06-09-2021, 11:42 AM
No letup in pressures on campuses as security program leads to demonization
![[Image: 60c00c1ca31024adbdcce10f.jpeg]](http://img2.chinadaily.com.cn/images/202106/09/60c00c1ca31024adbdcce10f.jpeg)
Two-and-a-half years after the US launched a program targeting researchers with ties to China, Chinese-American academics are still living in fear, according to professors.
"From the vantage point of those who have been targeted, there's been tremendous damage already, and I think there's tremendous fear among Asian-American communities and Chinese-American communities in particular," Gordon Chang, professor of history and vice-provost at Stanford University, told a recent webinar.
He said many of his colleagues have been reticent to speak out against the anti-China and anti-Chinese rhetoric whipped up since the China Initiative was established by the Justice Department amid so-called security concerns during the US' trade conflict with China.
"From the standpoint of many of my colleagues, this is a very, very sensitive line to walk even if they want to say the demonization of China is wrong for all sorts of reasons," he told the webinar, which was hosted by the 1990 Institute, a US-based research organization.
"They know they immediately… will be suspected. Some of them have already been demonized in social media and other platforms for their ancestry and for even the mild comments they made about the danger of demonizing China."
Chang cited the suicide of a former colleague, Shoucheng Zhang. Zhang, originally from China, was a physics professor at Stanford before he killed himself at age 55 in December 2018.
Around that time, the Hoover Institution at Stanford came out with a report called "China's Influence and American Interests". The report targeted many Chinese Americans as agents of China's efforts to affect US ways of life, politics and economics, said Chang, who called the report "scurrilous".
In the early draft of that report, Zhang was mentioned as one of those agents, and within days of the release of the report, he jumped from his condominium in San Francisco, said Chang.
- More -
Two-and-a-half years after the US launched a program targeting researchers with ties to China, Chinese-American academics are still living in fear, according to professors.
"From the vantage point of those who have been targeted, there's been tremendous damage already, and I think there's tremendous fear among Asian-American communities and Chinese-American communities in particular," Gordon Chang, professor of history and vice-provost at Stanford University, told a recent webinar.
He said many of his colleagues have been reticent to speak out against the anti-China and anti-Chinese rhetoric whipped up since the China Initiative was established by the Justice Department amid so-called security concerns during the US' trade conflict with China.
"From the standpoint of many of my colleagues, this is a very, very sensitive line to walk even if they want to say the demonization of China is wrong for all sorts of reasons," he told the webinar, which was hosted by the 1990 Institute, a US-based research organization.
"They know they immediately… will be suspected. Some of them have already been demonized in social media and other platforms for their ancestry and for even the mild comments they made about the danger of demonizing China."
Chang cited the suicide of a former colleague, Shoucheng Zhang. Zhang, originally from China, was a physics professor at Stanford before he killed himself at age 55 in December 2018.
Around that time, the Hoover Institution at Stanford came out with a report called "China's Influence and American Interests". The report targeted many Chinese Americans as agents of China's efforts to affect US ways of life, politics and economics, said Chang, who called the report "scurrilous".
In the early draft of that report, Zhang was mentioned as one of those agents, and within days of the release of the report, he jumped from his condominium in San Francisco, said Chang.
- More -