Criticizing China’s lockdowns are a “microaggression” and should be reported through online portal, UK university says

41 comments

  1. Saving you a click:

    > The University of Surrey in England has introduced a new module for staff titled “introduction to race equity” that contains several examples of what it calls “microaggressions.”

    > The module says that criticizing China’s Covid lockdown is a form of microaggression and should be reported through the college’s online snitch system.

    > Staff are told not to criticize China’s zero-Covid policy because some Chinese students may feel that complying with the policy means they are “caring more about others.”

    > The China zero-Covid policy example in the module quotes a Chinese student telling their roommates that they “don’t understand how the government [is handling Covid] – our community’s [way of] doing this, is really different from other countries – a very, very strict lockdown.”

    > They add: “But you’re pretty focused on keeping yourself safe and also keeping other people safe – care more about others [by] staying at home for at least two weeks. If you look at the most serious cases, like Wuhan and the nearby areas, they controlled [the] virus pretty quickly. But we talked [about] this to our flatmates. They don’t understand this.”

    > Students are encouraged to report incidents of microaggressions through the portal and staff are encouraged “to seek advice from human resources regarding next steps” when they are reported.

    > According to The Telegraph, the university’s leadership is facing push back from staff who are accusing them of “policing conformity with controversial moral and/or political beliefs.”

    > 13 academics at the university are seeking to have the module removed through a vote at the university’s senate, arguing it “would create significant new legal and institutional risks for the university.”

    > A spokesperson said that the university was “absolutely committed to protecting the academic freedom of its staff and this is a fundamental principle embedded in our university statutes. We are reforming our appraisal process for academics to better support them in their careers.

    > “We do not recognize this characterization of our new academic appraisal process which explicitly embeds protection of academic freedom in its guidelines, and places at its heart support for the professional development of our academics.”

  2. Since when is criticism of a government also a criticism of the ppl? Especially if said government isn’t democratically elected 🙃

  3. This is what I think people mean when they say woke

    Telling uni students to not use their brain and be critical of the world around them incase it’s a micro aggressive

  5. The whole point of university should be to challenge students beliefs and expose them to different thoughts and opinions rather than stifling them.

  6. I sense increasing paranoia in the administration layers of many universities. Trying to prevent any interactions that could upset anyone or any organisation or ever lead to any possible liability to the university for anything ever. My department used to have a poster showing support for Ukraine, but it has now been removed (I suspect because the central administration is worried about upsetting Putinites). It tends to shut down a lot of activity, and it might just be easier to shut down the universities entirely. After all, doing nothing causes no direct harm, and the indirect harm caused by inaction is beyond the scope of those imposing the restrictions.

  8. This one seems more to be pandering for economic reasons than anything else. Foreign students are a major source of income; chinese ones even more so and as the CCP cab exert influence on who goes where I have a feeling somr backdoor lobbying was done

  9. Many universities only survive these days on a massive amount of Chinese students, the supply of which can be turned off by the Chinese state with very little consideration. Hence why it is completely possible for the Chinese state to lean on these institutions in this way, through embassy staff and local teams, to be more lenient to CCP thought and way of doing things.

    I know that it might be coincidence, but the current vice chancellor, a man called Gaoqing Max Lu, was born in Shandong and it has been rumoured that he has connections to the CCP.

  10. Having been locked in my apartment for 5 months in total in 2022 in Shanghai, I can honestly say fuck China, fuck the lockdowns, fuck the zero Covid policy, and fuck the idiots that think critical comments of a political party, stance, or barbaric practices is a micro aggression.

    To top it all off in my last 2 weeks in China I got Covid when they lifted the policy overnight, the shitty sino pharm vaccine did nothing, I’d a 40 degree fever for one day and 39 degrees for 3 more.

  12. “According to the Telegraph” usually means there’s a vital detail they’ve missed from the article.

  13. I think that China actually had the right lockdowns policy – for China specifically. It’s a very, very large country, with an aging population that were at risk of dying en masse through repeated infections if nothing was done. It’s a lot harder to vaccinate a population of 1.4 billion than our 67 million.

    People with individualist sensibilities will of course bristle at this, but the statistics bear this out: Western economies were in shambles during and after Covid (and still are), but China’s economy grew through the pandemic and is still growing. Broadly speaking, every Chinese person I know gives at the very least critical support to the CPC, which is far more than can be said of our supposedly superior form of government.

    They take the longtermist view that some short-term pain is OK in exchange for long-term gains that are actually realised, as opposed to the individualist short-termist view, which is that the future doesn’t matter as long as we can get together and drink tonight. This unfortunate view runs all the way through this country’s culture and its leadership, and is one of the reasons this country is in such a dire state today.

    But I don’t think that shutting down all discussion on this topic is appropriate or good. It leads people to believe that the Chinese argument is weak and vulnerable to challenge, when the truth is very much the opposite. People should be able to argue for and against the merits of China’s policy, and if there are perhaps some elements of it and lessons from it that the rest of the world could learn from.

  14. Taking it on face value it doesn’t sound good.

    However I’m more interested in who, exactly, reclaimthenet are and who funds them. Answers are not easy to find which is fishy. Smells like an astroturfing operation to me.

  15. This sounds very similar to unconscious bias training, which is flawed in and of itself, and has even potentially been linked to creating biases themselves.

  16. There’s a few things going on here:

    1. UK unis are heavily reliant on Chinese students, many unis make a lose on domestic students in science based courses so they need to use the fees of overseas students to top them up

    2. Unis have a lot of contradictory legal and ethical requirements in relation to free speech and racism, this strikes me as someone trying to cover their bases in one part but not another.

    3. It looks like the microaggression portal and the new module are separate things. The module appears to be very clumsily making the point that national policies should be viewed in their cultural contexts (something that is often taught to politics and IR students), but the chosen example is stupid

    4. Universities generally suck at handling racism complaints, the process is always extremely slow and bureaucratic

  17. It’ll be interesting to know how much of this is CCP influence and how much people going down their ‘offence’ hole.

    Well, the CCP (and Russia) exploit the latter.

    Either way, the designers of the course should be fired and put on a foreign agents watch list.

  18. tl;dr Don’t upset our Chinese students we desperately need their money, well at least up until the student recruitment campaign in India is up and running anyway.

    P.S. Once the Indian students arrive don’t say anything bad about the Modi regime.

  19. Sorry but Universities shouldn’t be about pandering to sensitivity. It should be about being challenged and broadening perspectives and knowledge. If a Chinese person comes to the UK, it is in their best interest to know that the rest of the world frankly sees the CCPs covid policy as draconian and abusive of their peoples rights.

  21. Haha so will the sub be able to reconcile:

    1. Freedom of speech is under thread in our academic institutions
    2. “Wokeness” does exist and this is a prime example

    Or will it be the case that it is still a right wing myth made up by the tabloids and the only threat to free expressions on universities is from the Tories.

  24. I live in China and this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve read in a while. I hope the staff protesting this are successful. Freedom of speech should be protected, especially in universities.

    University of Surrey is clearly enjoying their pocket money from the CCP.

  25. It’s universities pushing this sort of nonsense time and again. I don’t want to see political intervention in universities but we should be able to refuse certain lecturers (some of mine pushed an overtly and one sided Marxist view) and we should be able to see why things like this happen…Chinese money underpins huge numbers of our universities.

    Universities should be critical of a regime that has concentration camps and forced sterilisation…but instead they seem determined to support them.

  28. University of Surrey is not the only one.

    After a mandatory inclusiveness training given by the Univesity’s Confucius Institute branch, I’ve been ordered by my Line Manager and/ or Programme Leader not to mention in class the following:

    West Philiipines Sea (Nine-dash Line), Taiwan independence, Hong Kong Freedom, Winnie the Pooh, Tibet, Tiananmen Square, the PRC origins of Covid, Uyghurs, the Weather Balloon incident, social credits, South Park, Keanu Reeves and others.

    I was additionally told for inclusiveness to not give additional readings/ videos on YouTube or encourage WhatsApp groups. I was told its better to use WeChat and the other PRC apps.

    Been verbally warned several times after students complained.

  29. Conflating criticism of political decisions with racism is disgusting.
    It undermines good-faith approaches to tackling racism and conflicts with the right to freedom of expression and belief.
    I expect a university to be a bit more thoughtful about such a thing but instead they seem to be doing the CCP’s dirty work for them..!

  31. Sure, it could be deemed as racist to condemn only that policy if you don’t also condemn others.

    ​

    That’s why when they teach about concentration camps in Germany they should also teach about the ones the UK ran in Africa 100 years ago and the ones China run today, using Uighers as slave labour.

    So they can mention Chinas covid policy as long as they mention that New Zealand also had a very strict policy but New Zealand’s worked because it was based on combatting the disease and not based on stopping the government looking too incompetent.

    It shouldn’t be mentioned as an aside. Students should have a full understanding about how the Chinese government operates, especially if they are exchange student coming over from China.

  32. Christ, everything about that website screams “this has been written with a very specific agenda in mind”.

    I’m not saying that their isn’t a discussion to be had about the topic but I get a very specific “if you dig deep enough this will turn out to be funded by a Tory donor or an alt right nutcase” vibe from it.

  33. University academia is absolutely RIFE of incredibly woke morons who live in their academic bubbles and stuff like this is so dangerous

  34. How about forgetting the ‘lockdowns’ and getting to the crux of why China seems to have dodged the blame on the worst pandemic in a century despite all the initial evidence pointing to it having originated from one of their fucking military virus labs?

    Forget about all the WHO bullshit a year after the CCP managed to destroy all evidence and people involved in Wuhan, the bottom line is, they originated it, allowed it to spread out of control killing millions, wrecking the Workdwide economy (while they cashed in $14 trillion in extra revenue from PPE sales).

    Where is the justice, the payback to families who lost loved ones, that is the only issue that is relevant.

  36. Micro aggressions don’t exist. You are either aggressive (or whatever discriminatory behaviour) or not. It’s a political invention.

  38. Anti woke nonsense.

    You don’t see how criticising a country in front of a class containing some students form there might be a bit of an issue?

    There’s a time and a place for valid criticisms like this. Seems perfectly legitimate as an example of what not to do as a lecturer in a totally unrelated subject.

    Ironic this gets attacked too as you just know these groups wouldn’t be so upset if was say, telling teachers not to promote lgbt rights.

  40. Lived in China through it, had to feed my elderly neighbour because government supplied us maybe half a kilo of greens for a 3 month lockdown.

    Guess I’m microaggressive, but the whole of fucking Shanghai was pretty macroaggressive throughout so get fucked UK university.

  41. The person who implemented this, is 100% compromised by the Chinese government. A uni professor in the US was just sentenced to house arrest for undisclosed ties to the CCP (which is another way of saying he was their little bitch)

    The other day, i saw that the US is claiming that China carries out more hacks than the rest of the world combined, both of corporate interests as well as normal individuals like you or me. So if they have our porn search history, and we eventually get into a position of power, what’s stopping them from blackmailing us with that data they already collected on us?

    Fuck China. Hope their entire government burns down so that a less dystopian shithole can spring up in its place.

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