Law and Business, which face staff cuts at Dundee, could partner with a Chinese university whose partnership with a Dutch university was cut short over genocide denial.
The University of Dundee’s (UoD) revised restructuring proposals, which still include cuts to staffing across faculties, are set to be presented to University Court on 8th September for approval. Justifying the cuts, the Academic Operating Model (AOM) shared with staff last month says a Joint Education Initiative is being developed with SWUPL, China’s Southwest University of Political Science and Law, and could generate a seven-figure surplus.
However, Vrije Universiteit rejected annual six-figure funds from SWUPL in 2022 after it emerged that their partnership included English-language publications denying that human rights abuses existed in the Xinjiang region.
Between 2018 and 2021, the Dutch university’s human rights research centre was solely funded by SWUPL and advocated “non-Western” views of human rights in close collaboration with China’s Central South University (CSU).
The UK’s House of Commons, the EU Parliament, and the US are among the governments and legislatures that declared China is violating the Genocide Convention against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang in 2021, following years of human rights campaigning by NGO charities.
When The Jute Journal searched for SWUPL online, English-language results were dominated by Chinese state media reports with headlines such as “Xi [Jinping]‘s profound gift to human rights discourse” and “Experts reject Western propaganda against Xinjiang.” Chinese authorities have consistently denied wrongdoing and highlighted political divisions in Western countries over human rights abuses in West Asia instead.
Vrije Universiteit dropped all further funding from China only after the Dutch government condemned the partnership in 2022.
As for Dundee, the AOM says the potential partnership with SWUPL is an example of UoD’s ambitions to benefit from increasing demand of China-UK partnerships given the recent US “withdrawal” from China’s education sector.
Indeed, the US and China have been in a diplomatic spat over China’s arrest of an American scholar studying Chinese influence over Myanmar on 3rd June.
However, Dundee’s AOM strikes an optimistic tone about international partnerships:
As [sic] example of the types of opportunities this could offer in future is demonstrated in a recent approach by SWUPL University (a top 5 Universities [sic] for Law in China) to develop a new Joint Education partnership in Law and Business at both UG [undergraduate] and PGT [post-graduate taught] level [sic].
The AOM comes after the Strategy to Recovery proposed closing “loss-making activities” at Dundee while investing in partnerships abroad, despite the risk of them being “loss-making in the early part of their delivery.”
Interim Principal Prof. Nigel Seaton had told The Courier in an interview published this week that there’s “no scope for generating more income by teaching more Scottish students,” who each bring in £1,820 in taxpayer money, whereas there are “modest opportunities” to increase income by teaching overseas with partnerships, “notably in China.”
UoD staff critical of the proposals had told The Courier last month that the Business School generated 39% of all fee-paying international students at Dundee but is facing a cut of 20 full-time academic staff. A University spokesperson at the time said the school’s “student numbers have declined significantly from a peak in 2022-23, while staffing levels increased substantially during the period of growth”
Neither the staff nor the University documents mentioned any controversy relating to China. The AOM explains that Joint Education partnerships provide a reliable pipeline of students, currently 15-100 students per programme.
Dundee’s AOM does not indicate whether the potential Joint Education partnership would involve students studying partially in the city, as is the case with the North Eastern University and Wuhan University’s Biomedical Engineering and Architecture students completing their final year in Dundee, or wholly in China.
The latter is the case with the Dundee International Institute at China’s CSU, which worked with SWUPL on the Dutch human rights centre and was the subject of a report by The Sunday Times last November about freshers undertaking ideological and military training hosted by the CSU.
Regardless, the Chinese Strategic Risks Institute and the Central European Institute of Asian Studies think tanks warned last year that all Joint Education Initiatives fall under the influence of China’s ruling Communist Party, allowing surveillance to extend to UK campuses.
While the University of Dundee has its freedom of expression guidance under Scottish and UK law, Hong Kong’s “national security law” and China’s new “ethnic unity law” introduced this July apply to all individuals in the world, criminalising any actions deemed to subvert Chinese authorities or “undermine ethnic unity or create ethnic division.”
Asked about the potential China partnership by The Jute Journal, a spokesperson for the University said:
We are in discussions about joint Law and Business programmes with SWUPL, a highly ranked and internationally recognised centre for teaching and research in Law. Before reaching any agreements we would undertake further due diligence as to the suitability of the partner.
With the Dutch university’s Chinese partnerships having come to an unpredictable end, how Dundee would continue navigating the complexities of UK-China relations remains to be seen.