Cambridge University accused of complicity in Uyghur genocide by students
The accusation comes from a new Uyghur Rights campaign launched by Cambridge University Amnesty International Society who point to continued links between China and the university.
Protests for Uyghur rights outside the White House in 2015 - photo by Elvert Barnes
What is the campaign?
On the 7th of February, Nikos Kouthouri-Whittaker, along with two Uyghur students and the CU Amnesty International Society, launched a campaign calling on the University to cut ties with China. Together, they have published two open letters, the “Surveillance Research Letter” and the “Faculty Complicity Letter.”
Kouthouri-Whittaker told The Cambridge Student (TCS) that the first letter addresses “the University's complicity in the genocide through unethical partnerships it has long maintained with Chinese bodies connected to the genocide.” These partnerships include Cambridge’s ties with Huawei, a Chinese manufacturing company that has provided Cambridge with more than £26 million in research funding, and Tsinghua University, which began a joint research initiative with Cambridge in 2019, and is one of more than 40 universities that The Times has linked to the Uyghur genocide, specifically through hacking, espionage, or nuclear weapon development. The Uyghur Rights campaign has submitted freedom of information (FOI) requests for “several ongoing projects” between Cambridge and Huawei and is hoping to learn more about the extent of Cambridge’s involvement with the company.
The campaign’s second letter addresses “academic silence and disengagement on behalf of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies [AMES]” as well as the campaign’s demand for the Faculty to discontinue the Cambridge-Beijing year abroad programme for third-year students. The campaign is asking students and other university affiliates to sign the letter addressed to Professor Barak Kushner in the AMES Faculty s to discontinue the Cambridge-Peking University year-abroad programme “until the PRC government stops its campaign of genocide of Uyghurs.”
At a Cambridge Student Union (SU) council on 19 February, the Student Union will vote on this demand. The SU Ethical Affairs Officer and BME Sabbatical Officer have both endorsed the Uyghur Rights campaign’s request that the AMES faculty discontinue the year-abroad programme.
Our analysis: brutality of China’s genocide makes academic links hard to justify
The Uyghurs are China’s largest ethnic minority group in Xinjiang, China’s northwestern province. Several countries, including the UK, US, Canada, and the Netherlands have accused China of committing genocide, defined by the UN as the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” In the UK’s Uyghur Tribunal judgement of 2021, the tribunal stated that “crimes against humanity attributable to the PRC government is established beyond reasonable doubt by acts of deportation or forcible transfer, imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty, rape and other sexual violence, enforced sterilisation, persecution, enforced disappearance and other inhumane acts.” According to the Cambridge Uyghur Rights campaign’s published documents, since 2017, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has incarcerated between one and two million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in mass internment “re-education” camps as part of its “de-extremification regulation”.
“‘Chinese academia is not separated from the party,’ but has instead been used to provide an ‘ideological foundation for ethnic cleansing.’”
Beyond these broad numbers, the details of China’s policies towards the Uyghurs are notably brutal. International human rights groups have published information about China’s forced sterilisation of Uyghur women in camps in an effort to stop the growth of the Uyghur population. Reports have also emerged regarding systemic sexual violence in the camps, including mass rape by guards. Moreover, in 2019, The New York Times published the “Xinjiang Papers”, more than 400 pages of leaked Chinese documents revealing detailed information about China’s persecution of ethnic minorities. Among these documents were speeches from Xi Jinping, China’s president, instructing party members to show “absolutely no mercy” in the repression of Uyghurs. The documents also contained instructions for local authorities tasked with answering the questions of students who returned home for the summer to find that their family members had been sent to the camps. The recommended answers instructed authorities to say those taken had been “infected” by the “virus” of Islamic religious extremism and had to be ‘cured through quarantine.
Around the time the Xinjiang Papers came out, governments and media outlets around the world invested significant energy in researching and reporting on the Uyghur genocide. Over the last few years, however, the issue seems to have largely dropped out of the global news cycle. Part of this is probably due to the fact that the state heavily censors local journalists in China, meaning that most coverage has to come from foreign news outlets with less direct access to information. The lack of international intervention or coverage may also be related to the PRC’s economic clout. According to the Cambridge Uyghur Rights Campaign, “Governments will not speak up and recognise the genocide for a simple reason: the 1948 UN Convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide mandates a government to intervene upon the instant it learns of a genocide occuring. The global economy’s dependence on China further deters governments from condemning the PRC and from adopting a ‘no trade until you change’ policy.”
More protoests in Berlin in 2020. The flag being flown is the Kökbayraq, the symbol of the exiled East Turkistan government and used predominantly by Uyghur rights activists - photo by Leonhard Lenz.
“…partnerships with Peking University and Huawei…‘are adding legitimacy [...] and even facilitating [the PRC’s] human rights abuses.’”
So what does the campaign hope that discontinuing the Peking University year-abroad programme will accomplish? The second open letter argues that the AMES faculty’s choice to reinstate the programme for the first time since 2019 represents a “gross denial” of tribunal judgements and reports from around the world “which have determined the government in Beijing to be perpetuating genocide and crimes against humanity.” According to the campaign, Peking University is implicated in the genocide because “Chinese academia is not separated from the party,” but has instead been used to provide an “ideological foundation for ethnic cleansing.” Indeed, several universities in the PRC, including Peking University, have edited their charters to emphasise loyalty to the Community Party.
In their letter, the Uyghur Rights campaign says it is “untenable” for the AMES faculty to “legitimise these genocide-compliant institutions and [the government in Beijng] through academic partnership, which only reinforces an atmosphere of normality in the face of the PRC’s mass atrocities.” The campaign also points out that the faculty has not produced any research papers on the Uyghur genocide or the situation in Xinjiang since details surrounding the human rights abuses have surfaced in recent years.
The campaign told TCS that Cambridge’s “complicity [and] academic silence [...] reflects a broader international silence towards and complicity in the genocide which the campaign aims to change.” According to them, “it falls to students” to put pressure on the University to end the partnerships with Peking University and Huawei “that are adding legitimacy [...] and even facilitating [the PRC’s] human rights abuses.”