Revealed: the Cambridge-China Pact
Journalism makes nothing happen. The general lack-of-response within Cambridge to the
TCSarticle ‘Stephen Toope: Blind to Tyranny’ would certainly warrant this conclusion. The piece, published in May 2020, revealed that on two separate occasions the Vice-Chancellor (who specialises in human-rights law) had used his position to promote the methods and objectives of the dictatorial Chinese government.
First, in a February 2019 Jesus College white paper funded by Huawei, Toope appeared to endorse China’s plans for a ‘new governance system’ worldwide; second, in a March 2019 speech at Peking University, Toope praised the faculty as ‘a formidable institution, which seeks an open world’. This encomium would be blandly unobjectionable were it not the case that, in the months before Toope’s speech, secret police abducted the Peking students Yue Xin, Zhang Shangye, and Qiu Zhanxuan for protesting about labour rights. After Peking’s Marx