“The rumor is that the security ministry sponsored the summer program,” Jeremy Wang told me. “I go there, I heard some faculty members saying that the security ministry funded the summer school.”
The courses fall into two categories: enrichment, or academic. Enrichment courses untangle baseball, country music, and other peculiarities that any student of American culture—especially one who expects to be an intelligence officer in the United States or handle an agent there—should be familiar with. Deborah McNutt, an English as a second language instructor at Marietta, teaches a summer UIR course on “American Culture and Practical American English,” such as idioms and slang.
“The goal and learning objectives of this course is to help foreign born people better understand what makes up an American,” according to her syllabus, posted on UIR’s website. “By understanding the reasons Americans behave as they do, a person from another country will be able to do business with more understanding.” The textbook: What Foreigners Need to Know About America from A to Z.
For a “brief biography of instructor,” McNutt wrote that she is a lifelong Marietta resident. “Although my home is small, for the last two summers I have opened up my home to visiting UIR students and professors as a ‘model’ of what an American home looks like from the inside.”
Professor Jacqueline Khorassani, chair of economics and business at Marietta, offers an academic summer course in her field at UIR. She doesn’t care if the security ministry is paying her, “as long as they don’t interfere and I have academic freedom to teach what I want to teach,” she told me. “I teach economics, no matter where.”
Though no one has censored Khorassani’s lectures, foreign professors at UIR may not have complete freedom. One of them noticed a “minder” monitoring his class. After showing a video that criticized the Chinese and U.S. governments, the teacher wasn’t invited back the next summer.
Xing Li had his heart set on studying foreign languages and international relations in UIR’s graduate program. When it spurned him, he went abroad to Aalborg University, a small public school in northern Denmark. Founded in 1974, Aalborg is known for its innovative approach to learning: students work in groups to identify and solve real-life problems.
Xing earned his master’s and doctorate there, and joined Aalborg’s faculty. UIR noticed his progress. In 2009, at its invitation, he attended its sixtieth anniversary celebration. In 2010, the university that had once rejected him named him an honorary professor. He also was inducted into a talent program for overseas scholars, which paid him for teaching in China.
The courtship bore fruit: a 2011 partnership with Aalborg that gives UIR a foothold in Western Europe, much as Marietta has done in the United States. The biggest difference is that, while UIR sends undergraduates to Marietta, the UIR-Aalborg initiative involves a master’s degree program in China and international relations. Twelve graduate students from each university spend the first year in Denmark, and the second in China, earning degrees from both universities. There’s also a joint research center located at UIR, and an academic journal that publishes two issues a year, one in English and one in Chinese. Xing Li is editor in chief.
No one at Aalborg questioned the collaboration at first. Denmark is seeking closer ties with China, one of its biggest export markets for everything from pork sausages to insulin. Then, in 2014, a faculty member searching the Internet stumbled on UIR’s affiliation with the security ministry. His complaint spurred a debate that raged through Xing’s department of culture and global studies, and then the faculty of social sciences, and up to the rector, or president.
The rector consulted the Danish intelligence services, which didn’t consider the program a security risk. “I heard they said they were more concerned with Chinese industrial espionage,” Ane Bislev, academic coordinator for the joint master’s degree, told me. “We know there is cooperation” between UIR and the security ministry. “We don’t know the extent. We talk to students about it, and tell them.”
While the Ministry of State Security selects some UIR graduates for further intelligence training, most pursue other fields, Xing told me. “As long as the joint program is purely academic and professional, it allows no room for any politicization,” he added in an email.
* * *
THROUGH A FRIEND of Xing Li, UIR also gained entrée to a public university in the United States. Timothy Shaw, a Canadian who has taught international politics and development at universities in fourteen countries on five continents, spent 2000–2001 as a visiting professor at Aalborg, where he got to know Xing.
In the fall of 2012, Shaw became director of the Global Governance and Human Security doctoral program at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He told me that UMass Boston’s future lies in cultivating emerging countries such as China, Brazil, and the United Arab Emirates.
In 2013, he agreed to host two visiting scholars from UIR, Rihan Huang and Wang Hui. It was an easy decision, he said, because it cost UMass Boston nothing. China paid their way. An assistant professor at UIR, where he also earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate, Rihan had received government funding to study cybersecurity, with a focus on China and the United States. Wang, an older associate professor, had a Ministry of Education grant to research American perceptions of China’s rise.
They chose UMass Boston, Shaw said, because they had heard of him through Xing Li, and because “they know Boston is a very good city, very academic. They also know that if they apply to Harvard, they wouldn’t get a reply.”
Their duties were up to Shaw, and he didn’t give them any. Neither Rihan nor Wang took or taught courses at UMass Boston; indeed, they didn’t have offices at the university, and hardly showed up there. Instead, they rode the subway most mornings from the suburban Chinese neighborhood where they lived to other academic institutions in the area: Boston University, Northeastern University, MIT, and especially Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. There they sat in on seminars, conferences, and other events that they had found on the Internet. Later, they might remark to Shaw, “Did you know what was happening at MIT last week?”
Going to conferences is, of course, a favorite academic pastime. It’s also a popular way for espionage services to make contacts and gather unclassified but valuable information. “One of the things that the Chinese intelligence system is very good at is understanding how to collect information that doesn’t come from documents and you won’t read in the media, that you’ll only get by showing up at these events, and being in place, and just listening,” Mattis told me.
Shaw was pleased that they weren’t bothering him. “I was worried they would need a lot of hand-holding,” he told me. “They needed no hand-holding. It never occurred to me that they might be spooks, sniffing around. They didn’t have the demeanor. I just assumed they were enjoying their six months here in a very different environment. I was just glad they weren’t in my hair.”
Wang Hui had lunch with another UMass Boston professor to discuss his research topic of U.S. perceptions of China. Wang complained that Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, only attacked China’s human rights record. The professor contradicted him, pointing out that Clinton had chided Israel and other countries. Wang “reflected the Chinese government to a T,” the professor told me. “He couldn’t have been more establishment.”
As Shaw welcomed the visiting scholars, he also persuaded UMass Boston to develop a formal relationship with UIR. Schuyler Korban, vice provost for international affairs, traveled to Beijing in October 2013 and met with UIR president Tao Jian. They exchanged gifts: a Plexiglas pen holder with “UMass Boston” engraved on it for Jian, a cardboard box with packets of green tea for Korban.
Korban, a molecular biologist, said he had “no inkling” of UIR’s position in Chinese intelligence. “All I knew was that it had a strong academic reputation,” he told me. “We’re academics, we look at academic programs. Beyond that, of course, you look at things a little more carefully if you
know where the resources are coming from.… If I had that knowledge ahead of time, I would have looked at it a little differently.”
That December, Shaw went to UIR for a conference, bringing a memo of understanding signed by top UMass administrators. At a ceremony in the Exchange Academic Center on UIR’s campus, President Jian, Vice Chancellor Rubai Wang, and international exchange director Hao Min added their signatures. Shaw and Xing Li were on hand as well.
Under the five-year agreement, the universities agreed to promote student and faculty exchanges, “transnational research,” and other joint activities. The only follow-up so far is that Shaw taught in UIR’s summer program in 2016.
After returning to UIR, Rihan Huang coauthored a 2015 article with UIR graduate and Charhar Institute researcher Xie Tingting, the former Carter Center observer in South Sudan and Emory University visiting scholar, about how China could exploit the European refugee crisis. “Of course, China should seize the opportunity to become an advocate of the international migration governance mechanism and rule maker of the global governance,” they wrote.
The article appeared in the Journal of China and International Relations—the joint UIR-Aalborg publication edited by Aalborg professor Xing Li.
* * *
MARIETTA’S BEIJING OFFICE is tucked in an upscale residential complex a mile from the American embassy, behind a BMW headquarters and a Donna Bella International Beauty Clinic. A security guard monitors the compound entrance. On an impromptu Wednesday afternoon visit in May 2016, children squealed on a shaded playground with a jungle gym and plastic tic-tac-toe boards, and a young woman walked her shih tzu past a basketball court.
No sign identified the college’s office on the fifth floor of a twenty-two-story tower with large square windows, and no one responded to initial knocking. On a second try, twenty minutes later, a middle-aged Chinese woman opened the door. Inside, the office looked like any cluttered apartment, with an overstuffed kitchen and a dining room table, except for displays of books about Marietta’s history and photos of Professor Xiaoxiong Yi with faculty and students. A framed English-language newspaper clipping hung near the table, with Yi’s picture and a headline about improved relations with China.
The woman declined to give her name or be interviewed, saying that her job was to speak only with parents and students—none of whom were there. She said that Yi rarely comes to the office. Asked about Marietta’s success in recruiting Chinese students, she downplayed it. “Marietta is just Marietta,” she said.
The slow day was no aberration; Marietta isn’t attracting as many Chinese as it used to. The number of Chinese students plunged 39 percent, from 144 in fall 2012 to 88 in fall 2015, contributing disproportionately to an overall 17 percent decline in Marietta’s enrollment from 1,432 to 1,193 over the same period. The resulting financial crisis precipitated faculty cuts and the resignation of President Joseph Bruno.
Along with greater competition from other U.S. colleges, one factor in this slump may have been a confidential 2009 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing to the State Department in Washington, which WikiLeaks made public in 2011.
Titled “Portrait of Vice President Xi Jinping: ‘Ambitious Survivor’ of the Cultural Revolution,” the 3,735-word cable described “multiple conversations” from 2007 to 2009 between a political officer at the embassy and “a longtime Embassy contact and former close friend” of Xi. The contact described Xi’s parents, childhood, Cultural Revolution exile in the countryside, and early career, as well as his personality and political views.
The source clearly knew Xi well, and had ambivalent feelings about him. He portrayed the future president as confident, calculating, focused, and so ambitious that he joined the Communist Party “while his father still languished in a Party prison for alleged political crimes.” Peers had underestimated Xi’s intelligence, and women found him “boring.” Should Xi take power, the informant accurately predicted, he would “aggressively” tackle China’s corruption, “perhaps at the expense of the new moneyed class.”
The cable didn’t name the contact, but it brimmed with clues. Born in 1953, he was the son of “an early revolutionary and contemporary of Mao” who became “the PRC’s first Minister of Labor.” He attended Beijing Normal University and graduate school in Washington, D.C. Now an American citizen, he “teaches political science at a U.S. university.”
These details matched one man: Professor Xiaoxiong Yi. The Marietta recruiter’s frank assessment of Xi for the U.S. government spread among Chinese students and prospective applicants, and their parents. “I was told about it by a colleague who had been to China and heard about it from some families,” Rees-Miller recalled. After the cable was published, a posting on Chinese social media included Yi’s name on a list of suspected U.S. spies, also causing a stir at Marietta. “A lot of students saw it at the time,” a former Marietta employee told me.
Especially after Xi became general secretary of China’s Communist Party in November 2012, some Chinese families may have avoided Marietta, fearing that Yi’s candor might have displeased their country’s new leader, or even that Yi was working for U.S. intelligence. “I would be uneasy to send my kid,” Professor Tong said. “They think, ‘Marietta is the American spy school.’”
The cable didn’t deter China’s spy school and Marietta from strengthening their bond. In October 2011, they extended their partnership for five more years. In 2015, presidents Bruno and Tao Jian met at UIR, along with Yi and other Marietta officials.
The number of UIR exchange students at Marietta increased from one or two per semester to four in spring 2016 and six that fall. Marietta held an event for Chinese alumni on UIR’s campus in April 2016. UIR officials “were generous in offering their campus as a venue,” Bruno told me.
Khorassani, Marietta’s economics chair, has proposed a dual degree program to boost Chinese enrollment. UIR economics majors would spend two years there and two at Marietta, and receive degrees from both. The Marietta diploma would help them get into U.S. graduate schools, by showing that they could read and write English at a college level, she told me. “I thought it would be something Chinese students are interested in,” she said, adding that it hasn’t been adopted yet.
“The two institutions are looking at some dual degree options but as of now they are in the very early stages,” spokesman Perry told me.
Following his students’ presentation at the McDonough Center about relations between the United States, China, and Russia, I chatted in the hallway with Yingjie Liu, the visiting scholar from UIR. After initial pleasantries—Yingjie said he liked Marietta because its fresh air gave him relief from Beijing’s smog—I asked him why the students never mentioned human rights or cyber-spying.
“The topics are already set in several areas,” he said.
“By whom?”
“The students.”
Mystified, I changed the topic to UIR’s relationship with Chinese intelligence. While the university receives funding from the security ministry, its support from the education ministry has increased in recent years, he said.
“It’s just a very normal college,” he told me. “Like Marietta.”
5
SHANGHAIED
During the summer after his freshman year in college, Glenn Duffie Shriver fell in love with China. And, though he didn’t speak its language yet, China seemed to fall in love with him.
Shriver was one of the youngest of eighteen Grand Valley State University students from western Michigan’s conservative cornfields, plunged for six eye-opening weeks in 2001 into a vast and alien country. “There were a number of us who were just fascinated with China,” another student recalled. “A lot of us, Glenn included, were on a ‘high’ or sensory overload, especially the first week or so. It was like you couldn’t get enough of it. Everywhere you turned, you were blown away.”
Based at East China Normal University, amid the throngs and skyscrapers of Shanghai, they studied Chinese philosophy, hung out wit
h Chinese students eager to practice English, and dined on snake and jellyfish. They made excursions to the Great Wall and to Beijing, where a traditional Chinese healer examined them and deduced from the warmth of their livers that several students—including Shriver—were drinking too much. They could have told him that.
On another side trip, they stopped at a rural one-room elementary school in southwest China where the children had never seen foreigners. The Americans taught them to dance the Hokey Pokey, and Grand Valley student Michael McCann pulled out a video camera.
“Some of these kids had never seen their own reflection except in a pool of water,” he recalled. “I don’t think they had mirrors in the village. I flipped the viewfinder over and let them see themselves. They realized it was them. They were waving at the camera and then hid from it.” Before leaving, the American students donated two hundred dollars to the school, the equivalent of three years’ funding.
Eight thousand miles and an ocean away from home, Shriver felt—and sometimes acted like—a rock star. He trash-talked Chinese opponents in pickup basketball games on East China Normal’s courts. He reveled in attention from Chinese women, and boasted about his conquests. He dominated class discussions, even when he had no idea what he was talking about. Older, more knowledgeable students laughed at him, and told him to shut up, but he didn’t.
Attending an ethnic minority cultural pageant, the handsome Shriver was selected from the audience to wear onstage the traditional garb of the Yi people, who live in the mountains of southwest China. “He looked like a dignified young prince,” said Grand Valley professor Peimin Ni, who led the Grand Valley group.
Shriver was always ready for adventure. One evening in Beijing, he, McCann, and two other students decided to roam the capital’s back alleys, with no particular destination. “We didn’t want to see tourist things,” McCann recalled. “We wanted to see what Beijing was really like. We started wandering around the streets, found a restaurant, found a bar, met up with two Russian guys. Found some karaoke bars. Had a great, great night. Glenn was tearing it up on karaoke. He loved to drink, to sing, to have fun.”
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