Asian Angle | As academic ties between US and China unravel, Malaysia could fill the gap
- With American and Chinese universities abandoning any pretence of academic impartiality, Malaysia’s neutrality offers a base for critical scholarship
- Impartial research by institutions like Xiamen University Malaysia would act as a counterbalance to the extreme positions staked out by either side
The rupturing of US-China academic relations is well under way and will continue apace no matter who occupies the White House come January. And this is not just a behind-the-beltway political pushback. American scholars who specialise in Chinese studies are now among those advocating, some vehemently, for disengagement from such programmes until President Xi Jinping acquiesces to further political reform.
Attempts by anyone, including academics, to counter the pervasive anti-China narrative are likely to be met with icy scrutiny. McCarthyism has returned to US campuses, but no longer on the back of a paranoid senator. Rather, this is a government-wide inquisition of an authoritarian China that has seemingly morphed into an existential threat to the free world.
Washington’s rallying cry to defend liberty and human rights belies a deeper anxiety – that the US’ pre-eminence is diminishing. It is an anguish compounded by Americans’ peculiar sense of “manifest destiny”. In academia, this presumed exceptionalism was embodied in the US teacher-Chinese student dynamic, a subordination now upended by the pupil scoffing at the professor who lectures on liberal democracy.
