Day: August 17, 2021

China looks set to add its recently passed foreign sanctions law to Hong Kong’s statute book this week, after sanctioning a slew of rights activists and former U.S. officials in July.

The National People’s Congress (NPC) standing committee “will likely discuss including the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law” in Hong Kong law, the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-backed Global Times newspaper reported on Tuesday.

“The agenda will likely be discussed during a meeting of the [NPC] standing committee,” the paper quoted Hong Kong standing committee member Tam Yiu-chung as saying.

“It is appropriate to implement the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law in Hong Kong,” Tam told the paper.

Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam, who has been targeted alongside Chinese and Hong Kong officials over human rights violations linked to the crackdown on the 2019 protest movement and a citywide crackdown on dissent under the national security law, has said China’s law will give the U.S. and other countries “a taste of their own medicine.”

However, a top economist warned that more than 80 percent of banks with operations in Hong Kong are foreign, so requiring them to comply with sanctions against foreign individuals could trigger their departure from the city.

“The crucial thing will be the scale of sanctions,” Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) economist Law Ka-chung told RFA. “If there are a large number of people, or a broad scope that sanctions everyone in a particular sector or category, it will cause huge problems.”

“It will be a dilemma [for banks], who will be forced to pick a side,” he said. “There are more than 200 banks, and only about 10 percent of their business comes from retail banking.”

“Many of them are foreign, including banks from southeast Asia and the Middle East,” Law said. “They’re not going to give up their U.S. dollar business, so they will choose to leave, and the number of banks operating in Hong Kong could fall by more than half.”

Reduced investment

Joseph Cheng, former politics lecturer at Hong Kong’s City University, said a conservative use of the law could save the situation.

“But if they are really going to force banks and other financial institutions to choose … then most financial institutions will be unwilling to offend the U.S., and will decide to leave Hong Kong,” Cheng said.

He said foreign-funded companies will likely gradually reduce their investment in Hong Kong, and move their business to other cities in the region, like Singapore or Tokyo.

On July 23, China announced it would impose “counter-sanctions” on individuals in the U.S., including former commerce secretary Wilbur Ross under the law, which took effect in June 2021.

China also imposed unspecified “counter-sanctions” on current and former representatives of a number of organizations, including the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Human Rights Watch (HRW), and the Washington-based Hong Kong Democracy Council (HKDC).

“The U.S. side concocted the so-called Hong Kong business advisory, baselessly smeared Hong Kong’s commercial environment, and illegally sanctioned Chinese officials in Hong Kong,” China’s foreign ministry said in a statement at the time.

“These actions seriously violated international law and the basic principles of international relations, and seriously interfered in China’s internal affairs,” the ministry said.

‘Medal of honor’

HKDC executive director Samuel Chu told RFA in a recent interview that being sanctioned by the CCP was a “medal of honor” for everyone targeted.

“Being on Hong Kong’s wanted list, and China’s sanctions against the HKDC are medals of honor for all of us,” Chu said. “It means we have being doing things right.”

“Personally, I’ve never had to stop to think about whether or not to do this work,” he said.

HRW’s China director Sophie Richardson, who was sanctioned by China by name, told Reuters that the move was a distraction from growing international criticism over the CCP’s mass incarceration of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang.

“These are diplomatic tantrums that are designed to distract attention away from Beijing’s complicity in crimes against humanity,” Richardson said at the time.

China passed its tit-for-tat law allowing targeted sanctions against foreign individuals and organizations on June 10, 2021. The move followed a slew of sanctions targeting CCP and Hong Kong officials over human rights abuses in Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong.

Earlier that month, the Biden administration banned U.S. investment in around 60 companies in China’s defense or surveillance technology sectors in a bid to limit the flow of money to firms that undermine U.S. security or “domestic values,” which allows listings for human rights abuses.

And on March 22, the European Union, U.S., Canada, and the U.K. sanctioned Chinese officials and security entities as part of a multilateral approach to hold to account those responsible for Beijing’s policies of oppression against Uyghurs in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is axing hundreds of Sino-foreign university cooperation arrangements, including around 60 joint programs with universities in the United Kingdom.

The ministry listed 286 projects it said were being wound down as part of a routine review process.

The canceled courses included a bachelor’s degree in mechanical design and automation run by Harbin University of Science and Technology and London’s City University, as well as a social work courses run by East China Normal University and New York University.

Other axed programs included courses jointly run with the University of Florida, the University of Southern Queensland and the University of Leeds.

According to University World News, China has signed hundreds of collaboration agreements and memorandums of understanding with foreign universities in recent years, and not all are successful.

Wu Yue, founder of the industry research company New School Insight Media, told Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post that such closures happen every year.

“Every year, the authorities terminate some unsuitable programs and give permission to a few that have good quality, it’s a routine operation,” she said. “The authorities have been supervising this area for a while.”

Confucius Institutes scrutinized

The ministry of education began supervising Sino-foreign programs in 2004, scrutinizing them for content that violates China’s national educational interests or historical and cultural traditions.

China’s Confucius Institutes have taken similar ideological requirements far beyond the country’s borders, leading some overseas universities to cancel agreements with the cultural and language-teaching schools over concerns at growing CCP influence on overseas campuses.

German rights activist David Missal recently announced via Twitter that he is suing the University of Potsdam over its refusal to disclose how much of its funding comes from Chinese sources.

“A lot of universities have been reluctant to tell me if they receive funding from China,” Missal told RFA. “In collaboration with Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte, I have been suing some of these universities.”

“I have already filed a lawsuit against the University of Mainz, which was the same as with the University of Potsdam; I wanted to know if they take China’s money.”

“If they do, I want more information, the contract terms, the conditions attached and so on,” he said.

Funding questions

Missal said he plans to sue 100 of the biggest universities in Germany over the issue of Chinese funding as part of a research project into Chinese influence at Germany universities.

“We know that there are about a dozen universities that currently receive funding from Hanban, or have Hanban teachers working there for free,” he said, in a reference to the Chinese government department under the State Council that is responsible for administering the overseas network of Confucius Institutes.

“I also know of more than a dozen universities that receive funding from Huawi,” he said, calling for legislation in Germany to prevent foreign influence in the country’s institutions. “It’s very risky in the long run; the biggest danger is that some professors will practise self-censorship.”

Missal’s work has so far listed the University of Göttingen, the University of Freiburg, the Berlin University of Technology, and the Free University of Berlin among nearly 20 German institutions to take money from Huawei.

Confucius Institutes are embedded in universities around the world, including dozens of U.S. universities, where they offer Mandarin language teaching, cultural activities, and other events to students. The State Department regards the programs as a foreign mission of the Chinese Communist Party.

Cooperation agreements with the Confucius Institutes typically allow them to exclusively employ teachers vetted and paid by the Chinese government, who “can be expected to avoid discussing China’s treatment of dissidents and religious and ethnic minorities,” according to letters sent in 2020 by the State and Education departments of the U.S. government.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.