Spanish university caught in China-Taiwan crossfire

One of Europe’s few Taiwan studies programmes, at the University of Salamanca in Spain, has been caught up in rival tensions between China and Taiwan after it attempted to organise a Taiwan cultural event on campus. It was forced to cancel the public parts of the event after Beijing insisted the university adhere to the Spanish government’s foreign policy principles on ‘one China’.

The incident took place last October but has been brought to the fore with a statement of “strong discontent” issued by Taiwan’s ministry of foreign affairs in Taipei last week, at a time of rising tensions as Beijing pressures companies, institutions and governments over its ‘one China’ policy which regards Taiwan as a province of China.

China putting pressure on a storied European university – Salamanca is one of the oldest universities in Europe – “is the latest instance of China’s continued persecution of Taiwan”, the Taiwan foreign ministry said in the 27 August statement.

The ministry said the international community should stand up against Chinese interference in academic freedom and China’s attempts to inculcate its political ideology. The statement added that “the way Chinese diplomatic missions attack Taiwan has got out of control”.

The ministry statement came after Shiany Perez-Cheng, a lecturer in Taiwan studies at the University of Salamanca, on 25 August made emails public from China’s embassy in Madrid to the university’s then president, and to José Manuel del Barrio, dean of its school of social sciences, which she said were sent to coerce the university into abandoning its Taiwan Cultural Day in October 2017.

According to the emails, the embassy demanded that the university cancel the events.

Embassy emails

It did not object to academic exchanges but was “completely dissatisfied and concerned” about “incorrect expressions” in related materials that “do not fall in line with the Spanish government who has long followed the ‘one China’ principle”.

What appears to have attracted the particular ire of Beijing was the invitation to Simon Ko, Taiwan’s representative to Spain, to attend the university event, which included music, dance and martial arts displays. Ko had already introduced the event on 19 October, but within days the Chinese embassy demanded the rest of the event be cancelled or “face repercussions”.

It pointed out that Ko should not be presented as “ambassador of Taiwan” or “vice minister of foreign affairs of Taiwan” – although the latter term was never used by the university – and disputed the nomenclature “Republic of China (Taiwan)” used in the university’s publicity material.

In the email, China’s embassy called on the university not to be used by Taiwanese authorities as a “platform for their political propaganda” or risk affecting the institution’s good relations with China.

“We demand your university adhere to the ‘one China principle’ and take measures to avoid and eliminate the adverse effect,” the embassy email said.

In particular it threatened repercussions on the university’s relations with China. “The University of Salamanca is one of the most historic public universities in Spain and has a great international reputation,” the email said. “China’s government gives importance to its relation(s) with this university,” it said, adding it is included in the “recommended directory” of China’s ministry of education.

“Many visiting Chinese scholars research at the University of Salamanca and many Chinese students also study there. We wouldn’t like your institution to be used by Taiwanese authorities as a platform for their propaganda. It would affect the university’s good relations with China.”

University officials “were shocked to receive the embassy emails”, Perez-Cheng told University World News, recounting that the atmosphere in the social sciences department and East Asia studies department was “very sombre” at the time.

“To be fair, the situation took Salamanca totally by surprise. They did not know of any protocol to implement when dealing with China in Spain,” she says.

It led to the cancelling of the event. Instead of using the main hall of the social sciences department and public areas of the university, it was restricted to classrooms used by the East Asia studies department and comprised some 30 students who are registered for the East Asia masters programme.

Effect on Taiwan studies

Perez-Cheng said the move by the university’s previous president a year ago to comply with the Chinese demand was particularly damaging for the future of Taiwan studies, which Salamanca initiated a decade ago.

“The University of Salamanca and the masters programme of East Asian studies were pioneers – it was the first university in Spain to host a course specifically on Taiwan that is not part of China, Hong Kong and Macau studies.

“It was a bold and very interesting move back then by the university and provided an opportunity for East Asian studies to reflect the actual diversity and differences that are in the Asia-Pacific,” she said, and she noted “being the pioneer is not always easy and we are seeing this now”. The university's then president had consulted with Spain's government and the instructions came from Madrid. Given Madrid's relations with China, "I don't know what will happen to Taiwan studies at Salamanca in the future; we'll have to wait and see," she said.

In contrast to China studies in most major universities, Europe hosts just half a dozen Taiwan studies programmes, mainly in the United Kingdom but also at the University of Vienna, the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium and the University of Tübingen in Germany.

China has attempted to disrupt university events it deems to be against its national interest – these include protests at the University of California, San Diego when it invited the Dalai Lama to speak at its graduation ceremony in 2017; and a debate with human rights activist Anastasia Lin at Durham University, UK, in 2017 which China’s embassy in London wanted cancelled, saying it would harm UK-China relations – but Durham University did not back down, citing freedom of speech on campus.

This year in Australia, a University of Newcastle professor came under attack for listing Taiwan as a country in a slide presentation, as Beijing stepped up its attacks on publishers describing Taiwan as a country rather than a province of China, and threatened sanctions against airlines globally for characterising Taiwan as a country on their websites.

Last year, during a time of heightened tensions between China and Japan over the disputed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea – known as the Diaoyu Islands in Chinese – the Japanese ambassador to Spain was aggressively questioned by a Chinese student during a visit to the University of Salamanca for the university’s Japan cultural week.

“So we are seeing that this is a pattern, it’s not just about China-Taiwan,” says Perez-Cheng, who is currently conducting research at National Taiwan University in Taipei.

Spanish government’s policies

“This is not an isolated incident; it is not China throwing a tantrum over one situation, but it is systematically China’s modus operandi, and as such the Spanish government has to decide on a strategy or a protocol to answer these kinds of situations,” she says.

“It’s not fair and realistic to ask the university to fight this battle on their own when the Spanish government has been systematically conceding to China,” she says.

Perez-Cheng, who is writing her PhD thesis on Europe’s arms embargo against China in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, says Spain has a tradition of being “very compliant with China”. The embargo is still in place but in 2010, when Spain held the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union, Madrid “unilaterally proposed lifting the European Union arms embargo to China without consulting any member states,” she says.

Nonetheless, she believes universities should clarify that these kinds of debates and activities are in line with academic freedom and the charter of universities and do not mean that a university supports one or other position. “If China wants to send its ambassador to the University of Salamanca, we will welcome him and we will have a debate with him but the university should be an open space,” she says.

“Right now in Spain there is a sensitivity with the whole Catalonia issue,” she notes, which the China embassy had exploited in its email to the university “to make it seem like the Taiwan issue is the same as the Catalonia issue, when they are completely different situations,” she says.

China last year backed the Madrid government amid moves by Catalonia to declare independence, saying it supported Spanish government efforts to protect the country’s “territorial integrity”.

Spain is seen as an important country for China as a conduit to the EU and Latin America. Some of the 17 countries that continue to recognise Taiwan are in Latin America.

This article has been edited from the original to clarify that Salamanca University had never referred to the Taiwan representative as 'vice minister of foreign affairs of Taiwan' as stated by the Chinese embassy; and to clarify that the university's then president consulted with the Spanish government and that the instructions to scale back the event came from Madrid.