Little time? At the end of the text there is a summary.
China's students know how to move the world. Your courage is legendary and to marvel at these days again. One hundred years ago, her May Fourth Movement led to the founding of CP China two years later. Thirty years ago, her protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing shook the world. Now they are protesting again.
Last week, the Beijing security authorities attacked: Three students and two graduates of Beijing University and a student of the People's University in Beijing disappeared without a trace, according to a student solidarity group.
Then students from both universities showed off their faculties with posters demanding the release of their fellow students. A few days earlier, the police had auditioned some Peking University students. There were interrogations with the arrested, in which they accuse themselves.
Wanted deterrence
The videos should obviously serve as a deterrent. But they only aroused much displeasure among the students. The video also featured Yue Xin, a missing student since her arrest in August. Yue was a symbol of the #Metoo movement in China before graduating from Peking University last summer and attending labor protests in Shenzhen's industrial monopolies in southern China.
There she was arrested and not seen again until she appeared in the police video. Western intellectuals such as the philosopher Slavoj Zizek and Yale professor John Roemer had previously supported Yue's release, and there were many solidarity statements online.
The details of the #guilty video were announced!
The spirit of wilting, the half-year prison life, #YueXin Gu Jiayue Zheng Yongming Shen Mengyu What have you experienced?
Video link: https://t.co/Zp6bWViZ9u
Text link: https://t.co/KOy9VgtKCg pic.twitter.com/K79sLBKeKT
"For the first time, I heard about the story after the Chinese New Year last year," says a Peking University student to SPIEGEL. "A fellow student from my university was a senior member of our Marxist reading group, and after graduating, went to Shenzhen to work and set up a new reading group, but one group meeting was disbanded by the police, more meetings banned, and some members arrested . "
What the Beijing student describes fits into the picture of a new Chinese student activism in recent years. At its center are the Marxist reading groups that exist at every Chinese university. Only in the end they limited themselves less and less to reading. "These groups have always existed, they are an integral part of university life in China, but they have been characterized for years by their increasing social commitment," says Sinologist Daniel Fuchs of the East-West Seminar at the University of Göttingen.
In Beijing, members of these groups visited construction sites in the past to organize reading groups with construction workers. Or they campaigned for the cleaning staff of their university because it was outsourced under draconian conditions. So far, the authorities tolerated the activism.
Students and workers protest together
But the groups networked nationwide and established contacts with the active industrial workers. Protests against poor working conditions and falling wages are commonplace in southern China.
imago / view floor
Library of Peking University
But never had students from the best universities in the country allied with the protesting workers. But this happened "in a spectacular way" last year, as reported to SPIEGEL by Eli Friedman, China expert at Cornell University in New York State.
Friedman has been watching the reading groups for a long time. Her members would barely get to his Ivy League college in the US. "The rich, liberal Chinese are coming to us," says Friedman. But the Marx groups in China drew a very different student type: "These are young people from the provinces who have yet to face poverty, they thought they might escape to study in Beijing, but it's not that easy today more."
All the more does the young Marxist notice the contradiction between rich and poor, between the claim of the ruling communists and the reality of the workers in China's industrial areas. "Especially the students of Peking University take pride in the revolutionary history of their university," says Friedman.
30 students in custody
At the latest when students of Peking University demonstrate, however, the security authorities are wide awake. Geoff Crothall, spokesman for the independent Hong Kong information service China Labor Bulletin , estimates today the number of student activists imprisoned in labor protests at around 30 people - among them Yue Xin.
That might not sound like much in China. Nevertheless, Crothall speaks of a "very significant development". "Many workers' activists in China today are aware of the support of Beijing students," said Crothall, whose information service has been reporting in detail on labor protests in China for years. Between 2015 and 2017, the China Labor Bulletin alone counted 6500 such protests nationwide.
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Chinese students on campus (archive image)
The numerous arrests of students of the Marxist Reading Group at the People's University in Beijing go too far for Eli Friedman of Cornell University. "Where did you stay?" Friedman asked. He demanded explanations - but did not get them - from the People's University in Beijing, with which Cornell runs numerous exchange programs.
As a result, Friedman stopped the cooperation of his institute with the Volksuniversität last fall. "American educational institutions should withdraw from partnerships with universities that track their students," Friedman wrote in November's Foreign Policy journal.
more on the subject
Since then, the executive committee of the US Congress, headed by the Republican US Senator and Trump critic Marco Rubio, deals with the university exchange with China. Against the background of the trade war and the political clashes between the US and China, Trump government officials seized the opportunity to demand sanctions against the rivaling major power.
One should, Trump consultant Stephen Miller suggested, not to let a single Chinese student come to the US. Their number is currently 340,000, which is almost 30 percent of all foreign students in the United States. Clear that this was a provocation and hardly a serious proposal.
Discussions also in Germany
The debate about the right way to deal with China now also arrives in Germany. Under the theme "Labor Disputes and the Persecution of Student Activists in China", the East-West Seminar in Göttingen invited students to a discussion a few days ago. Daniel Fuchs speaks of a "very disturbing development" in China. Chinese sociologists are already giving up their subject because they no longer get permission to fieldwork.
Academic publishers such as Cambridge University Press are banning critical publications in China. It is therefore time for Fuchs in Germany, too, that the German universities, which almost all cooperate with China, "collective protest" - individually, unlike Cornell, they were hardly noticed in China.
In the end, it's about much more than just student exchange. Just recently, US Vice President Mike Pence mentioned in a speech the case of a Chinese student, who advocated free speech in the US and was promptly covered with a social media shitstorm in China.
For pence that went too far. Just as for Friedman the arrest of students in Beijing went too far. Not excluded that China's courageous students force the West to be for or against them.
But with that they could shake the world again.
Summarized:
In China, a new student protest movement is developing. The junior academics are in solidarity with protesting workers and demand a clear Marxist line in politics. Thus they provoke harsh counter-reactions of the Chinese state leadership, there were already several arrests. At the same time, western universities are coming under pressure. Because of the harsh efforts of the Chinese authorities, their cooperation and exchange programs with China are under scrutiny.