As academic ties between US and China unravel, Malaysia could fill the gap
After axing its Fulbright exchange programme with China in July, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo now wants the China government-run Confucius Institute to end its programmes at all US colleges and universities by the end of this year.
The rupturing of US-China academic relations is well under way and will continue apace no matter who occupies the White House come January. And this is not just a behind-the-beltway political pushback. American scholars who specialise in Chinese studies are now among those advocating, some vehemently, for disengagement from such programmes until President Xi Jinping acquiesces to further political reform.
The much-lauded academic freedom on offer in the United States is never without limits. Conservatives have long accused America's left-leaning ivory towers of liberal bias. But today, it is Chinese students in the US who are feeling the chill on college campuses via increased FBI surveillance, which has reduced all Chinese students to the level of potential spies.
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Attempts by anyone, including academics, to counter the pervasive anti-China narrative are likely to be met with icy scrutiny. McCarthyism has returned to US campuses, but no longer on the back of a paranoid senator. Rather, this is a government-wide inquisition of an authoritarian China that has seemingly morphed into an existential threat to the free world.
Washington's rallying cry to defend liberty and human rights belies a deeper anxiety - that the US' pre-eminence is diminishing. It is an anguish compounded by Americans' peculiar sense of "manifest destiny". In academia, this presumed exceptionalism was embodied in the US teacher-Chinese student dynamic, a subordination now upended by the pupil scoffing at the professor who lectures on liberal democracy.
If the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre triggered the so-called War on Terror against the Islamic civilisation, then Covid-19 is the plague pushing America to the precipice of a hot war with the Chinese world. Decades of collegial interactions are ending as China becomes a peril too ominous for impartial scholastic inquiry.
Meanwhile, universities in China are in a relentless rush to climb the global rankings, some through link-ups with the likes of such high-profile institutions as Johns Hopkins University and New York University - collaborations that now face an uncertain future.
In Malaysia, however, academic relations with China are moving in the opposite direction: toward positive interactions. Xiamen University, for example, has established an overseas campus in Kuala Lumpur - the first time a Chinese university has established a fully functioning satellite campus anywhere in the world outside mainland China.
Lee Kuan Yew, left, with Mahathir Mohamad in 2005. In the 1980s, as the respective prime ministers of Singapore and Malaysia, the two led a pushback against Western cultural values that in time brought forth democracy with Southeast Asian characteristics. Photo: AFP
The move signals China's entry into the one of the few remaining Western-dominated spheres of influence - international higher education.
China's determination to produce world-class educational institutions is yielding breakthroughs, especially in the sciences, and has spawned China's equivalent of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Tsinghua University in Beijing.
But China's effort to replicate liberal arts powerhouses like Harvard University is harder to achieve. Academic freedom has boundaries. Scholars in China face exceptional constraints, notably in the social sciences and humanities. And under President Xi Jinping, room for dissenting opinions has contracted further.
Independent scholastic insights are vital instruments in any conflict resolution. But the tight rein between party and state is impeding the Chinese intelligentsia. And universities in China, as in the US, are not generating the critical scholarship required to steer an increasingly hostile rivalry from spinning out of control.
That said, Xiamen University Malaysia (XUM) could prove different. Set up in 2015 as part of China's technological transfer programme, XUM's soft power impact is expected to be significant. But this top-ranked Chinese university could also be transformed by Malaysia's comparatively open milieu, which allows for a wider scope of scholarship. And at a time when many are pressured to pick sides, Putrajaya's non-aligned foreign policy is setting itself apart and positioning Malaysia for a crucial intermediary role in the US-China rivalry.
Xiamen University should capitalise on Malaysia's strategic neutrality. The Kuala Lumpur campus must be allowed to develop a vigorous liberal arts programme, and to undertake research that can help narrow the chasm dividing the two superpowers - for example, through an impartial analysis of the South China Sea dispute.
The choice to plant China's first university abroad on Malaysian soil is not coincidental. After all, Tan Kah Kee, a prominent Chinese philanthropist who settled in colonial British Malaya, founded Xiamen University in southern China in 1921. Thus, in opening the Kuala Lumpur branch, Xiamen University is returning to its overseas Chinese multicultural roots.
Indeed, at the crossroads of great powers, Southeast Asia is a cross-fertilisation of diverse civilisational streams. And one pertinent modern episode is the 1980s Asian values debate, when Mahathir Mohammad and Lee Kuan Yew, who were then the respective prime ministers of Malaysia and Singapore, led the rebuttal against the Western notion of human rights - a pushback that in time brought forth a democracy with Southeast Asian characteristics, where individualism becomes subsumed under communitarianism.
XUM must make the most of Southeast Asia's multicultural heritage by nurturing a scholastic environment where divergent civilisational actors from the East and West are free to interact and forge common ground though an open dialogue among equals.
On that note, XUM has in fact taken one decisive step towards multiculturalism - namely, the adoption of English as the medium of instruction. This is a crucial move not least because poor command of the language is undermining China's international diplomacy and global image.
And one domain where this deficiency is made manifestly clear is in international higher education, dominated by the Anglosphere states of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand - which also happen to comprise the Five Eyes intelligence alliance.
With a near monopoly of the international student market, these countries possess unmatched soft power in shaping generations of international students' world views, including hundreds of thousands from China. And as US-China relations deteriorate, these countries, through the Five Eyes alliance, have mostly acted in concert with one another. Canberra, for example, has set in motion Australia's own academic decoupling with China.
The international higher education arena ought to reflect our multipolar world. XUM can and should provide a Southeast Asian representation to counterbalance the prevailing Western dominance.
It is a grim indicator that the world is in graver danger when the scholastic community loses the capacity for dispassionate inquiry. American universities have abandoned any pretence to academic impartiality when assessing the unfolding hegemonic struggle between the United States and China. And institutions in China lack the political space to fill that void. Malaysia's neutrality can provide an opening, and Xiamen University in Kuala Lumpur should be free to advance that non-partisan voice of reason so desperately needed by a deeply polarised world teetering on the brink of a potentially calamitous open conflict.
Peter T.C. Chang is deputy director of the Institute of China Studies, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
Copyright (c) 2020. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
