China’s “new era” of increased global power poses a threat to academic freedom across the world and could result in global university leaders seeking to appease the country’s Communist Party, warn experts. China’s president Xi Jinping heralded the dawn of a “new era” of Chinese power during a recent speech at the Communist Party congress and said that it was time for his nation to transform itself into “a mighty force” that could lead the world on political, economic, military and environmental issues.

Academic experts on China say there already are signs that the balance of power in Sino-Western university partnerships is shifting towards China, while recent reports show China is exerting increased ideological control over foreign institutions based inside and outside the country.

Cambridge University Press came under fire last August for removing hundreds of papers and book reviews from the online version of one of its journals in China after a government agency threatened to block access to the website. It later announced that it would reinstate the articles after admitting that it had received a “justifiably intense reaction from the global academic community”.

Meanwhile, an investigation by the Financial Times in November revealed that Springer Nature had censored some of its content in response to demands from Chinese export agencies. Further, reports indicate that the Chinese Communist Party had ordered foreign-funded universities in the country to install party units and grant decision-making powers to a party official.

William Callahan, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, says the “scope of civil society has been shrinking” in China since President Xi assumed office in 2012, but the country’s increased power means the debate has now “shifted from Westerners being concerned about censorship in China to all of us being concerned about how China is censoring what we’re doing all around the world”. “What China has been doing for the past ten years or so is learning how to export its censorship,” he says.

Prof. Callahan says China’s strategy for bringing Western expertise into China was to get “big institutions like (the University of) Nottingham and New York University to invest a lot of money and time to… hire people and to build campuses. And then once they had committed an enormous amount of time, money and effort, (China) starts to pull back some of the freedom that people had on those campuses and tighten up ideological control on those campuses.”

Steve Tsang, director of the Soas China Institute, says there have already been cases in which Western universities have pandered to China’s demands. He cites the fact that several Australian universities issued apologies this year, and in one case suspended a lecturer, following complaints from Chinese students about teaching materials being incorrect or insulting to China.

“Until now the top Western universities are institutions that the elite Chinese universities want to partner with and collaborate with because they see real benefits going to the Chinese side in particular. If we get to a point where the Chinese elite universities feel that they are actually better than their opposite numbers in the West, we will have to ask the question, will they ask for their pound of flesh from us? In the future, will collaborations require approval by party secretaries?” queries Prof. Tsang

Simon Marginson, director of UCL’s Centre for Global Higher Education, says the higher education sector is “watching China to see if more direct party-state controls in the universities will be introduced, and if introduced will lead to greater political control over research and scholarly work or new limitations on the international relations of universities”.

Jeffrey Lehman, vice chancellor of NYU Shanghai, rejects the notion that China’s relationship with foreign universities in the country had changed. “We have received no instructions to change the way we operate, and I would be astonished if the government were to renege on its promise of academic freedom that is a cornerstone within the foundation of our university,” he says.