The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/cornell-china/)
Criticism of the Chinese government is not an insult to the Chinese student community at Cornell University, nor can acting as a mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party fully represent all Chinese students. These truths should be self-evident. At Cornell, the critique and resistance against the political violence of the Beijing regime never stopped.
The Sun’s investigative report last semester on Cornell’s lucrative, undisclosed links with the shadowy Chinese tech giant Huawei should ring alarms everywhere. Beyond what The Sun’s editorial laid out, as a dissident Chinese, I am particularly bone-chilled by this news. My college, one of the few places in this foreign land that I see as a place of refuge, might very well be a lion’s den. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Chinese government’s influence reaches far above Cayuga’s waters. This influence comes in many forms. Recently, keen journalistic attention has been put on an intercollegiate student organization called the “Chinese Students and Scholars Association,” a Chinese embassy-connected student organization on campuses around America.
The massive scale of the Chinese atrocities in Xinjiang has become quite clear. Cornell should suspend all projects involving Chinese counterparts and undertake a transparent review to see if any ought to be terminated because they are aiding these atrocities. Since 2017, the Chinese government has carried out a mass terror campaign in the northwestern province of Xinjiang, targeting millions of ethnic-minority people and forcing them to give up their culture and religion. Those who refuse are sent to brainwashing camps, where they are tormented into denying their ethnic identity and everyday faith and told to stop speaking their own language. As I have argued elsewhere, this campaign is effectively a program of genocide.