Chinese students were welcome at Dutch universities for years, but our hospitality seems to have come to an abrupt end. Martin de Jong, professor of inclusive prosperity at Erasmus University Rotterdam and formerly professor of urbanization and infrastructure development in China at TU-Delft, has been working with Chinese doctoral students and master students for years and wonders if rejecting Chinese students is the right response to the newly evolved geopolitical situation in the world.
From very desirable to very risky
There was a time when we liked them. There was a time when they walked the corridors of university buildings in droves, filling jobs that Dutch candidates could not fill.
There was a time when employees in secretariats and at canteens needed extra time to turn their unsecure and bumbling Chinglish into something they could understand. But we apparently don't need them any longer, those Chinese master's and doctoral students. Even if they bring their own scholarships (money from their parents or a scholarship from the China Scholarship Council), most university boards don't allow them to come anymore.
And if they work for one of the seven institutes legally under the Chinese Ministry of Defense (the so-called “Seven Sons”) then even any kind of cooperation with them is out of the question, even if they work in a completely different field, once graduated and obtained their doctorate in the Netherlands and have worked with you for years.
The CIA once drew up a list of dangerous institutions and unsurprisingly, almost all Chinese knowledge institutes appear on it. Medium risk, high risk, very risk, fatal risk. China is never low risk, of course. Dutch universities know the ins, but not the outs and meekly follow. The United States of America, evidently, is always low risk: it never eavesdrops on other countries, always generously shares its technological knowledge with developing countries, and would not even dream of imposing trade restrictions on world market leaders in the chip trade based in other countries. Only China commits such heinous crimes.
The greatest danger comes from the sons
Geopolitics is what it's called. Concern about the theft of high-value technological knowledge, and first and foremost, of course, military knowledge. And part of that fear is, of course, quite understandable. Certain Chinese parties want to take away scientific insights as cheaply as possible and give little or nothing in return. In areas such as Artificial Intelligence and robotics, they have already long overtaken us, and that knowledge gap is getting bigger instead of smaller. The Chinese government can profess harmony with its mouth and in deeds show aggressive dominance in the East and South “China” Seas. There may be fanatical party members running around in European countries sending sensitive signals to Beijing. And on certain political topics, there is little or no meaningful conversation possible between the average Dutchman and Chinese from the People's Republic. Yet lack of sensitivity about the exact situation in China has led to many ill-considered and, to some extent, unjustified fears that may please the United States but harm Europe in general and the Netherlands in particular. Are the Chinese master students and PhD candidates who leave their country to come here to study in the “free West” and sharpen their critical minds the right victims of our short-sighted geopolitical interventions to protect our market? Some of them see it as an ideal opportunity to temporarily or permanently escape the extreme work pressure and ideological coercion of their motherland. Many of them make crucial contributions to the research program of their professors for whom they are working or are part of Sino-Dutch networks in which mutual learning takes place in the areas of environmental protection, climate change or waste treatment. The Dutch embassy and consulates try to showcase that they matter, and that Sino-Dutch research cooperation is still valued as much as ever. But Chinese researchers in the Netherlands have long since known where the wind is blowing: they feel unwelcome.
There's the hole in the door
Their supervisors are still being nice to them and assure them that it is all not so bad after all. The Chinese students, however, have learned another lesson by now. They know they may be allowed to serve out their current contract, but after that their productive careers in the land of human rights are probably more or less over. And now the new Dutch government has also decided that education and science are actually not that important, but that keeping foreigners is justified through exploring the constitutional fringes of extra-parliamentary action and sidestepping the rule of law. Time for many to return to their country of origin reasonably disillusioned. The Chinese students came for the academic freedom, for the illustrious quality of life in Europe, for that top university where they could start and continue their careers at an affordable rate, or that professor they had looked up to because of their high-quality publications that were available online just like that. Instead, they are gentled pointed to the emergency exit: back to the mental servitude and physical crowd control of the People's Republic they had willfully intended to escape from and back to their former professors who paged them at night to complete on the spot commercial reports of little or no scientific value. Mind you, in a few years the corridors in Dutch faculties will be mostly empty, as new intake has dropped almost to zero. While, given lower budgets and staff shortages, their efforts may be needed more than ever to drive scientific development forward. Just when secretariats are used to Chinglish and Chinese students can order their bread meal in fine English. Chapeau, the Netherlands!
- Professor