NYU's Fight Against Isolationism in Shanghai: The Analogy to Iran

Recently, I engaged in a (I hope) good-natured fight with Steve Diamond over whether NYU’s presence in Shanghai is beneficial or harmful to the cause of Chinese civil liberties. You can read the points and counterpoints in the comments on my blog post. There is, however, one question that I did not ask Steve and the rest of the critics of “NYU-Shanghai,” NYU’s partnership with East China Normal University to provide a NYU-style education to Chinese students in China. Does it worry them just a little bit that their most vociferous allies in China are the Left Maoist enemies of “western values”?

Although Steve and others claim to speak on behalf of workers, feminists, farmers, and others abused by the Chinese Communist Party, they have yet (to my knowledge) been able to cite a single Chinese victim of the CCP who wants NYU to leave China. My own conversations with Beida academics who are also civil rights advocates in China suggest, indeed, that the people in China standing up for liberty are happy that NYU is in China. By contrast, Chinese nationalists denounce the presence of western academics in China, treating even on-line college courses from western sources as a dangerous virus. Like Steve, they seem to want us to leave. I would think that this neo-Maoist endorsement of the idea that westerners should get out of the business of educating Chinese would make people like Steve a bit uneasy. If NYU’s program here in Shanghai makes no contribution to liberty, as Steve asserted, then why do the enemies of liberty dislike it so much? They want to throw us out, Steve want us to leave: Should he not feel just a bit uncomfortable at having such strange bedfellows?

That last question can also be directed against my fellow Republicans who want to scuttle the Obama Administration's negotiations with Iran. When the result you hope to obtain is fervently desired by the people you claim to oppose, then does not this coincidence of aims suggest reason to doubt the goal?

Republican objections to negotiations with Iran follow roughly the same script as Steve's objections to NYU-Shanghai's educating kids in China. In both cases, the the attack on American engagement with repressive regimes is rooted in the general notion that such engagement does not do enough to stop the repression. I do not share these reservations, perhaps because I start from a different baseline of expectations: I do not see how the victims of repression be made worse off by American engagement. But, if I did shared such suspicions of engagement, I surely would start second-guessing them when they were endorsed by the most reactionary mullahs at Friday prayers. If the enemy of your enemy is your friend, then should not Republicans be a bit more friendly towards the current negotiations with the incumbent government of Iran, negotiations which are plainly reviled by the most repressive factions in Iran?

It seems to me that American academics’ opposition to ties with China resemble Republican opposition to negotiations with Iran in two respects. First, both try to punish a repressive regime by adopting a stance of isolationism that wins support from the most repressive factions within that regime, without any support from the victims of such repression. Second, neither have a plain answer to the question, “how does cutting off ties between the USA and the repressive regime help make the latter less repressive?” Opponents of NYU-Shanghai cite the Chinese government’s human rights abuses as as a reason for U.S. universities to withdraw from China without any explanation for how such withdrawal is supposed to reduce such abuses. Republicans denounce the Obama Administration’s engagement with Iran without any argument about how lack of engagement is supposed to help the victims of mullahs and purity police. Given that the Revolutionary Guards and Left Maoists alike hate engagement with the West, one might imagine that American opponents of such engagement would, at the very least, offer some sort of argument about why the advocates of repression and illiberalism somehow do not know their own self-interest.

The truth, I think, is that advocates of repression are very rationally also advocates of isolation. Unlike NYU’s American opponents, they understand the link between isolationism and repression. From the Middle East to China, those who are suspicious of liberty are also suspicious of Americans’ investment of educational resources in their countries. The American University in Beirut has never been a hit with reactionary Islam. The Maoists don’t like NYU-Shanghai. Putin is trying to chase foreign-funded NGOs out of Russia. Reactionaries just do not like competition, and, within its very limited province, NYU-Shanghai provides a different and competing model of education than that espoused by the heirs of the Cultural Revolution – a model based on debate and free inquiry, not on indoctrination and obedience.

Of course, there are limits to what we can do in China, but it is completely mystifying to me why those limits constitute reasons to do even less. We cannot sponsor a strike at a factory or file a lawsuit in Chinese court on behalf of an aggrieved farmer. But … so what? Why are these limits on our mission reasons not to teach what we know? The only response I ever hear is (to my ears) the obviously self-refuting dogmatism that any freedom less than total freedom is no freedom at all. When such an apparently weak argument is made on behalf of a result that advocates of repression applaud, then I am inclined to feel for my wallet and count my change: Surely, isolationism should win a bit of skepticism from the friends of liberalism as a consequence of its illiberal friends.