This a chinese saying worth pondering by everyone:
“NEVER RIDE A TIGER IF YOU DONT KNOW HOW TO GET OFF ALIVE”
Merkel was called 老朋友 by Xitler recently, which is the equivalent of a good old friend. And while companies like VW lobbied for good relations with the regime running concentration camps, the German public has been largely asleep regarding this issue. Remember ‘never again’? Me neither.
Lol “freedom” and “Beijing” in the same sentence.
Happens if you put the interests of VW, Siemens and Mercedes above values.
The CCP are determined to dominate the Planet !
It’s really nothing new that German universities are susceptible to outside pressure, as a non negligible part of their funding depends on research contracts. “Academic Freedom” mostly means that the university is free to govern itself and to do as it pleases, which means it is also free to suck up to whoever is awarding it research contracts.
What the article doesn’t mention is that the reading still happened at both universities, just not at the China-controlled Konfuzius Institutes.
Why is Germany always on the wrong side of history? Is it just a cultural thing or something? What causes these people to always do the wrong thing…
Germany on the wrong side of history, again!
the headline is very exaggerated
Just like Reddit is controlled by China. You never see anti-China posts on Reddit, because they are always immediately deleted.
The headline is totally misleading. German academic freedom is not decided in Beijing. The only thing that has happened is that these China-funded Confucius Institutes have limits on how critically they can be about China.
There are professors whose academic careers depend on Chinese support. These professors may have specialized in Chinese culture, for example, and obviously they are severely limited if they can’t travel to China, for example. And then there may be Chinese research funding.
So these Confuzius Institutes do have some problems with academic freedom in practice. This is why I would simply remove them from the universities; let China fund university-independent institutes if they want to. The University of Hamburg, for example, did so last year. And I am sure other universities will follow. (In the past, btw, the Confucius Institutes were much less restricted. Otherwise they would not have been established in the first instance. Even open discussion about the Tiananmen Square Massacre was not impossible. But China’s stance changed over the past years, and for this reason these institutes are now being questioned.)
But this does not apply to universities as a whole, just to one China-specialized institute, and only 19 universities (out of way more than 200 German universities) have Confucius Institutes at all. So German academic freedom is not decided in Beijing.
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This a chinese saying worth pondering by everyone:
“NEVER RIDE A TIGER IF YOU DONT KNOW HOW TO GET OFF ALIVE”
Merkel was called 老朋友 by Xitler recently, which is the equivalent of a good old friend. And while companies like VW lobbied for good relations with the regime running concentration camps, the German public has been largely asleep regarding this issue. Remember ‘never again’? Me neither.
Lol “freedom” and “Beijing” in the same sentence.
Happens if you put the interests of VW, Siemens and Mercedes above values.
The CCP are determined to dominate the Planet !
It’s really nothing new that German universities are susceptible to outside pressure, as a non negligible part of their funding depends on research contracts. “Academic Freedom” mostly means that the university is free to govern itself and to do as it pleases, which means it is also free to suck up to whoever is awarding it research contracts.
What the article doesn’t mention is that the reading still happened at both universities, just not at the China-controlled Konfuzius Institutes.
Why is Germany always on the wrong side of history? Is it just a cultural thing or something? What causes these people to always do the wrong thing…
Germany on the wrong side of history, again!
the headline is very exaggerated
Just like Reddit is controlled by China. You never see anti-China posts on Reddit, because they are always immediately deleted.
The headline is totally misleading. German academic freedom is not decided in Beijing. The only thing that has happened is that these China-funded Confucius Institutes have limits on how critically they can be about China.
There are professors whose academic careers depend on Chinese support. These professors may have specialized in Chinese culture, for example, and obviously they are severely limited if they can’t travel to China, for example. And then there may be Chinese research funding.
So these Confuzius Institutes do have some problems with academic freedom in practice. This is why I would simply remove them from the universities; let China fund university-independent institutes if they want to. The University of Hamburg, for example, did so last year. And I am sure other universities will follow. (In the past, btw, the Confucius Institutes were much less restricted. Otherwise they would not have been established in the first instance. Even open discussion about the Tiananmen Square Massacre was not impossible. But China’s stance changed over the past years, and for this reason these institutes are now being questioned.)
But this does not apply to universities as a whole, just to one China-specialized institute, and only 19 universities (out of way more than 200 German universities) have Confucius Institutes at all. So German academic freedom is not decided in Beijing.