Thread by @JimMillward

Coordinated disruption of Brandeis webinar on Xinjiang: a thread. web.archive.org/web/2020111504…

Link above is archived version of a letter sent to Brandeis Chinese students by the Chinese Students and Scholars Association. It says the event would disrespect Chinese people (forgetting the Uyghurs are also Chinese people?) and that critical academic events are inappropriate.

There's a template in English at the bottom for letters to be sent to Brandeis president and, interestingly, to the University Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Indeed, those offices received these letters, but of course did not cancel the event as the letters asked.

The attendance at the Zoom webinar (at which Rayhan Asat, Gardner Bovingdon, Lauren Restrepo, Sean Roberts and I spoke) was very good--a few zoom screens full, many Chinese names among attendees.

There were also attendees hiding behind pseudonyms, of which at least one was a disrupter. Some pseudonyms / profile images were interesting: One was "All lives Matter."

Another was was General George Custer, who was killed at Little Big Horn in the course of a US campaign to corral all remaining Plains Indians after white European Americans continually violated treaties and impinged on Indian land.

No idea who was behind these pseudonyms, of course, but they are disturbing given the subject matter of the webinar; also interesting that someone was apparently drawing a parallel re. settler colonialism's victims in US and Chinese history.

Over the past few years I've given dozens of seminars on this topic and this is the first time I've been disrupted this way. It's telling that the most offensive disruption was directed at a Uyghur (discussing internat'l law implications and her falsely incarcerated brother)

(It might have been useful to listen to that, since it shows a how PRC could be brought before the Internat'l Criminal Court even though PRC is not a signatory to the ICC convention.)

But let me say this to the CSSA: thanks for increasing attendance at our event. Though the web panel is not the ideal way to convey information (please see our published writings, all fully sourced) we were glad to be able to discuss some of the dimensions of what is happening

For my one part, I think these ethnocidal policies in XJ are very bad for PRC, which is one reason I want CCP to stop them and implement spirit and letter of minzu autonomy laws, i.e. China's own system of multiculturalism, designed under Mao, abandoned under Xi.

But another issue is recent anti-Chinese racism in US, spurred by Trump administration, which has demonized PRC students and scholars, said "all" are spies, proposed banning all visas (Stephen Miller), prosecuted Ch scholars etc.

Against this backdrop, coordinated CSSA campaigns to shut down events, using Trumpian language (”Fake news 不实消息“）and crying wolf to the Diversity, Inclusion, Equity institutions saying discussion of the Uyghur issue makes "Chinese students" feel "insecure" is a bad idea.

US scholars of China are very concerned about Trump's demonization of PRC and Chinese, and USG attacks on academic freedom. Racism is racism whether in PRC and US. But CSSA campaigns like this play into the Trumpy argument that Chinese students are all tools of evil Communists.

One attendee wrote a long Medium critique of the webinar. It's many screens long, but at top he wrote, "I have no intention to make this article academic-oriented, which requires tons of research and evidence. Evidence, research, and statistics may be added in later articles."

I didn't read any more and suggest others don't either. We in fact have done the tons of research and present the voluminous evidence, thank you. Call me back when you've read it.

My point is that Trumpism (racism, calling "fake news," denigrating scholarship and science, denying documented evidence) is targeting Chinese people in US. Yet CSSA parrots Trumpist language and methods to challenge scholars for uncomfortable research PRC needs to hear. Crazy.