The Babylon Bee recently published a satirical article, claiming that the Chinese Communist Party had disbanded its propaganda team, “as American media doing their job for them”.
In a case of life-imitating-satire, an Australian university is doing Beijing’s dirty work for them: harassing and persecuting a student who dared speak up about the Chinese Communist Party’s influence on campus.
The University of Queensland is going to extraordinary lengths to silence its most effective critic, a 20-year-old philosophy student who has campaigned against the university’s tight links with the Chinese Communist Party.
Drew Pavlou came to public attention in July last year when, while leading a protest in support of Hong Kong democracy activists, he was assaulted by men who gave every impression of being heavies working for the Chinese state.
He then was targeted by a torrent of online hate and death threats from patriotic Chinese students. China’s consul-general in Brisbane, Xu Jie, praised the violence, drawing a rebuke from Foreign Minister Marise Payne. Pavlou decided to seek a protection order against the consul-general through the courts.
Pavlou’s safety was threatened further when China’s state media vilified him, in effect giving official blessing to patriotic thuggery. He was no longer safe on campus.
As Australian swimmer Mack Horton has found, incur China’s wrath and “patriotic Chinese students” (who are indistinguishable from CCP heavies) will soon turn up outside your house. New Zealand’s own Professor Anne-Marie Brady likewise had her car sabotaged.
If Drew Pavlou was expecting his own university to have his back, he should be sadly disappointed.
How has the university responded to these events, surely one of the most worrying assaults on free speech?
None of the pro-Beijing students or the thugs who assaulted Pavlou has been disciplined. Xu, whom UQ had appointed an adjunct professor, appears to be as welcome as ever at the university.
Instead, irritated by Pavlou’s robust criticism, pranks and sarcasm, UQ seems to have decided to intimidate him into silence.
UQ’s own website declares that “the University is a place where people should be free to express themselves, staff and students should enjoy the freedom to protest and disagree” and endorses “the freedom of staff and students to express their opinions in relation to the University”.
Except when a students mocks the university’s purse-string ties to the CCP.
In February, Pavlou posted a mock Facebook announcement of a forthcoming “UQ Confucius Institute Panel: Why Uyghurs Must Be Exterminated”. A bit of undergraduate humour? Not for the mandarins at UQ.
University lawyers Clayton Utz wrote a letter to Pavlou that itself reads like a prank. It accused him of “making false statements” because, in fact, the Confucius Institute has no involvement with “the alleged event”. There follows a page and a half listing the rules and by-laws it claims he has violated, and ends menacingly[…]the university “reserves the right to commence proceedings”.
Pavlou duly removed the post, but his Struggle Session was far from over. Proving that one thing despots truly fear is mockery, UQ is bringing out the pliers and alligator clips.
On April 9, the disciplinary board delivered a 186-page document detailing 11 charges. Pavlou has been summoned to a secret meeting at which, if he cannot explain himself, he can expect to be expelled.
Most of the allegations are trivial to the point of risible.
But UQ’s Speak Bitter list inadvertently lets slip a truly sinister aspect of how the campus is run.
It’s alleged that Pavlou was guilty of behaviour that “unreasonably disrupted staff or students” when at 12.30pm “on or about 26 February 2020” he took a pen from a shelf at the university stationery shop, wrote something with it, put the pen back and left the shop paying only for three sheets of card.
This kind of surveillance and reporting to authorities has more in common with Beijing’s Orwellian social credit system than what we’d expect on an Australian campus.
Drew Pavlou’s fight echoes that of the “QUT Five”, and Lindsay Shepherd in Canada. Universities have betrayed the Enlightenment ideal of free and open inquiry on which they founded. Instead, they’ve become little more than ideological re-education camps.
The Chinese government has directly funded at least four courses at UQ. Academics at several Australian universities have admitted to altering course content to “address Chinese concerns”.
If UQ wants to counter the impression that it is an ideological slave to the Chinese whip, it had best stop acting like a thuggish Party cadre.
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