The Atlantic

Colleges Should All Stand Up to China

American universities need to show Beijing—again and again—that they reserve the right to unfettered debate.
Source: Mike Blake / Reuters

About five times a year, the U.S. military conducts freedom-of-navigation operations, or FONOPs, in the South China Sea to challenge China’s territorial claims in the area. American Navy vessels traverse through waters claimed by the Chinese government. This is how the U.S. government registers its view that those waters are international territory, and that China’s assertion of sovereignty over them is inconsistent with international law.

Americans are witnessing a similar encroachment on territory equally central to our national interest: our own social and political discourse. Through a combination of market coercion and intimidation, the Chinese Communist Party is trying to constrain how people in the United States and other Western democracies talk

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