Many cases were documented where students from China, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia have had to report to their embassies about their academic activities and their colleagues. An example of this is forcing students to report to their embassies in western countries. The Egyptian police raided Al-Khatib’s family home in Egypt, confiscated many of their belongings, and threatened his family members after interrogating them with several questions about Al-Khatib.Īnother tool of transnational repression can be seen in these states’ expansive capacity to implement surveillance. The Egyptian regime behaved in a similar fashion with Taqadum Al-Khatib, a post-doc scholar at the Free University of Berlin. In the case of Zhihao Kong, a Chinese student at Purdue University in Indiana, his family called him and asked him to stop sharing anything that contained anti-Chinese regime rhetoric on social media after a visit by a state security officer threatening them. This was based on a Facebook post he wrote while he was studying at CEU in Vienna, in which he denounced the Egyptian regime’s Covid-19 policies.Īnother common tactic of authoritarian regimes to silence their students and scholars abroad is the use of intimidation, threats, and arrests of their family members. For example, Ahmed Samir, an Egyptian graduate student at the Central European University (CEU), was arrested during his vacation in Egypt and sentenced to four years in prison. Other autocracies have followed suit since 2014 Freedom House has documented 608 cases of transnational repression. By imprisoning our colleague Luo Daiqing, the Chinese government sends a message of terror and intimidation to all its citizens abroad, including students and scholars that their presence outside the Chinese borders does not mean that the long arm of repression could not reach them. “Transnational repression” is the term used by several reports and scholars to describe how autocracies are using a wide range of tactics to harass, spy, threaten, and intimidate their citizens abroad in order to silence their criticism. The same regimes that have intensified their repression against students and scholars at home have also sought to “transnationalize” everyday forms of censorship, control, and repression to students and faculty abroad. While international students and scholars abroad are constantly thinking about how they can transfer the knowledge and experience they receive from western universities back to their home countries, autocracies tend to see their students and scholars abroad as “the most dangerous group of emigrants”, as once described by Egypt’s immigration minister Nabila Makram. Among those attacks, there were 110 cases of forced disappearance, violence, and killing, 101 cases of imprisonment, and the rest were cases involving prosecution, travel bans, and other forms of restriction on free expression and wellbeing. In 2021 alone, Scholars at Risk (SAR) - an international network that seeks to protect scholars and promote academic freedom- documented 332 attacks on higher education communities (Scholars, students, and staff) in 65 countries. Students, scholars, and academic institutions are among the primary targets of this kind of repression. The second issue relates to the fact that Twitter is banned in China, meaning that those who reported Daiqing’s tweets to the government are part of a larger effort to monitor and surveil their citizens abroad, making the Chinese government the world’s leading perpetrator of attacks on dissidents abroad.Īround the world, authoritarian regimes are censoring knowledge production in academic institutions. The first is the global reach of authoritarian regimes and the ways in which the impacts of their draconian laws go beyond borders to control students who are expressing their thoughts from 7,000 miles away. That tragic case confirmed two very serious issues. These tweets were later considered by a Chinese court as “denigrating a national leader's image and indecent pictures," which "created a negative social impact." The court sentenced Daiqing to six months in prison after he arrived in China. Luo Daiqing, a 20-year old Chinese student at the University of Minnesota, shared posts on his Twitter account while he was studying in the US.
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