, it’s not hard to imagine losing your doctorate candidacy.
Especially in America's highly controversial political climate today. This story would be much easier to parse if he had merely criticized the CCP, rather than reposting the cartoon. We should remember this incident and see if the pattern will repeat in the future, or if this was a case of inappropriate behavior that was fairly disciplined.
Considering that the UBS put their chief economist on a leave of absence (initially they communicated that he had been let go of completly), for calling pigs in china "chinese pigs", I think ever mentioning that topic alone would already be to much.
I would assume in the first case, like the previous example, you would lose the Ph.D. But the second example with bears (assuming Pooh) is not a fair comparison to hate speech.
What are you even talking about? Posting racist cartoon depicting stereotypes about Chinese is exactly what the Chinese studies PhD student did, so this is an exact parallel.
Do you have a copy of the cartoon? The article intimated that it had possibly exaggerated Asiatic features. It did not indicate that the cartoon’s actual intent was to lampoon an entire race, which is what would traditionally qualify as racism (although I know the goalposts have been moved quite a bit).
I don’t have a copy of the cartoon, and I haven’t read anything about this story other than what’s in the article. But that the article is very vague about the cartoon is rather telling in itself: if it is innocuous enough why isn’t it included or at least described in more detail as ammunition? The author wasn’t shy about including the full tweet they’d like you to believe was the smoking gun. It’s also impossible to tell “actual intent” even if the image is provided; pushing a political message is not at all mutually exclusive with contempt against an entire people.
Anyway, this jollybean poster apparently also doesn’t have a copy and posted in bad faith just to mislead people who didn’t actually read the article, or only read what the author intended to highlight. Really tried of this bad faith engagement.
I posted multiple quotes from the very article being discussed as a reply to another misinformation comment from you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28097088 If this very one-sided article says it was racist, it was, or they would have used it as ammunition instead of being as vague as possible.
At this point it is very clear you’re deliberately pushing bs in bad faith. You should be ashamed of yourself.
It had winnie the poo memes afaik. It would be like posting the drawn image of obama as a monkey (which caused a stir a while ago) while criticizing his policies in the US.
Wait a second. Is the argument here that comparing Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh is "racist"? As opposed to just, say, offensive to a very powerful fat man? Wow, OK. I think we have a new standard for the use of racism accusations to censor people.
Of course it is racist. I'm not sure if it was the Winnie the pooh, I assumed it was due to its prevalence and how the article described it as a cartoon depicting stereotyped features (yellow skin).
Maybe you read about the incident elsewhere but TFA vaguely hints at a drawing of a Chinese person with offensively stereotyped features, which doesn’t sound compatible with your Winnie the Pooh theory.
In any case TFA deliberately made it hard for readers to form their own judgement.
He was getting a PhD from a university in China though? He was deregistered as a PhD candidate in his former university as well. If you're on a Chinese government scholarship and visa and your livelihood depends on that (as well as new family ties), why would you criticize the Chinese government? His research and life was tied to China. I would imagine you'd want to play by their social rules then.
Couple of professors who are unfriendly to black people got fired too, not saying its wrong, but its not that different in this case. Someone got offended, someone got fired.
You can definitely get in massive trouble in the US and put your job in danger. Your superiors just have to massively disagree, or you might be posting about sensitive topics like Israel or the military.
Both BLM and MAGA are incredibly mainstream movements.
Maybe not lose your job, but the University of California will prevent you from getting one, as they require all job candidates to commit to and have a history of advancing diversity. Conflicting political posts would probably harm your ability to pass this first step of the job application process.
I doubt the UCA is actually going to check. But it us still horrible that a university is enacting such a political requirement.
It feels to me much more aimed at being able to fire people when controversy arrises than something used to actively screen new hires. Though perhaps the self-selection is also meant as a goal.
> It feels to me much more aimed at being able to fire people when controversy arrises than something used to actively screen new hires.
If you mean my speculation about political posts, then you're probably right. But if you mean the diversity pledge screening, then you couldn't be more wrong. From another article on the same subject:
> eight different departments affiliated with the life sciences used a diversity rubric to weed out applicants for positions. This was the first step: In one example, of a pool of 894 candidates was narrowed down to 214 based solely on how convincing their plans to spread diversity were.
The student partner was living in Wuhan. The partner beg them to stop, and they didn’t. Its partner is lucky not to be sent to a “re-education” camp.
We all agree that the fact that this can happen is wrong, but what the student did is not just wishful thinking, they put their loved ones at risk. That’s very disrespectful of other people lives.
A PhD proofs that one is capable of conducting independent research on some topic. This story proofs that they are definitely not capable of conducting and directing independent research on China, so it makes no sense for this student to be on a PhD program anyways. They should have known better, since they were “China experts”, but they didn’t.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
I think calling for the professors dismissal in this instance is completely unwarranted. Not only do we have only one side of the story here, we don't even know what those tweets were, or if there's anything else at play here, nor is the relationship very clear here (the supposed student was actually studying in china for 3 years? What exactly was the relationship with the Swiss professor then?) Additionally, it's just not acceptable to demand others suffer the consequences for fights you picked, no matter the justification.
I mean, there is clearly an argument that the funding, influence and prestige the Confucius institute grants also allows them influence, and that that influence is perhaps unwanted. But if that's the conclusion, we should demand a counter-pressure by parties that are better able to withstand chinese pressure, e.g. perhaps some coalition of European countries that reject the institute whole cloth. Unfortunately, I doubt the EU can do much here because it's already been infiltrated by governments that clearly appear to be under Chinese influence, such as Hungary, and it needs unanimity for most action; and of course Switzerland isn't even in the EU.
To put it another way: I have doubts a country like Switzerland would dare to pick this fight with China alone - but if so, how absurdly unreasonable is it to expect an individual professor to, without any kind of policy. The whole issue puts the wisdom of Switzerland's idea of independence at risk.
Also, I no matter how you reject China's actions, I think it's morally pretty questionable to put your partner's family at risk, even if you think you're in the right, even if you are.
The EU can take action against China and it has recently took soft action by updating its customs code¹. However, Germany is not particulary keen on picking fights with China, because they export vehicles to the Chinese market. Let's just say there is not enough political will to do anything like this at this time. There's also the separate issue of banning Huawei 5G network carrier equipment in the EU due to data being leaked to China.
Let us check it again: I understand it is more like "There exist operators in Swiss education who are in a weak position, e.g. for the need to obtain visa which could be critical to perform their job".
It is not that there is not an influence (it could be China as much as many other entities), but given the above it is transversal to the job.
CCP influence in foreign universities is definitely a thing, at least under Xi (mostly aimed at Mainland Chinese students studying abroad, not Westerners directly).
It got to the point where a special taskforce was set up specifically to tackle this issue here in Australia; I'd be surprised if we were the only country experiencing this.
Totally agree - he is studying china, lived in china, has a chinese girlfriend in china who advised him to stop the critical tweets…and he just kept doing it anyway???
“His girlfriend was shocked when she saw some of the tweets. Talking with him on the telephone, she begged him to stop. Not because she necessarily disagreed with anything. But because she was worried about retaliation by the Chinese government. «I'm in Switzerland, not China,» Gerber replied. «I can say what I want here.»
Sorry to sound harsh, but I would argue that level of naivety / ignorance pretty much should disqualify him from a PhD in anything related to modern day China.
I say that jeopardizing the safety of your loved one and her family back in China after they specifically ask you not to take some action, and while you are safely abroad is not a good example of moral courage
There are countries in the world who do not have a patriot act or similar. They can argue in place of the USA that the government of the country discussed in the article is totalitarian.
The story goes: dude studies in china. Is in Switzerland bc of corona. Starts posting anti CCP on Twitter. Posts racist picture, some chinese PhD student in Canada sees it. Emails his supervisor. Supervisor sees it and decides that she doesn't want to work with someone who posts racist pictures (for the wrong reason not bc of the picture but because she fears she will get excluded if she publishes with him). This is all very plausible imo if one could actually see the picture which conveniently isn't included.
This is not saying anything about the CCPs control over research which is a very serious topic. As long as I don't see the relevant picture. It's a researcher not wanting to publish with a someone who posts racist stuff.
It is very convenient to only mention the racist picture and not also mention the accusation of the Chinese Coronavirus cover-up.
The latter is just as bad for the CCP and would also lead to the events we have seen.
But it's obvious that when you are doing Chinese studies paid by a Chinese university, then you're not free from repercussions when you tweet from a European country.
So yes, China is influencing European universities and the west appears to accept this.
The CCP can block the supervisor's future Chinese visa prospects if she were somehow linked to the PhD candidate. Hence she disowned him and utilized the university machinery to achieve it. That's literally the premise of the article.
Except that's what the professor thought would happen, not what actually did. If we're to act on hypothetical then where would we draw the line? The US asks visa applicants for all of their social media accounts, seems pretty standard to me.
That's what the professor thought would happen, based on historical precedent. She used that precedent as a basis to proactively act against the candidate.
Not sure what the timeline is here. TFA strongly implies it’s a tweet on March 21 inciting a response on March 28, but buries the lede about the racist cartoon posted at an unknown time that the professor claims to have received an email about.
I’m sure political factors play the leading role here, but it’s long past the point where you can casually post racist cartoons and act surprised when you’re hit by undesirable consequences. Imagine an African American studies PhD student casually posting racist cartoons depicting black stereotypes. People have been disciplined for much less (e.g. that professor who spoke a common Chinese phrase resembling the n word several times to caution students and later got suspended).
And before you accuse me of things, I’m a long time HN user and I’m not paid to comment. Using a throwaway for radioactive topics.
You're using a moniker 'casualracism' trying to exploit the notion of a cartoon which has 'Chinese Characters' as inherently racist, even though that's entirely likely to be a weaponized use of the term given the political context.
"If you criticized China, you are Racist" is bad form.
It's a very easy and common method of CCP duplicity to simply blow the 'racism' dog whistle and have 1/2 of Westerners immediately lose context and get distracted.
There's no way what the PhD student did should lead to anything other than someone being trite on Twitter and that would be the end of it.
TFA tried very hard to bury and brush off this detail but had to include
> It depicted a comic character that had been altered and had stereotyped Chinese features, with yellow skin tone and slit eyes. This drawing circulated on social media in the spring of 2020, and was deemed racist by some users.
The student reluctantly admitted
> In retrospect, I realize I didn't question the rendering of the Chinese person enough
Given TFA’s clear sympathy for the student and intentional omission of what the cartoon actually is, one simply has to assume it’s at least as racist as TFA claims (oh who am I kidding, it’s more racist). It’s clearly not a case of “the notion of cartoon which has ‘Chinese character’ as inherently racist.” Asking “have you read the article” is frowned upon on HN but this is a case where the question justified. It’s either that or you’re arguing in bad faith.
original tweets need to contained within articles like this. Timelines should be standard, before the body of the argument. Way too easy to spin a narrative for an audience hungry to believe.
>TFA strongly implies it’s a tweet on March 21 inciting a response on March 28, but buries the lede about the racist cartoon posted at an unknown time that the professor claims to have received an email about.
I continue to be amazed with how creative propaganda can be. It is a simple misdirection (but oh how effect, just read the comments here). There is a paper trail showing what tweet the pushback had been about but the article still takes the liberty to draw up a strawman, and concludes -- Criticising the CCP is supposed to be «Neo-Nazi» like? Hawww.....
One thing I have realized over time is that it is one thing to recognize deficiencies in an argument you are against, and a completely different thing to recognize the same in arguments for a cause that you do believe in.
Legally the university might have done nothing wrong. They had advised him to unregister to play tricks in order to avoid losing his study rights. A trick that is common if you study at more than one university. And works unless there is any kind of problem.
However, the message is: If you deal with China today, either don't think, be a coward or a liar. China is an authoritarian country that increasingly exercises its power outside of the country.
In Western democracies we are used that you can criticize. Strong democracies tolerate heavy criticism until you get into difficulties, others only weaker kinds. There is no doubt that China is very far from any kind of democracy.
> In the United States too, a quarter of the country’s Confucius Institutes have been shut down in recent years. Universities no longer wanted to give legitimacy to an institution that defended fundamentally different values.
Well, that makes a statement about the purpose of a university.
„The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly paradoxical idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.“
I think that summary misses out how much Popper argues should be tolerated. e.g. in the quote in the article, Popper writes:
> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
The university system developed inside the cultural western tradition, it didn't fall from the sky. It most definitely has to self-preserve. But i m curious what you think the purpose of a university is
As a faculty member and PhD advisor, let me offer my reading between the lines. The student and advisor did not get along already. The student went to China and found a girlfriend. The lockdown separated them. Hormones flared, exacerbating what was probably already a tense situation.
The student was increasingly a problem (note the screaming at the advisor mentioned in TFA). The advisor decided that it was no longer worth the effort to maintain the unofficial relationship and broke the promise of supporting the student's future re-enrollment. Dealing with unprofessional students sucks. It's very hard to "fire" grad students for unproductivity or workplace issues, unless they are egregious. In this situation the advisor had a convenient out and took it.
Well I got my PhD, so let me read between your lines ([1]).
Faculty have little fiefdoms and they expect students to live on salaries bellow minimum wage. If the advisor is sub-par (i.e. the university made a mistake hiring them) it's incredibly difficult to change advisors without poisoning the relationship with other faculty members.
Dealing with sub-par professors sucks. Some are not too bright. Others sexually harass the female students. All are protected by the moat the university builds around them.
[1] I'll admit it's a bit weird to see a professor that I'm assuming given the forum, is in a tech field "read between the lines" instead of engaging the facts.
You're entirely correct. Academia is broken is so many ways. A lot of my colleagues are wastes of space and some are indeed harmful. I don't think I'm a great advisor either. No one teaches us how to advise students.
My take is based entirely on facts of the article interpreted through an advisor's lens rather than that of a journalist trying to get clicks.
The fact that the advisor in the OP changed their stories multiple times indicates duplicity. Your inability to see that, coupled with an abrupt allegation against the journalist suggests self-deception
Now you've also fabricated something about the journalist, their motive and character. Do you have any factual basis for that? What do you know about the journalist?
"[1] I'll admit it's a bit weird to see a professor that I'm assuming given the forum, is in a tech field "read between the lines" instead of engaging the facts."
I'll keep it up in my comment because I despise it when ppl scrub clean what they wrote.
But the rest is entirely fabricated and ignores the clear statements of the advisor themself, which is that they didn't want to offend China and would for that reason terminate the relationship.
> the advisor had a convenient out and took it
How is it a convenient out? 'CCP pressure' doesn't sound like a convenient reason. The advisor could have pulled the 'you're no long enrolled' trick at any time.
Quote from the article: "The professor went on to explain that the relationship of trust had already been strained, because Gerber had «lost his temper» during a conversation a year earlier, and had told her that he no longer wanted to continue his doctorate at St. Gallen in any form, and no longer needed her as a doctoral supervisor."
I'd trust an email record over he-said / she-said claims.
"Losing temper" is quite vague; and evidently, it didn't warrant terminating the relationship until the tweets happened.
Let's not pretend the timing was a coincidence. The relationship was clearly terminated because of the tweets, which has nothing to do with the professor.
Thats not evidence. That is just a claim made by the professor, which is denied by the former student and which, according the the article, is not reflected in the tone of the emails exchanged at this time, either.
Isn't eye-witness testimony considered evidence? Maybe the professor is lying, true. But also professional emails tend to be more cordial than in-person conversations. In terms of motives, the student has more motive to lie than the professor, since the professor has nothing at stake.
The nice tone of the professor’s emails (after the run-in) could be also proof of her goodwill. While student showed his lack of self control on twitter.
This is just a different aspect of the same facts.
> The nice tone of the professor’s emails (after the run-in) could be also proof of her goodwill.
What was nice about it?
> student showed his lack of self control on twitter
I don't see a lack of control on Twitter. The student wasn't talking to the professor, and there is nothing inappropriate about their Twitter comments as reported, beyond the cartoon which IIRC the advisor didn't cite.
That was after the fact, with no evidence, after Gerber had contested the separation. The emails contemporaneous with the events clearly show differently.
Regardless of the merits of this case, I think it is interesting to also consider if the reverse could conceivably happen. Could a Chinese professor become worried about travel visa to the US because one of their students starts posting things critical of the US? I think for a Chinese professor the answer is perhaps not immediately obvious, but if you switch it to a professor from an Arabic country, I think the concern would definitely be valid. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if there is a lot of self-censorship like this going on already.
Edit: in fact, in a different thread, perihelions posted an instance of such a visa denial happening in the US.
I don't know how evident it is in the West, but what you mentioned for the US is very true, not just for Arab countries but also South Asian and African visitors. Around more than a decade back, when our school had planned for a trip to NASA, I remember the teachers and the visa guide aggressively asking all the students who had applied to scrub anything political off their social media and their public profiles elsewhere. The US visa officials are also the most hostile lot, and while I didn't experience much hassle during my interview (I guess because I worked in a white shoe firm which was sponsoring the visa), I was witness to seeing a Sikh family get intensely rattled and rammed during their process.
As a PhD advisor myself, this is telling. I always respond to all of my students' emails. This suggests a poor relationship between them already exists before the tweeting.
Meta comment: this story is the future of geopolitics. A confusing mess of different narratives, each backed up with a cornucopia of digital “evidence.” It is still unclear to me exactly what happened here. All I can be certain of is that all participants are incentivized to spin a story in their own favor.
To be clear, what happened to this kid is horrible and just demonstrates that we have to get serious on this problem.
However this comment annoyed me:
"«I'm in Switzerland, not China,» Gerber replied. «I can say what I want here.»"
You can tell this kid grew up in the la-la land that is the West, particularly Europe. I find this comment to be an infuriating mix anivete and patronizing.
For the naïveté Switzerland is a landlocked country of 10 million people. Tough guys, great companies, great economy, sure. But a minnow. China can and does throw it's weight against people in countries like this.
For the patronizing part of the comment, it's the Western attitude of "this can't happen here", or "that will never get to be so bad" typical of people that are 70 years removed from tyranny (I'm Western myself, but my parents lived through a dictatorship).
This is the attitude that allows people in the West to compartmentalize all the known abuses (snowden leaks, NSA spying on European leaders, Big Tech squashing our rights, etc) and live in a permanent state of double-think.
Patronizing: you know what's patronizing? The notion that this kid simply doesn't understand the realpolitik. Of course he does: it just punched him in the face. He's fighting it. I respect him for that.
Infuriating: you know what's infuriating? The person who claims to share the values this guy is standing up for but can't stop trash-talking him.
Naïveté: you know what's naive? Thinking that rolling over and accepting realpolitik bullying is going to make things better.
La-la land: you know where that is? It's right between cynicism and self-loathing. Of course things can get bad here! That's why we need to fight whenever they slide in that direction! Of course the West isn't a bastion of moral purity above all reproach! That doesn't excuse China's behavior, it doesn't make them the lesser evil, and it doesn't mean they aren't worth fighting!
Stop navel-gazing and stand up for what you believe in. At the very least, cheer on those who do.
I have no problem cheering on those who take on known risks. But a person who takes on risks they are ignorant off are not heroes. They're cannon fodder for internet chatterers who cheer them to their doom. They are to be pitied.
I'm under no illusions that something has to be done to contain the rising totalitarians around the world. But I won't send a delusional noob to fight it for me.
As to your comments about self-loathing. I love the West. I just don't think self-immolation through twitter is that effective. He's changed nothing for the better and lost everything.
But we agree on something. He just got punched in the face w/ realpolitik
> Patronizing: you know what's patronizing? The notion that this kid just doesn't understand the realpolitik. Of course he does: it just punched him in the face. He's fighting it. I respect him for that.
I disagree. His Chinese girlfriend was begging him to stop, but he carried on. It’s either hubris or not realizing what China is willing to do to stop people from criticizing it. He was also enrolled in a Chinese university, and was undoubtedly warned about criticizing the government.
I'm not one for turning up my nose to criticising government's like China's but the reality is that freedom of speech is not an important aspect to Chinese society (including many others) and if one wants to work there, travel there, and not endanger people there as he has done with his girlfriend's family, then one needs to at least consider the consequences for critical speech and whether they're worth bearing.
> There was also no risk to his GF. At worst, the relationship ends - it's not like the CCP is going to go after her (she did ask him to stop).
I'm not sure why you think being so apparently reasonable is also something her government and its supporters care about?
> So should he just shut up, then? It's scary if most people feel that way.
If his goal was to complete his studies at the Chinese university or maintain a relationship with his doctoral advisor who has ties to China, or to not make life for his girlfriend and her family difficult, yes.
I don’t agree with the methods of the CCP to silence dissent, but that’s reality. Nothing will change on account of this guy.
This is not a reasonable assumption and once it's throw out it becomes clear this boy was endangering others as well as himself by doing something ill-advised and unplanned.
It sounds very wise, except the person under discussion also did not do anything. He simply spoke poorly and got crushed. That isn't action of any kind, except as a type of suicide.
Oh, what u r saying here is patronizing. Before you start to criticize others or another country, shouldn't you do some basic justification or research. Free speech is not about just blindly saying whatever u want. That's irresponsible. Ppl should be responsible for whatever they say as grown man.
When you are blaming China's behavior or any other country's behavior, do u see any proof abt those so-called bad behaviors? Or u just read some news and followed whatever ppl are saying.
In addition, every country has its own problems and own culture. Try to respect others first. If there is improvement other should have, what is needed is constructive suggestion instead of patronizing blame.
Indeed I am disappointed abt this student's behavior as he has studied in China for sometime and he made friends in China as well, he should have a good understanding abt the life there and would understand what had happened there during COVID. He could have been more responsible for what he tweeted.
The perfect is not the enemy of the good. "The west" is definitely not a paragon of virtue, all its flaws notwithstanding, is order of magnitude (or two) better than a CCP style government. I would much rather live in "the west", where i am, than in China.
Freedom of speech is protected only so much as the protection is enforced. It is not some sort of fundamental law. With weak-kneed politicians and indifferent population it inevitably erodes.
It actually is. It's a fundamental human right under the European Convention on Human Rights (to which Switzerland is a party) , Art. 10:
"ARTICLE 10
Freedom of expression
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right
shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart
information and ideas without interference by public authority
and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States
from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema
enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it
duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities,
conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and
are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national
security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention
of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for
the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing
the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for
maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."
It is not a fundamental law in scientific sense, i.e. it is not a natural property of any kind. You want freedom of speech, fine, but you have to fight to get it and keep it alive. Otherwise it becomes just another unenforceable legalistic quirk like beheading for insulting the Queen is today.
> You want freedom of speech, fine, but you have to fight to get it and keep it alive.
This needs to be said more often… rights cannot be reduced to a “declaration” or a “bill”. They are social constructs that wither away and die without constant social reinforcement, both formal and informal.
Rights aren't "social constructs" if they're natural rights, that is, those that follow from the nature of what it means to be a human being. Those are recognized, not "constructed". These must be distinguished from those things that are merely asserted as rights and that people like to make up to suit their agendas.
But, given that, natural rights can be violated and fail to be protected from those who would do so. So just because something is natural in nature does not mean it cannot be suppressed. It is natural and proper for human beings to speak, but speech can be suppressed. So yes, a society that stops protecting rights will see more violations of them. Declarations are magic incantations. You need power and authority to back them up.
(Also, w.r.t. freedom of speech, I am here not assuming unrestricted speech and "expression"; this has never existed and cannot exist and so on. Rights are not absolute: you can forfeit even your right to life by murdering another human being, for example. Thus rights must be understood in the context of justice.)
Humanity for the longest time existed without any hint of universal inalienable rights. Calling them that is aspirational. They are not "natural" in any way except being the norm in very recent social reality of certain fortunate parts of the world.
"Article 35. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration."
"Article 36. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief..."
"Article 37. The freedom of person of citizens of the People's Republic of China is inviolable..."
"Article 49. Marriage, the family, and mother and child are protected by the state..."
Just meaningless words on a page. To be completely fair, the text does imply that the above isn't worth a wooden nickel in practice:
"Article 51. The exercise by citizens of the People's Republic of China of their freedoms and rights may not infringe upon the interests of the state, of society and of the collective, or upon the lawful freedoms and rights of other citizens."
The European Convention on Human Rights has a similar clause (which you quoted) that allows the state to eliminate one's rights "for the protection of health or morals". It seems that "human rights" are mainly there to make the state seem legitimate. They "protect" humans against the state for exactly as long as the state allows.
Yes, article 51 that you quoted more or less makes any other article completely irrelevant. That's the whole point. In western countries there really isn't an equivalent to Article 51 in any meaningful sense. China's government is an oppressive dictatorship by design. It makes a big difference.
I didn't suggest anything, generally I avoid suggestion. It's pusillanimous.
Switzerland has a lot of freedom, certainly compared to China and other European countries. It's without a doubt my favorite country, one I'd want to live in. But, as we're finding out, the "free speech protections" that we drone on about are only as good as we are willing to insist on.
"freedom of speech is protected in this country" is meaningless if it only restricts government from silencing its citizens. Companies and powerful interest groups can and do restrict the speech of people, and I don't see the Swiss government rushing to pass laws to force Google to stop censoring.
Anyway, freedom of speech protections in Switzerland are not that good compared to, say, the US. You can't, for example, criticize islam (I hate when people mock islam, btw).
From Article 261 of the Swiss Penal Code:
"Any person who publicly and maliciously insults or mocks the religious convictions of others, and in particularly their belief in God, or maliciously desecrates objects of religious veneration, any person who maliciously prevents, disrupts or publicly mocks an act of worship, the conduct of which is guaranteed by the Constitution, or any person who maliciously desecrates a place or object that is intend- ed for a religious ceremony or an act of worship the conduct of which is guaranteed by the Constitution, is liable to a monetary penalty.277"
So Charlie Hebdo (who are disgusting, btw) should have been fined in Switzerland. Btw, I'm pretty sure a Zurich museum would have no trouble displaying artwork depicting Mary as a whore. Not unless muslims, rightly, get upset about the depiction of the most revered woman in Islam.
But it gets worse:
"Any person who publicly incites hatred or discrimination against a person or a group of persons on the grounds of their race, ethnic origin, religion or sexual orientation, any person who publicly disseminates ideologies that have as their object the systematic denigration or defamation of that person or group of persons, any person who with the same objective organises, encourages or participates in propaganda campaigns, any person who publicly denigrates or discriminates against another or a group of persons on the grounds of their race, ethnic origin, religion or sexual orientation in a manner that violates human dignity, whether verbally, in writing or pictorially, by using gestures, through acts of aggression or by other means, or any person who on any of these grounds denies, trivialises or seeks justification for genocide or other crimes against humanity, any person who refuses to provide a service to another on the grounds of that person’s race, ethnic origin, religion or sexual orientation when that service is intended to be provided to the general public, is liable to a custodial sentence not exceeding three years or to a monetary penalty."
You can drive a Mac truck through that. What does "inciting discrimination" mean? Are the people campaigning to have the veil banned in Switzerland not inciting discrimination?
And, for the record, I despise people who mock any and all religions (although valid criticism is very important). But criminalizing mockery and claiming to believe in freedom of speech? That's rich.
Sounds wonderful. Would then my religious convictions be protected in Switzerland according to law or does my deity has to contact the Swiss government somehow ?
Because I am a Pastafarian, and I can't stand the abuse
and mockery anymore. I was thinking of emigrating to Switzerland.
Both you and I know this is provocation, so there's no point in pretending otherwise. But sure, it is an argument in favor of the confessional state. Liberal societies are de facto confessional states anyway, it's just that the liberal religion (which Rawls can't quite seem to acknowledge as one, but deploys without scruples) by which all others are measured and restricted is not named as one.
No because pastafarianism is a funny, if aged, joke among atheists. You don't sincerely believe in the spaghetti monster, and the courts could hold you in contempt.
But why would an atheist who likes to mock religion want to live in a country that criminalizes it?
Neither of these codes (which, by the way, I certainly object to) is anywhere near the scope of China's blanket ban on any activity (speech included) covered under the Article 51 quoted in a comment elsewhere here. Basically that's any activity any government official says it is.
Suggesting these are on the same level is, at best, to show misunderstanding of what the words mean and how the government applies them.
> So Charlie Hebdo (who are disgusting, btw) should have been fined in Switzerland.
Charlie Hebdo is indeed disgusting. They're nihilists from a cultural milieu that know no moral limits. There is a difference, as you say, between rational criticism of Islam and its mockery and charity is a pretty good way to distinguish between good and bad behavior (i.e., even assuming Islam is terribly flawed, it is uncharitable to mock it in this way given what it is, but charitable to criticize it).
> Btw, I'm pretty sure a Zurich museum would have no trouble displaying artwork depicting Mary as a whore.
You mean like what the Talmud says about Mary, the same Talmud that depicts Jesus boiling in excrement?
The same nihilistic cultural milieu hates Christianity most of all. You think the mockery of Islam was bad? Look at how they depict Christ in those comics. It's far worse as a matter of the kinds of things they depict as well as the subject of the depiction (Mohammad is just a prophet, Jesus is the incarnation of the Logos, of God Himself, thus we're talking about the difference between irreverent desecration and outright blasphemy and sacrilegious imagery). But hatred of Christianity has become normalized and made acceptable by this nihilistic cultural milieu and Christians have been intimidated into acceptance and spineless in their resistance which is why it persists with impunity. Muslims have been known to go in the opposite extreme.
> But criminalizing mockery and claiming to believe in freedom of speech? That's rich.
Freedom of speech was never unrestricted. It cannot be. The days of that libertarian anything-goes thinking is dead even among the same Mother Jones type lefists who wanted it back when they were still dope-smoking boomers. The question isn't whether you restrict speech, but how you restrict it and what you restrict and whether it is good. Without a specific case in mind, I would generally rather risk being a bit too permissive than being too restrictive, greater liberality in what is permitted and greater conservatism in how law is interpreted, but prudential judgement is key.
Your post is long and I don't disagree with much really, except maybe your flirtations with some restrictions on speech. Certainly we all understand, even in the USA, the concept of a "provocation". And on it's face a provocation is something that is hard to allow.
My problem with that is that criminalizing the provocation has lead in all liberal countries except the US into the criminalization of things that offend the sensibilities of the powerful.
I'd allow Charlie Hebdo to continue swimming in the cesspool of mediocrity it belongs, and I'll put up with blasphemy, if in exchange I have the full unrestricted freedom to argue for my conscience.
But, many (predominantly on the Left) are now seeing liberal free speech as outmoded. Though he's not a serious person, former Prince Harry (who, with his wife, use their celebrity to champion Progressive causes) recently called the 1st Amendment "bonkers"[1]. Even The Atlantic publishes its doubts about it.[2]
My stepfather grew up Jewish in Germany in the early 20th century. He was 13 years old when Hitler became Chancellor. His family got out, and he made his way to the US. He told me very sternly "don't ever think that it can't happen here". Those words stuck with me, and seem now more relevant than ever.
> even former Prince Harry recently called the 1st Amendment "bonkers"
Shocking!
I'm starting to think we Americans are going to have to overthrow the British monarchy to protect our rights!
> Even The Atlantic publishes its doubts about it.
Unlike the Prince Henry thing (who cares), I read this one.
The Atlantic says the exact opposite of what you say it does. It starts and ends firmly defending American style free speech. Full stop.
In the middle it talks about how European style free speech allows for suppressing hate speech, and that there are costs and benefits to that approach. He explains that calls for such restrictions here cannot be dismissed out of hand as insane but that they have to be contended with. He then does so, arguing against restrictions. "Free Speech isn't Free" is just pointing out the often overlooked costs to totally free speech.
I hesitate to call people bad-faith actors, but in general the "article says the literal opposite of what I claim it does" is a giant red flag.
(Edit: I went back and read the Prince thing. I dismissed it because "who cares", but then I figured if you misrepresented the Atlantic article that badly I should check it out. What he was talking about was American vs. British libel laws, not general free speech. In Britain, it is much easier to sue for libel to the point that celebrities often sue international publications there. This protection in Britain especially protects politicians and royalty. In the US, it is almost impossible to win a libel suit against a news organization, especially if the person suing is a public official. This is based on New York Times vs. Sullivan, a first amendment case. )
"Two events were wake-up calls. The first was Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about the astonishing extent of secret U.S. government monitoring of digital networks at home and abroad. The U.S. government’s domestic surveillance is legally constrained, especially compared with what authoritarian states do. But this is much less true of private actors. Snowden’s documents gave us a glimpse of the scale of surveillance of our lives by U.S. tech platforms, and made plain how the government accessed privately collected data to serve its national-security needs.
"The second wake-up call was Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. As Barack Obama noted, the most consequential misinformation campaign in modern history was “not particularly sophisticated—this was not some elaborate, complicated espionage scheme.” Russia used a simple phishing attack and a blunt and relatively limited social-media strategy to disrupt the legitimacy of the 2016 election and wreak still-ongoing havoc on the American political system. The episode showed how easily a foreign adversary could exploit the United States’ deep reliance on relatively unregulated digital networks. It also highlighted how legal limitations grounded in the First Amendment (freedom of speech and press) and the Fourth Amendment (privacy) make it hard for the U.S. government to identify, prevent, and respond to malicious"
Disagree with your disagreement. The Atlantic article is casting shade on free speech. One only needs to read the headline, which is rightly or wrongly what most eyeballs will ever see. If a headline is “iPhones have a lot of problems” and then body of the article explains that “despite that they are still pretty good” then it fair to characterize it as the parent poster did IMO. No person ever has made the claim that free speech doesn’t have costs.
1) Talking about costs isn't casting shade. And the article is talking about the costs (and why they are worth it).
2) It's not a hot-take that titles don't agree with their article's contents. The solution to that is to fix headlines, not to plug our ears and only read headlines and claim nuance is impossible.
> No person ever has made the claim that free speech doesn’t have costs.
Considering the entire article was about how people kept responding to nuanced articles by claiming that free speech didn't have costs and that dismissive and wrong, I think people did in fact make that claim.
Fair enough. I do see where you’re coming from, just thought you made the case a bit too strongly. I feel like given the current environment in which censorship is running rampant, in the opinion of many on both the left and the right, that to assert nobody is questioning the value of free speech seems at least a tad unperceptive if not willfully ignorant. Perhaps I mischaracterise your thinking, and if so I hope no offense is taken. I’ve seen what I perceive to be a cultural shift between the late 80s and today in popular attitudes toward free speech, at least in progressive circles. My perception may be wrong, I fully acknowledge.
This concept of "it can't happen here" is so infuriating. So much hubris in so few syllables. I think it angers me, not only because there's an underlying sentiment of being better than everyone everywhere else, but because the sentiment itself opens the floodgates.
I'm a bit conflicted on this story for the same reason. One the one hand I agree what happened to him was horrible, but on the other hand it's almost to be expected. The kid was enrolled in a Chinese university and decided to criticize the CCP on the internet under his own name. So yeah what happened to him was horrible, but not unexpected.
This news is incremental, sure, but still news. If stuff like this had been happening 20 years ago, many countries would probably have a very different trading posture with China.
It's important to report on this kind of thing once in a while, even if no individual instance is shocking. It builds up into a major problem.
The message of the article is that a renowned Swiss university cowardly bows to China's oppression instead of guaranteing their students (not legally, but morally their) their democratic rights. Cynics might say not suprising either. Switzerland is somewhat infamous for its silent Nazi support while formally neutral in WWII.
Of course they are. That's a big part of their job. Does that offend anyone? It's reciprocal: I assume if Biden calls Pelosi to talk about the weather almost every country is recording the call (assuming it's unencrypted).
People on HN generally don’t like content-free “this”- or “+1”-style comments. If you don’t have anything to add that’ll further the conversation, upvote and move on.
It's usually to point out commonalities to get people to emote when having a conversation I find.
Yes comparing the scales of the Chinese sensorship to googles deplatforming of uncomfortable topics is not nice.
But explaining how one can lead to the other also explains to people in the west why something is bad. Especially when people would readily sleep walk into enabling technologies that would enable state sensorship at a level that would concern everyone.
I'm just pointing out that this kid had a really naive attitude of where our rights currently stand in the West. And I think the story is the proof - the kid got canned.
The form of censorship in the west here I'd argue its financial oppression. Granted in his case he's been lucky enough that his support went the press so he might get something for his efforts, but financial oppression by bullies isn't new or unique to any culture I fear.
Tell me, is your country one where loosing your job would be considered a relatively trivial or benign punishment for mouthing off? Because in my parents' country they would have been thrown off an airplane for what this kid did.
But I didn't grow up in my parent's country. I grew up in the West. And I cherish very jealously my rights and refuse to trivialize cancel culture, blasphemy laws etc. And if we in the West had taken our rights seriously this kid wouldn't have been fired.
Or you angered america, or the US political parties Or women or trans people or nonbinary people. It's like , if you don't draw a hard line, the virus keeps expanding
First of all , these are rich people whose removal would be largely inconsequential to their livelihood. Under them you 'll find a sea of people who are self-censoring because their positions are much more precarious, and they see the whims of the mob.
> haven’t been forcibly removed from office
Second i find this insinuation that a mob should be able to remove elected people from office problematic
A much better criticism of that line would be that it was attacking a strawman. It was a hyperbolic representation of the fears I was trying to quell. Saying that I was implying those politicians should be forcibly removed from office requires ignoring a LOT of context. It wouldn’t make very much sense for me to signal that I supported using violence against detractors while arguing that the backlash to transphobia is massively overstated.
I think cancel culture is much worse for people who are close to the community tgat cancels them than people far removed. This is sorta obvious if you consider how much effect a community can have on someone by cancelling them.
Sometimes cancel culture affects people outside the community. And then everyone is on the barricades. But I think the real damage is being done inside these communities. Essentially the communities lose the ability to be self critical. A lot of these communities are trying to improve the rights of certain people. But this lack of self criticism makes them much less effective at convincing outsiders.
This is especially bad for reaching the people who disagree quite strongly. I think this is part of why the American political centre seems to be empty.
Are you inside the trans rights movement and have seen this happen first hand, or can you cite an advocate for trans rights that was shunned by the community? What you describe is an interesting hypothetical problem. In my experience as a trans person participating in the trans community, it is completely divorced from the reality of the situation. People aren’t “canceled” because they aren’t ideologically pure. It’s the opposite, actually.
Trans people often need to grapple with “internalized transphobia”. I experienced this firsthand when I realized I was trans and then felt a wave of disgust and horror. I felt it the first time I went to a trans group meetup and felt embarrassed to be seen with trans people. I felt it every time I was terrified of anyone knowing I was trans. I’m not alone in having these experiences, but my experiences were probably more on the extreme side. Almost no trans person has the luxury of being entirely free of internalized transphobia, and internalized transphobia can manifest in one’s political beliefs. If we shunned every single person who ever disagreed with the “groupthink” then there wouldn’t be anyone left. By necessity, we need to welcome and encourage the process of people learning and growing.
That’s a far cry from the idea that the trans community expels anyone who is critical of them.
I am adjacent to the trans community. Pretty knowledgable with sime friends in their. My main source for these ideas was contrapoints. Though notably, I wrote my comment to be much more widely applicable. I think it equally applies to wider queer communities, femisim, and maybe the wider woke anti racism movement. Heck, it probably applies to a lot of people left of the democrats.
I hypothesise this because I am trying to understand why the general left is so ineffective. Why it engenders so much actual hatred when the message is quite positive.
I think a large part of this is some apparent logical gaps in our arguments that are taboo to discuss. Those can be quite infuriating, and also make for very easy strawmaning. (e.g. "all trans people say biology is meaningless")
I am afraid this is just an effect of the deeper problem - bestial behaviour emerged as norm. A fall towards low quality ethics, including intellectual thresholds, including thresholds of elaboration (meditated vs rushed).
(The latter seems to also be very relevant to the student.)
In anecdotal form bestial behaviours ("I was forced to fire you having received pressure from a priest because you are kind to that boy of a different cult" - real example, probably not rare, of an episode of 50 years ago in Europe) have probably always been common, but today they seem to be less of individuals and more of groups ("that nobody in a costume in tinytown" vs "the assumedly respectable entity"), less exceptions and more norm ("it happened" vs "it happens").
I see no conflict between utter distrust for the NYT and the fact that it is indeed the paper of record for the US [1]. I was even going to say that it lends little credibility to the story itself, which should have to stand on its own merit, but it does speak to the impact of the story in Switzerland and possibly abroad.
There is a cultural subcontext that may be missing here:
The swiss are fiercely independent people that shun cultural misfits and people that don't respect tradition.
They certainly hold in contempt outsiders that go against established groups/ norms / traditions. This is evident in their rules for granting citizenship, which is at the discretion of each canton.
Some cantons are particularly fickle and will reject granting citizenship to foreigners living in Switzerland for decades...if the foreigner is "annoying" [1]. This means: a serial complainer, a bad neighbor that does not respect customs.
My thinking:
PHD student forgot they were part of the local academia community.
This group was sensitive to china criticism. Whether this was subtle or not, we wont know. What we know is he went ahead and criticised china, thus becoming a bad neighbor. He was therefore cast out.
The more I read of the article the less clear cut this looked. Someone has already mentioned the cartoon, but he had deregistered with the university, on the proviso that support from his phd mentor would allow him to return. When his mentor did not want to mentor him anymore he was actually registered at Wuhan rather than St Gallen, so I can see why this would make it complicated for him to continue there.
Having done a PhD recently and knowing several who have, around the three year mark can be a difficult time for the student-mentor relationship. There is mention that his mentor claims the student had lost their temper with them prior to this happening, so I wouldn't be surprised if things were strained.
Another aspect is the natonality of his mentor. The mentor may have family in China or need to continue strong links with China to continue their career in the field. Regardless of actual Chinese influence, the mentor may simply have been concerned of the impact the student's tweets would have on their career. Obviously still not ideal, but reflects more a 'chilling effect' that comes with heavy handed censorship.
All governments regulate agents of foreign powers, and thus can shut down the Confucius Institutes. Whether the replacement is called the Lee Kuan Yew Institute or the Chiangmai Kai Shek Institute is immaterial. The Chinese certainly don’t allow foreign NGOs on their territory and would have no grounds to complain.
"received a message from a Chinese doctoral student doing research at a Canadian university.
The writer accuses Gerber of a «racist attack on the Chinese people.» He was referring to a specific tweet: a cartoon that Gerber had posted in response to another user's tweet. It depicted a comic character that had been altered and had stereotyped Chinese features, with yellow skin tone and slit eyes. This drawing circulated on social media in the spring of 2020, and was deemed racist by some users. "
Is she? I love China and if somebody pulls a stunt like that that may blow up in my face I would take action too.
Think about if you were in CS and a student of your would post some ISIS shit on the internet and you were threatened with a travel ban to the US. I think most people would think twice.
Supporting free Hong Kong and Taiwan isn’t really comparable to supporting ISIS. The “he is an anti Chinese racist” rhetoric seems stretched by the fact that he spent so much time there, his romantic partner is Chinese, he seems to have a friends network there.
Having a Chinese partner is not guaranteed for not racism. This reminds me of the local case. A British Expat married to a local and posting racist comments on social media. His defense was the local failed to understand the British joke.
Somehow im guessing it goes
a bit deeper than “I have black friends” in this case. Althoug I haven’t seen the image referred to in the tweet, so maybe it was in very very bad taste and racist.
I am in CS. If a student of mine posted "ISIS shit", I'd want nothing to do with that person for personal reasons, irrespective of professional consequences.
People of other cultures, if told "Entity E will make so that if any student of yours expresses an opinion against E, you shall pay consequences", would make a perfectly consequently legitimate and correct declaration against E (defamating E in light of judgements evident and justifiable in some solid ethical frameworks: confusion in the attribution of responsibility, bullism, even the nowadays overused concept of terrorism, etc.).
curiously, you mention "ISIS", and a practice like "If you have ties with people we dislike there will be consequences for you" is one of the few correctly attributed instances for the concept of terrorism.
Somewhat tangential, but it's interesting that this is in St. Gallen. St. Gallen is known for the so-called St. Gallen Mafia which counted among its members the now defrocked sex predator Theodore McCarrick among others who negotiated deals for the Vatican under Francis in China and had a reputation for being pro-CCP in his leanings. Makes me wonder if there is some "Chinese representation" specifically in St. Gallen? Take this quote from the article:
"For the last eight years, St. Gallen has also been home to a «China Competence Center,» the aim of which is to «strengthen and deepen productive relations with China»."
(Frankly, this sort of content is being censored in the US by BigTech also, so...)
It's a serious issue. One party speaks with on voice, everyone else thousands of voices, and not even a single world leader other than maybe the US President can get away with saying something.
It feels like a bit of overreaction from the professor, unless there were other emails or calls from the Chinese government.
If it was just one email, it could also be possible that she just wanted him to find a different advisor and didn't realize that breaking her advisory relationship with the student would leave him in the lurch and without a PHD.
> His girlfriend was shocked when she saw some of the tweets. Talking with him on the telephone, she begged him to stop. Not because she necessarily disagreed with anything. But because she was worried about retaliation by the Chinese government. «I'm in Switzerland, not China,» Gerber replied. «I can say what I want here.»
Shouldn't he have also taken into consideration that this "retaliation" could also be directed towards his girlfriend?
Generally, the article raises the feeling of "mistakes have been made". There you have a professor afraid of harming her career, which is understandable, and having the option to play a "is de-registered anyway"-card. Keeping him in the unofficial advisorship and tied to the university can be seen as a friendly, helpful gesture on the part of the university, surely also with the intention to be able to refer to him should he build a successful career. It was a weak point which he should have taken into consideration, yet it would have been difficult to anticipate that it would turn out this way.
Wasn't he planning to go back to Wuhan anyway? Why risk it?
People used to say that by bringing China into the global market, free people's would influence China to be more free. The opposite has actually happened.
I'm happy she is dismissed. No student should be a propaganda tool, especially in a continent that Julian Assange is in jail in worse conditions (like those of Stalin) for doing journalism and revealing the war crimes of so-called democratic countries.
>Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
You're confounding descriptive and persctiptive theory. Such conflicts are an obvious consequence of the setup despite deeper strategic analysis advising against it.
In his book, Mearsheimer
> readily acknowledges the inherent pessimism of offensive realism and its predictions because his world is one in which conflict between great powers will never see an end. [1]
The US has a lot of problems and bad behavior. Yet we can talk about it without worrying if the us govt is pressuring our employer to fire us, without worrying about the safety of family members & friends living in the us will be rounded up.
China is not that place. It's not anti-Chinese rhetoric to point our reality. China is the place where people wonder when the authorities are coming to take you to the re-education camp, hopefully not to be sterilized.
Yes, China should instead be a soft banana-republic like India and surrender its whole historiography and narrative, and thereby its own self-understanding, to the West.
Then, if someone speaks up for India or the Indian society, they can all be called "Hindutva" and then the West can ban them from the Indology conferences and the academics can all rejoice for having banned the Swastika-worshipping "original" Nazis.
(sarcasm, yes, but everything noted above has happened in Indology. apparently, according to these worthies, Hindus are the original Nazis too - no I'm not kidding. explains the insidious anti-Hindu sentiment in the West.)
Nationalism isn't simply speaking up for onesself. In any case, what instances are you refering to? You assure us that this happened but didn't bother linking to anything. That's not an efficient way to convince people of something.
You have to understand that any platform that deletes or undermine your words does not deserve your patronage. Get off Twitter and all abhorent anti-social media. Go outside, see nature.
I don't want to dismiss Chinese influence as a threat to Western values; but we have to keep this in perspective. China is thrice the population of the US and has a comparatively sized (arguably a bit larger, arguably a bit smaller) economy.
We expect their influence to catch up with their size and be comparable with the US government. The US government has long reach and a strong grip (eg, Assange, Snowden, the general pretence that their ongoing aggressive military posture is legitimate, synchronisation of global norms for intellectual property to American interests, Hollywood, etc).
How many other countries would threaten visa denial against the supervisor of a student with 10 Twitter followers? I happen to think the student’s tweets expressed extreme and unfounded views, but they hardly warrant such retaliation from one of the world’s most powerful countries.
One can only speculate how much worse the PRC's system is. The professor's fears are quite rational (I needn't say I wholeheartedly condemn her actions, and hope she's fired).
Thank you. I find this only slightly less disturbing than China’s behavior. Stopping a visitor at the border for social posts of acquaintances is almost as bad as writing nasty emails threatening to do so.
(Edit: Ismail was ultimately granted entry [1] but still shameful incident and disturbing that it could happen at all.)
> In a press release, Lopez says "this is a move so perverse, so grotesque as to defy explanation. Preventing people from entering the country because their friends critiqued the U.S. on social media shows an astounding disregard for the principle of free speech. The idea that Ajjawi should be prevented from taking his place at Harvard because of his own political speech would be alarming; that he should be denied this opportunity based on the speech of others is downright lawless."
I would replace the terms used by Lopez, from "astounding disregard for the principle of free speech" to "astounding disregard for the principle of justice". (Which, I rant, has been devastated in many places in the past 18 months.)
Theoretically, though, I understand from some publications that there is an ongoing debate in national security agencies about the thresholds to be observed between false positives and false negatives. Meaning: not that the authorities believed such judgement sensible or fair, but they probably delegated their sense of fairness to a top-down mandate of "better safe than sorry". Which, in the encouraged alienation from good sense, creates these monstrosities.
"It depicted a comic character that had been altered and had stereotyped Chinese features, with yellow skin tone and slit eyes"
In the report but often neglected. This is exactly the kind of student professors don't want. Obvious bias in the field of research, and what the heck honestly. If I were the professor I would not sponsor the reapplication either.
I think the student is well aware he has a weak case, otherwise if it's so obvious that it's because of government intervention, even if his own professor doesn't want to supervise him, it shouldn't be difficult to find a new one (there are plenty, I mean PLENTY, researchers critical of the Chinese government, it shouldn't be hard to find one really), the academic field is actually quite protective towards students when it comes to undue influence from the government in general.
Also, the institute he chose to apply to focus on "«strengthen and deepen productive relations with China»". It's not like they've made it unclear. It's quite clear they want to be 'productive' with China. There are plenty who don't, so why does this student applied there? It's like researching the adversary effect of CocoCola at a instutite 'promote understanding of the health benefits of carbonated drinks'. It's not like there is no choice.
Yes, some shame on the advisor, department/program for folding under such threats, but let me ask this:
What was the guy seeking in posting accusatory political opinions about the Chinese government on Twitter? Attention, that's what. The thing that everyone on Twitter wants. He got it, and now is unhappy with the result. He's not totally without some responsibility here.
Why are you equating a guy posting opinions specifically designed to publicly criticize a country's government with a woman being taken advantage of against her will?
> In fact, as of the fall 2019 semester, Gerber had been officially enrolled only at the university in China, not at St. Gallen.
So he was a Swiss person doing a PhD at a Chinese university. His relationship with the professor at the Swiss university was an unofficial one, so the word 'dismissal' here is pretty misleading. No information about what happened to his actual PhD program at the Chinese university that I noticed.
The actual evidence of chinese influence?
> She said she had received a message from a Chinese doctoral student doing research at a Canadian university.
So, it sure sounds like some people had their feelings hurt.
My totally made-up hypothesis on this article: honest reporter researched a story, realised it was pretty weak, then when they wrote it up shuffled things around a bit to give an exaggerated impact, but couldn't bring themselves to lie or leave out any facts.