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3
ing the events of Chen’s escape and exile in the United States, 
which, when Chen Guangcheng’s book came out, certainly was not 
the same story being told by both. Or maybe there wasn’t any pres-
sure at all, just self-censorship to keep in Beijing’s good graces dur-
ing the final stages of opening the NYU Shanghai campus. 
While we are not here to exclusively focus on the sad divorce of 
Chen Guangcheng and NYU, but his ousting begs the question: Is 
it possible to accept lucrative subsidies from the Chinese Govern-
ment, or other dictatorships for that matter, and operate campuses 
on their territory and still preserve academic freedom and other 
values that make America’s universities great? 
I am sure there are those here today who say they can and ref-
erence the assurance they receive from the government or any 
agreement they sign, which is often kept secret with the host gov-
ernment. The real answer appears to be much more murky. 
Foreign educational partnerships indeed are important endeavors 
for students, collaborative research, cultural understanding, and 
maybe even for the host country. The U.S. model of higher edu-
cation is the world’s best. American faculty, fellowships, and ex-
change programs are effective global ambassadors. We must all 
seek to maintain that integrity, and it is in the interest of the 
United States to do so, and particularly when it comes to China. 
Nevertheless, if U.S. colleges and universities are outsourcing 
academic control, faculty and student oversight, or curriculum to a 
foreign government, can they really be the islands of freedom in 
the midst of authoritarian states or dictatorships? Are they places 
where all students and faculty can enjoy the fundamental freedoms 
denied them in their own country? 
These questions we ask today are not abstract at all. The Chi-
nese Government and the Communist Party are waging a per-
sistent, intense, and escalating campaign to suppress dissent, 
purge rivals from within the party, and regain total ideological con-
trol over the arts, media, and universities. 
The campaign is broader and more extensive than any other in 
the past 20 years. Targets include human rights defenders, the 
press, social media and the Internet, civil rights lawyers, Tibetans, 
Uyghurs, and religious groups, the Falun Gong, NGOs, intellec-
tuals and their students, and government officials, particularly 
those allied with former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin. 
Chinese universities have been targeted, as well. The recently 
issued Communist Party Directive Document 30 reinforces earlier 
warnings to purge Western-inspired notions of media independ-
ence, human rights, and the criticism of Mao Zedong. 
In a recent speech reported by The New York Times, President 
Xi Jinping urged university leaders to ‘‘keep a tight grip on . . . 
ideological work in higher education . . . never allow singing to a 
tune contrary to the party center, never allowing eating the Com-
munist Party’s food and then smashing the Communist Party’s 
cooking pots’’—his words. 
Will anyone at NYU or Fort Hays or Johns Hopkins or Duke, for 
that matter, be allowed to smash any Chinese Communist Party 
cooking pots? It is a serious question, because if your campuses are 
subsidized by the Chinese Government, if your joint educational 
partnerships are majority-owned by the Chinese Government, 
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4
aren’t you then eating the Communist Party’s food and then sub-
ject to its rules just like any Chinese university? 
I remember almost 10 years ago when Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, 
and Cisco here testified in a hearing about censorship and raised 
their hands and gave their oath that they would tell the truth. The 
persistent response to their censorship and their opening up of 
their personally identifiable information to the Communist dicta-
torship in China was that they were just following Chinese law. 
And many great people, like activists, particularly in the media 
area, were imprisoned because of that complicity, because they 
were enabling it. 
I will never forget showing pictures of Tiananmen Square on 
Google which showed nothing but nice pictures—that is the Chi-
nese version—and then if you went to Google, obviously the one 
that we have access to, you got millions of hits of tanks in the 
Square and young students being killed. 
There are nine U.S. educational partnerships operating in China. 
The New York University Shanghai campus opened its doors to 
students in September 2013; Duke; the University of California, 
Berkeley’s School of Engineering; Kean College, which is located of 
course in my own State of New Jersey. In addition, there is Fort 
Hays State University out of Kansas, and there are a couple of oth-
ers as well. 
I would point out to my colleagues that we have also asked—be-
cause this is the second in what will be a multiseries of hearings 
on this—the Government Accountability Office, and they have 
agreed, to study the agreements of both satellite campuses in 
China and the Confucius Institutes in the United States. 
I know some agreements are public while others are not. In fact, 
some schools made their agreements public after our last hearing, 
and we are very grateful for that. We are looking for complete and 
total transparency, and we will be asking all the universities and 
colleges to make their agreements with the Chinese Government 
public. 
We need to know if universities and colleges who are starting 
satellite programs in China can be, again, islands of freedom in 
China or in other parts of the world. We need to know what pres-
sures are being placed on them to compromise and backstop them, 
knowing that the Congress and the U.S. Government is behind 
they being unfettered in their ability to have academic freedom. 
These are important questions. Can they be handled by the uni-
versities and faculties and trustees themselves, or are there things 
that the U.S. Congress and State Department and the White House 
need to be doing to protect these freedoms? 
I would like to yield to my good friend and colleague Mr. Sher-
man for any comments he might have. 
Mr. S
HERMAN
. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. 
I am not ranking member of this subcommittee. I am not even 
a member of this subcommittee. Karen Bass asked me to sit in and 
promised that I could leave at 2:45, which I will need to do. But 
I am the ranking member of the Asia Subcommittee, which I be-
lieve is somewhat relevant to this discussion. 
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