It's a serious issue. One party speaks with on voice, everyone else thousands of voices, and not even a single world leader other than maybe the US President can get away with saying something.
There needs to be more concerted effort.
Swiss Ph.D student’s dismissal spotlights China’s influence
11–20 of 374 posts
Re: Swiss Ph.D student’s dismissal spotlights China’s influence
#12Well, that long, favorable article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung ought to help. That's a well respected newspaper. Published since 1780.
You're underselling it a little. NZZ is the German-language Swiss newspaper of record, the NYT of Switzerland.
Re: Swiss Ph.D student’s dismissal spotlights China’s influence
#13Well, that long, favorable article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung ought to help. That's a well respected newspaper. Published since 1780.
You're underselling it a little. NZZ is the German-language Swiss newspaper of record, the NYT of Switzerland.
You're overselling NYT I think. It's still one of the reputable sources of USA but I have some reservations.
Re: Swiss Ph.D student’s dismissal spotlights China’s influence
#14This is an article spun to make controversy out of nothing.
The narrative is that a student tweeted something critical about China, and the CCP pressured his advisor into dropping him.
The reality is that the student published a tweet that "depicted a comic character that had been altered and had stereotyped Chinese features, with yellow skin tone and slit eyes". This understandably was perceived as racist by a Chinese student in Canada, who complained to the advisor. The advisor agreed and dropped her racist-seeming doctoral student.
The CCP wasn't involved. Nobody cared about his criticism of China. It was his racist-looking tweet that got him dismissed.
Edit: But yes, the CCP can have a chilling effect on free speech. See the Blitzchung controversy. This article is just a non-story.
Re: Swiss Ph.D student’s dismissal spotlights China’s influence
#15The professor should be fired and the university punished (doubtful), but the student was also an idiot to do what he did. It’s not like he was some random guy who just tweeted at China, he lived in wuhan for years and has actual family there now, being critical of a totalitarian government in that scenario is the height of monumental stupidity. It’s ironic that the article paints him as methodological and thoughtful because he seems anything but in his actions.
Re: Swiss Ph.D student’s dismissal spotlights China’s influence
#16Re: Swiss Ph.D student’s dismissal spotlights China’s influence
#17Not sure what the timeline is here. TFA strongly implies it’s a tweet on March 21 inciting a response on March 28, but buries the lede about the racist cartoon posted at an unknown time that the professor claims to have received an email about.
I’m sure political factors play the leading role here, but it’s long past the point where you can casually post racist cartoons and act surprised when you’re hit by undesirable consequences. Imagine an African American studies PhD student casually posting racist cartoons depicting black stereotypes. People have been disciplined for much less (e.g. that professor who spoke a common Chinese phrase resembling the n word several times to caution students and later got suspended).
And before you accuse me of things, I’m a long time HN user and I’m not paid to comment. Using a throwaway for radioactive topics.
Re: Swiss Ph.D student’s dismissal spotlights China’s influence
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're underselling it a little. NZZ is the German-language Swiss newspaper of record, the NYT of Switzerland.
You're overselling NYT I think. It's still one of the reputable sources of USA but I have some reservations.
I see no conflict between utter distrust for the NYT and the fact that it is indeed the paper of record for the US [1]. I was even going to say that it lends little credibility to the story itself, which should have to stand on its own merit, but it does speak to the impact of the story in Switzerland and possibly abroad.
Re: Swiss Ph.D student’s dismissal spotlights China’s influence
#19> In the United States too, a quarter of the country’s Confucius Institutes have been shut down in recent years. Universities no longer wanted to give legitimacy to an institution that defended fundamentally different values. Well, that makes a statement about the purpose of a university.
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Re: Swiss Ph.D student’s dismissal spotlights China’s influence
#20This is an article spun to make controversy out of nothing. The narrative is that a student tweeted something critical about China, and the CCP pressured his advisor into dropping him. The reality is that the student published a tweet that "depicted a comic character that had been altered and had stereotyped Chinese features, with yellow skin tone and slit eyes". This understandably was perceived as racist by a Chine…
For anyone else wondering if the above commenter is a Chinese propaganda account, you can see from his or her comment history that that is not the case.