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Students protest harsh lockdown conditions and penalties

Harsh lockdown conditions and draconian penalties for breaking them have led to a major student protest on the campus of Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University and an angry petition to Duke Kunshan University (DKU) authorities, condemning the university’s harsh penalties for student non-compliance that include suspension from the Sino-American university.

Fudan University in Shanghai was the scene of chaos when large numbers of students demonstrated on the campus on 20 April. Riot police were sent in, with arrests reportedly made in what is regarded as the most serious campus incident of China’s current coronavirus wave.

Parents of students at the Shanghai university reported that Fudan had been disconnected from the internet when the protests occurred. It is unclear how many arrests were made or whether the students were later released.

Meanwhile, this month, around 120 students at Duke Kunshan University, just over 50 km from Shanghai, petitioned the university administration via email criticising the university’s draconian penalties over testing and lockdown, which include suspending students “from all academic activities” if they refuse to be tested, and calling for the measures to be lifted.

Anger at surveillance cameras

Some students at Fudan University, in lockdown since 13 March, some weeks before Shanghai went into general lockdown on 28 March, reported “dire conditions” on campus and said the protests occurred when surveillance cameras were installed on 19 April near the door to the bathrooms at a women’s dormitory without informing the students beforehand.

Pictures of handwritten signs on the walls near the dormitory entrance circulated on Chinese social media Weibo. They said: “Freedom, privacy, not cameras”, “This is a university, not a concentration camp” and “No to surveillance! Surveillance! No to bureaucracy! No to micro-fascism”.

Although students reached by University World News at the weekend could not confirm this is what sparked the outdoor protests, they said many students were unhappy with strict campus restrictions which were constantly being extended with little notice. Students said more recently the university authorities had stepped up controls and begun random checks of dormitories.

Under China’s dynamic zero-COVID policy, the Shanghai city authorities have conducted several rounds of mass COVID testing with those found positive sent to quarantine centres, including outside Shanghai.

Fudan University said the surveillance cameras were for epidemic prevention, including to monitor whether students were wearing masks and taking other precautions. “The university will retrieve the screenshots of the monitoring for school notification and criticism!” said the university notice.

Official media in China carried a university statement issued at 6pm on 20 April in the wake of the “rumours” of the unrest that day, saying the situation on campus was “now stable” and condemned “rumoured behaviour that disturbs the overall epidemic control situation”.

The statement said the university had “reported the case to relevant departments for investigation and punishment in accordance with laws and regulations”.

Foreign students want to leave

A petition by parents of South Korean students in Shanghai on a Korea government website in mid-April calling for a “rescue operation” of Korean students studying in Shanghai garnered over 5,000 signatures in just 10 days.

South Korean students had been the only nationality of foreign students allowed back to China since the evacuations of March 2020 when COVID-19 led to major lockdowns around China, with other nationalities of foreign students unable to return for over two years.

Korean diplomats said they were trying to help students with food deliveries and flights out of Shanghai.

A large number of foreign professionals and some remaining foreign students in Shanghai have been flying out of China. Last week, the South Korean consulate in Shanghai wrote to Fudan University calling on university authorities to release the South Korean students still in lockdown, according to South Korean media.

“Last week, half of the international students in China were evacuated by plane,” the letter said. “There are still [South] Korean students in various universities.”

“The Korean consulate wrote to Fudan University because the school wasn’t cooperating ... and refused to allow them to leave,” a consular official told Korean media. The letter described the students as “extremely panicked and helpless”.

Videos circulated widely on Chinese social media this week showing busloads of people being taken to quarantine, at times outside Shanghai. According to some Weibo posts, Fudan’s foreign students have been transported out of Shanghai to isolation facilities in neighbouring Zhejiang, Jiangsu and other provinces, but this could not be confirmed.

“We are looking for ways to help these [Korean] students, especially in relation to deliveries in the city and departures to Korea,” an official from the consulate of South Korea in Shanghai was quoted by Korea’s JoongAng Daily newspaper as saying.

Limited flights out of Shanghai, as international travel has been curbed till May, was hampering efforts to evacuate students.

Draconian punishments at Duke Kunshan

The eastern city of Kunshan in Jiangsu province, with a population of just over two million, went into phased lockdown earlier this month. The only university in the city, Duke Kunshan University, which delivers US Duke University liberal arts degrees in China, brought in a compulsory testing regime similar to other areas in Kunshan.

The university informed students in early April that missing COVID tests could incur penalties, including academic suspension, demotion from leadership positions and a permanent note on students’ records.

The email to students from the university administration said even missing one test could lead to students’ university access code being deactivated until they can provide proof of testing, which students said amounted to expulsion from campus. The names of “non-compliant” students would also be posted publicly on campus, according to the administration.

Missing three tests could lead to academic suspension. Students would need to retake the classes in which they are currently enrolled, although they would remain on campus for the rest of the semester due to COVID-19 protocols, the administration email said.

Students would also be barred from study abroad programmes, including at Duke University’s campus in the United States, which has been one of the attractions of the DKU degree for Chinese students.

Students responded with outrage, noting that some students had been erroneously named and shamed despite complying with the testing regime.

In an email earlier this month to the DKU administration signed by 120, students said they were “deeply troubled by the COVID policies across the campus”. The email, seen by University World News, said the way the university had tackled COVID and relevant issues “has become increasingly disrespectful, irresponsible, threatening, inflexible and authoritative”.

“Most importantly, students have been suffering from high levels of pressure, insecurity, anxiety and even depression under the current COVID situation. However, COVID cannot and can never be an excuse for us to violate important values, including respect, freedom, trust, empathy and openness that should be upheld in this community.”

They demanded a formal apology to “DKU community members whose lives have been seriously impacted by DKU’s excessive policies”.

Denis Simon, senior advisor to the president of Duke University in the US and former executive vice-chancellor of Duke Kunshan University, told University World News there had been “an intense COVID control system in place, and the latest is the most severe. It’s near the end of the academic year, and things were getting worse before getting better, so the reaction of the students is not surprising.”

Restrictions by provincial authorities

Simon said the restrictions imposed on the university were handed down by the Jiangsu provincial authorities with “a multiplicity of agencies who are working together to set the rules and conditions, etc. And then those get implemented at the institutional level.

“While I think that the penalty is severe and extreme, the point is that it’s not inconsistent with the nature of the policy that’s been imposed on the society writ large, however draconian it may seem,” Simon maintained.

While the university cannot deviate from the requirements set by the health authorities, the university administration, in response to students’ complaints, had “tried to maintain a little bit less of a heavy-handed touch. They’ve tried to lighten up a little bit, being less coercive and more carrot rather than stick,” he said.

“The essence of this whole lockdown, zero-COVID policy is that unless you have 100% compliance, the weak link in the chain is going to cause a problem. So, the DKU people are saying to the students, look, we don’t want to be one of the weak links in the chain,” Simon said. “You’ve got to participate. This is not a free choice issue. In China, compliance is the essence of the system.”

Simon said as part of measures taken in response to the student email, test availability has improved to prevent long queues, and testing schedules have been made less rigid so that students don’t miss tests. But he admitted that the easing did not address student grievances over the strict penalties that had prompted the student email.

“Most reasonable people would think that it is an extreme approach in order to try to get compliance from the students and that there are far better ways to get compliance rather than severe coercion.”

Simon acknowledged there was an “inherent conflict between the kind of student that has been produced in the DKU liberal arts environment, and the kind of political environment that is evolving in China, particularly over the last two years when things have become tighter and more controlled. So the contrast has become sharper and sharper.”

The email was signed by mainland Chinese students at DKU. Simon confirmed that there were no foreign students at the campus despite plans drawn up earlier this year to bring them back in.

Aimee Chung in Seoul contributed to this article.