Chinese students were welcome at Dutch universities for years, but our hospitality seems to have come to an abrupt end. Martin de Jong, professor of broad welfare at Erasmus University Rotterdam and formerly professor of urbanization and infrastructure development in China at TU-Delft, has been working with Chinese doctoral students and students for years and wonders if rejecting Chinese students is the right response to the new geopolitical situation in the world.
From very desirable to very risky
There was a time when we liked them. There was a time when they walked the corridors of university buildings in droves, filling jobs that Dutch candidates could not fill. There was a time when employees in secretariats and at canteens needed extra time to turn their uncertain and bumbling Chinglish into actionable for blunt polder people. But we apparently don’t need them now, those Chinese master’s and doctoral students. Even if they bring their own scholarships (money from their parents or scholarship from the China Scholarship Council), most university boards don’t allow them to come anymore. And if they work for one of the seven institutes that legally fall under the Chinese Ministry of Defense (the so-called “Seven Sons”) then even any kind of cooperation with them is out of the question, even if they work in a completely different field, once graduated and received their Ph.D. in the Netherlands, and have worked with you for years. The CIA once drew up a list of dangerous institutions and strangely enough, almost all Chinese parties are on it. Medium risk, high risk, very risk, fatal risk. Low risk is of course never China. Dutch universities know all the ins and outs and meekly follow. America, of course, is always low risk, never eavesdrops on others, always generously shares technological knowledge with developing countries so that they can develop favorably and never forces world market leaders in the chip trade to impose trade restrictions.
The greatest danger comes from the sons
Geopolitics is what it’s called. Concern about theft of high-value technological knowledge, and first and foremost, of course, military knowledge. And part of that fear is, of course, quite understandable. Certain Chinese parties want to take away scientific insights as cheaply as possible and give little or nothing in return. In fields such as Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, they have already long and wide passed us, and that gap is getting bigger instead of smaller. The Chinese government may profess harmony with its mouth and in deeds show aggressive dominance in the East and South “China” Seas. There may be fanatical party members running around in European countries sending sensitive signals to Beijing. And on certain political topics, there is little or no meaningful conversation possible between the average Dutchman and Chinese from the People’s Republic. Yet lack of sensitivity about the exact situation in China has led to many ill-considered and to some extent unjustified fears that may please the United States, but are to the detriment of Europe in general and the Netherlands in particular. Are the Chinese master’s students and PhD candidates who leave their country to study here in the “free West” and sharpen their critical minds the right victims of our geopolitically short-sighted interventions to protect our market? Some of them actually saw it as an ideal opportunity to temporarily or permanently escape the extreme work pressure and ideological coercion of their motherland. Many of them made crucial contributions to the research program of the professors for whom they worked or were part of Sino-Dutch networks in which mutual learning took place in the areas of environmental protection, climate change or waste treatment. The Dutch embassy and consulates try to showcase that they matter, and that Sino-Dutch research cooperation is still valued as much as ever. But Chinese researchers in the Netherlands have long since known what the flag is flying; they feel unwelcome.
There is the hole of the door
Their superiors are still kind to them and implore that all is not meant to be. They know that they can possibly serve out their current contract, but after that it’s probably more or less the end of their productive careers in the land of human rights anyway. And now the new Dutch government has also decided that education and science are actually not that important, but keeping foreigners out justifies extra-parliamentary action and pushing (possibly overstepping) the boundaries of the rule of law. Time for many to return to their country of origin reasonably disillusioned. The Chinese students came for the academic freedom, for the glorious quality of life in Europe, for that top university where they could still start and continue their careers at an affordable rate, or that professor they had looked up to all their studies because of his/her high-quality publications that were readily available online. But there awaits the doorway: back to the tyranny of the People’s Republic that they had just wanted to escape, and back to the professors who paged them at night to complete a commercial report of little or no scientific value. Mind you, in a few years the corridors in Dutch faculties will be largely empty, as new intake has dropped almost to zero. While, given lower budgets and staff shortages, their efforts may be needed more than ever to drive scientific development forward. Just when secretariats are used to Chinglish and Chinese students can order their bread meal in fine English. Chapeau, the Netherlands!
