Social Science Space

UK-China academic collaboration directly involves the CCP and its representatives at the university level. Against the backdrop of the Party’s human rights abuses, argues our anonymous scholar, such collaboration seems increasingly hard to justify.

The question how to approach international academic cooperation with totalitarian China therefore leads to no easy answers. It nonetheless merits much greater attention than it has received so far.

Totalitarian rule and the governance strategies it entails have direct implications for academic internationalization at Chinese universities and for their collaboration with universities abroad.

Within Communist academia, scholarship is managed top-down to a significant degree, for the benefit of part, state and society, and independent research operates in the nooks and crannies that remain. In this institutional environment, independent public speech carries a considerable risk, as does, to an extent, independent thought.

To what extent do the realities of social research in China live up to the favorable image created by job ads on academic recruitment sites?

What is WeChat, and what does it do? Apart from ethnically suspect attacks on the platform itself, its ability to socially engineer discussion in China is a genuine concern.

At their heart, Chinese public universities are deeply parochial bureaucratic structures geared towards the party-state’s priorities for socio-economic development. In response to national and international pressures, some universities have recently begun to internationalize, with notably different degrees of enthusiasm. Others have not. You would do well to determine, the author writes, into what category a prospective employer falls.

China has become an increasingly attractive destination for Western social scientists, both for those doing research in and on China and for those looking to continue their careers with meaningful, long-term perspectives.