Introductory note: I know that conversations about the Hong Kong protests, Wesleyan’s proposed campus in China, and the organizing of the Solidarity Rally for Hong Kong today has made many Wesleyan students from mainland China feel uncomfortable or unsafe. In these difficult times, I sincerely extend my deep solidarity with each and every mainland Chinese student on this campus. I ask every member of the Wesleyan community to do the same.

Last month, I had the opportunity to speak on a panel organized by the College of East Asian Studies (CEAS) about the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, my hometown. Since June, the people of my cosmopolitan metropolis have risen against our Beijing-controlled government in a massive and sustained revolt. Initially provoked by an extradition law that would threaten our rights and autonomy by empowering the government to send anyone suspected of violating certain Chinese laws to mainland China to stand trial, the unprecedented cruelty of the mainland regime’s efforts at suppression have intensified the protests into a popular insurrection against state power, police brutality, and imperial domination by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the ruling party of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). I was deeply moved by the turnout of the panel—PAC 001 was crammed to over-capacity with faculty and students from all backgrounds. I was also grateful for the many international students from mainland China who asked critical questions about the relationship of Hong Kong to mainland China and initiated important discussions about their own positionality on campus. I found these preliminary conversations very insightful and have continued them with some students from mainland China in the last few weeks.

One week after the panel on the Hong Kong protests, The Argus published an article revealing that Wesleyan is considering a proposal to partner with Hengdian Group to build a campus in Zhejiang, China. In July 2019, as international human rights organizations decried the Hong Kong Police Force for indiscriminately shooting, tear-gassing, beating, and arresting protesters, Wesleyan sent a delegation to the project site in China, which included Chief of Staff of the President’s Office David Chearo and Director of the Fries Center for Global Studies Stephen Angle. According to Chearo, Hengdian initially wanted to found a film institute and hence was interested in Wesleyan for its prominent film program. Chearo explained that after the visit, it was made clear to Hengdian that the joint venture would involve Wesleyan’s full liberal arts program. As is typical of joint-venture universities in China, the Wesleyan campus would have a Communist Party secretary serving as president.

Founded in 1975 by a prominent CCP member, Hengdian Group has since become one of China’s largest private conglomerates. Worth over $6.7 billion, it has accumulated over 60 subsidiaries, 200 manufacturing sites, and three publicly listed companies. In recent years, the corporation has focused its efforts on its film production subsidiary, Hengdian World Studios. Also nicknamed “Chinawood”, the company “blows up mountains, flattens villages, tears down temples, and bulldozes cemeteries” to expand its studio, which has become the world’s largest outdoor film studio. This expansion continues to accelerate thanks to the studio’s skyrocketing budget, with 40 new “high-tech studios” due for completion in 2020. As one of China’s largest film studios, the content it produces is strictly monitored and restricted by the state’s propaganda machine, a fact admitted by CEO Sang Xiaoqing. After amassing a string of senior government positions and CCP titles—including membership in the National People’s Congress, National Model Worker, and Outstanding Communist Party Member of Zhejiang Province—founder Xu Wenrong passed his business empire to his son Xu Yongan, now president and chairman of the conglomerate, and named his brother as vice president.

As stated in the title of this article, demonstrating solidarity with Hong Kong’s struggle for freedom and self-determination means rejecting Wesleyan’s proposed joint-venture campus in China. We cannot do the first without doing the second. For many folks on this campus, this connection may not be intuitive and it is worth asking why that is. What forces are at work to make them appear unrelated? Who is benefiting—and at whose expense—when we imagine the issues at Wesleyan, Hong Kong, and China as separate? How might our conception of ourselves and our position in the world change if we began to see the dense lattice of power relations that constitute our world? These are precisely the questions that today’s Solidarity Rally for Hong Kong is trying to serve as an answer to.

The CCP’s perpetration of authoritarianism, exploitation, and (neo)colonialism is not up for debate. The 1989 military crackdown on mass democracy protests in Beijing, mass dispossession drives like the eviction of Beijing’s “low-end population”, the brutal apartheid project in Xinjiang and the sinification of Tibet, ongoing suppression of mounting labor unrest—the rule of the CCP is steeped in countless crimes against our common humanity. The tyrannical behavior of its puppet regime in Hong Kong is but the latest display of its despotic arrogance, which has only achieved new heights under the rule of Xi Jinping.

Setting aside the obvious and warranted concerns over the CCP’s tightening grip on academic freedom at joint-venture universities, the conditions of labor and community relations on a Wesleyan University in Hengdian, and the repercussions of linking Wesleyan’s finances and image to a CCP-linked conglomerate, we must ask a far more fundamental question—will we allow Wesleyan, a non-profit university which brands itself as a leading progressive institution, to conscientiously partner with, benefit from, and enable the profit-making of one of the world’s most powerful authoritarian regimes—the same regime that is subjecting my friends and family in Hong Kong to unspeakable terror at this very moment?

Joy Ming King is a member of the class of 2020, and can be reached at jking01@wesleyan.edu.