Cornell cuts ties with Chinese school after crackdown

Faculty members at Cornell University in New York said that they were cutting ties with Renmin University in Beijing, a leading Chinese tertiary institution, after reports that it was harassing and intimidating students campaigning for workers’ rights, writes Javier C Hernández for The New York Times.

Scholars at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations said they were suspending a six-year-old research and exchange programme with Renmin University after the institution punished at least a dozen students who joined a nationwide call for better protections for low-income workers in China. The student activists, who describe themselves as followers of Mao and Marx, say they are fighting to defend the working class and the legacy of communism. The governing Communist Party, which sees mass movements as a threat, has detained dozens of activists and ordered universities, including Renmin, to help suppress what has become one of the most tenacious student protests in China in years.

Eli Friedman, an associate professor at Cornell who oversees the programme, said Renmin’s actions – including compiling a blacklist of student activists and allowing protesters to be sent home and monitored by national security officials – represented a “major violation of academic freedom” that Cornell could not tolerate.
Full report on The New York Times site