“It happens when scholars are induced, whether for fear of not getting visas or because of the lure of getting money, to censor themselves and not raise questions that they otherwise would raise and to speak using words that they know would be acceptable in Beijing rather than words they would view as being more accurate,” said Link, who noted, for example, that the massacre in Tiananmen Square (a subject of his own research) is frequently described by scholars as an “event” or “incident” or even by a Chinese word meaning “tempest in a teapot.”
“Chen is absolutely right when he says that the Chinese government has influenced intellectual freedom in the West,” said Maochun Yu, a professor of history at the United States Naval Academy. “On the other hand, this is not NYU’s problem. It’s a larger problem.”
“A lot of American universities want to have broader contact with China in terms of academic exchange, in terms of getting more Chinese students to pay full tuition to American campuses. They want to keep the Chinese government in good graces. They don’t want to offend the Chinese government,” Yu said, noting, for example, that a university with a joint academic program with a Chinese university would “know better” than to invite the Dalai Lama to give a talk. (Here’s one cautionary tale: after the University of Calgary granted the Dalai Lama an honorary degree, the Chinese Ministry of Education removed the Canadian institution from its approved universities list for more than a year, as The Calgary Herald has reported.)
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