Students Threatened by University Administrators over Anti-China Stickers

T wo of the most disturbing trends in America’s culture wars — U.S. colleges’ woke bent and the conflation of legitimate anti-China rhetoric with odious anti-Asian racism — have formed a toxic cocktail at Boston’s Emerson College.

Emerson administrators have just suspended a student group for distributing stickers emblazoned with the phrase “China kinda sus” — “sus” being shorthand for “suspicious” — and a hammer-and-sickle image meant to symbolize the country’s totalitarian regime. And whether they know it or not, they’re doing the Chinese Communist Party a favor.

In an email to students on September 30, the university’s interim president, William Gilligan, condemned “anti-Asian bigotry” and said that the Emerson chapter of Turning Point USA, a conservative activist group, would be investigated after its members distributed the stickers a day earlier. In a subsequent letter to the group’s leadership, the school’s director of community standards served notice that the group had been suspended from its usual activities due to the “Bias Related Behavior” under investigation, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which is advocating for the students.

The Emerson administration’s actions undoubtedly raise due-process concerns. “They are certainly taking steps that are inconsistent with their very strong and admirable commitment to freedom of expression,” FIRE’s Adam Steinbaugh told National Review. “And who knows, what does that say about their other commitments?”

Just as important, they’re likely violating students’ rights in service of a severely flawed narrative advanced by apologists for the Chinese regime.

As common sense would suggest, and contrary to what the Emerson administration claims, the “China kinda sus” stickers are anything but racist. Emerson TPUSA vice president Kjersten Lynum said in a video posted to Instagram that the stickers referred to the Chinese government’s well-documented human-rights atrocities, including the Uyghur genocide. “It has nothing to do with Asians or Asian culture. I am Chinese-Singaporean myself, and I’m offended by people who suggest I have hatred toward my own race,” she said.

In an email to NR, the Emerson TPUSA chapter’s president, Sam Neves, elaborated on the university’s malfeasance. “The stickers come standard in every activism kit from the Turning Point USA headquarters. Thousands of colleges and universities all across the country distribute those exact same stickers, and virtually no one else ever had any issue with them,” Neves said. “We feel most of this outrage is disingenuous.”

Neves is probably correct — Gilligan’s conduct is, according to FIRE, apparently motivated by complaints he received about the stickers from students. The most prominent student organization pushing for TPUSA’s defenestration is the Chinese Students Association (CSA), which has a dubious record of taking Beijing’s line on various issues, including the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement.

Before Gilligan’s email and the announcement of the suspension, the Emerson CSA posted a statement to Instagram complaining about the stickers. “We denounce all forms of racism and bigotry against Chinese individuals as well as the entire Asian community. Emerson is supposed to be an inclusive community, yet any hate speech is unacceptable and we experience tremendous pain from this incident,” read the post, which went on to call for disciplinary action to be taken against the Emerson TPUSA chapter.

“The school’s official Instagram account liked a post from a student organization calling for our punishment, all before reaching out to us,” Neves told NR, apparently referring to the CSA post. “How is this going to be a fair trial?”

Emerson, which through a spokesperson declined NR’s requests for comment, has a history of buckling to pro-China pressure. In 2019, a campus controversy over the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong bubbled up. Frances Hui, then a junior at the school, led a movement on campus to draw attention to the plight of Hong Kong’s democrats. She wrote an op-ed for the school’s newspaper that earned her threats from two members of the CSA that April. A number of the group’s other members claimed that her criticism of the country was racist.

In an interview with NR, Hui recalled that after one CSA member posted her op-ed alongside the message “whoever opposes China must be executed,” the Emerson administration failed to take action. Hui had asked only that the university issue a statement condemning the death threat. Instead, in June 2019, administrators held a meeting with her in which Jim Hoppe, the college’s vice president, dismissed her concerns about safety. Adding insult to injury, she was eliminated from consideration for a part-time job at the Office of International Student Affairs soon after. She was, she claims, deemed too controversial to represent the school to its international students, some 60 percent of whom are mainland Chinese.

At the time, the CSA’s officers made an argument remarkably similar to the one that they have advanced in their social-media posts about the TPUSA controversy. “You are disrespecting my country, and that’s my culture and that’s part of who I am. As much as I’m really open-minded, I still feel really uncomfortable to be confronted by others here,” Beini Wang, then the president of the group, told WGBH News.

The message — that all criticism of the Chinese government is racist — appears to have been received by administrators.

“The Office of International Student Affairs (OSIA), the Office of Intercultural Affairs, and Student Engagement and Leadership (SEAL) and the Social Justice Center (SJC) stand with our students from China, and other Asian-identified and Asian-American community members, to denounce the use of free speech platforms for statements that are used as xenophobic weapons,” Emerson wrote in a note to international students on the same day that Gilligan sent his email.

But the only weapon being wielded here is the nebulous concept of “hate speech,” invoked as a means of silencing, embarrassing, and threatening students who call the Chinese Communist Party’s evil what it is.