College changes name of China centre following transparency criticism

A Cambridge college will rename its China Centre and adopt more transparency over its funding, it was announced on Tuesday.

The centre, set up in 2016 at Jesus College Cambridge, was reviewed by a panel of the college’s academics in 2021 and will no longer receive funding from the Cambridge China Development Trust.

The college said the China centre should follow the college’s principles of “academic freedom” and that this must be clearly stated on the centre’s website.

“The centre should demonstrate its commitment to this principle by being bold and proactive in planning and running seminars and not shying away from controversial topics,” it added.

The centre will be renamed the “China Forum” and be “reformed and restructured”, the review said, with full transparency over its governance and funding.

The review said that from early 2020, media reports had raised concerns about the college’s China-related activities, while initiatives were also “mentioned as a matter of concern in the House of Commons by Dominic Raab, the then-foreign secretary, and Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the foreign affairs committee, in the context of discussions about academic freedom in British universities”.

It said many of the newspaper articles had expressed concern over the funding arrangements behind the college’s China initiatives and the “perceived lack of transparency” behind them, as well as “what appeared to be the avoidance of controversial topics, such as the political situation in Hong Kong and the treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang, in the China Centre’s seminar programme”.

The report also references letters from several alumni who “were dismayed by what they perceived as inconsistency or even hypocrisy on the part of the college, which was taking steps to remove the memorial to Tobias Rustat in the College Chapel because of his involvement in the slave trade, on the one hand, while the China Centre appeared to be turning a blind eye to the treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang, on the other”.

The college fought the Church of England through a consistory court case to remove the memorial to Mr Rustat from its chapel, but in March, the Diocese of Ely decided it would not be removed.

The review says a number of college fellows had also expressed concerns over the lack of speakers on topics such as human rights, press freedom, the treatment of the Uighurs and the political situation in Hong Kong, although it notes that in 2021, seminars were held on Hong Kong and Xianjiang.

Last year, The Sunday Times reported that the centre’s director, Professor Peter Nolan, said that the college could be “perceived as being a campaigning college for freedom for Hong Kong, freedom for the Uighurs” if it held explicitly anti-China events and that more balanced debate would lead to a “very, very contentious outcome”.

Sonita Alleyne OBE, Master of Jesus College, said: “The world has changed dramatically since the China Centre was established in 2016, which is why the College’s Council commissioned this detailed review and why we are taking the recommendations forward immediately.

“We will change the China Forum’s funding model and make its aims and funding fully transparent, so the forum can continue its highly regarded scholarly seminar series which has covered topics as diverse as the ancient Liangzhu civilization, China’s high-speed trains, Xinjiang and its Muslim Minorities, and the future of Hong Kong since the series was launched in early 2019.”