Taiwanese Minister of Education Cheng Ying-yao announced on Thursday that the island’s universities will no longer be allowed to collaborate with three Chinese institutions because they are affiliated with the United Front Work Department, the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda bureau.
“Chinese universities affiliated with the United Front Work Department serve a political purpose rather than a purely academic one,” Cheng said when announcing the ban. “To prevent political influence operations we must halt cooperation and exchanges.”
The three Chinese institutions on the blacklist are Jinan University in Guangzhou, Huaqiao University in Xiamen and Quanzhou, and the Beijing Chinese Language and Culture College. The three universities have about 2,000 Taiwanese students enrolled. China attracted these students by making it easy for them to enroll and obtain tuition waivers.
Cheng said that individual students can communicate with the three Chinese institutions at their discretion, but degrees obtained from those universities will no longer be recognized in Taiwan.
“United front work” is Chinese Communist code for influence operations designed to shift the politics of other countries into alignment with Beijing’s views. The United Front Work Department organizes and bankrolls protest movements in other countries and injects Chinese Communist propaganda into their education systems. In the United States, the primary campus vehicle for united front work was the Confucius Institute, a program that ostensibly provided free education about Chinese culture and language to American universities.
Wu Szu-yao, a legislator from Taiwan’s governing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), compared the ban on the three Chinese universities to the shutdown of Confucius Institute programs by the governments of the United States, Europe, and Australia.
“Taiwan has never restricted normal academic and cultural exchanges, as long as they are free from official influence. But these schools, being under the United Front Work Department control, inherently serve political purposes and follow political directives,” Wu said.
Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs minister, Chiu Chui-cheng, pointed out on Friday that China tightly controls how many of its own students are allowed to study in Taiwan, creating a distinct “imbalance in cross-strait educational exchanges.”
Chiu said that educational exchanges “should be grounded in reciprocity, respect, and fairness.” He noted that Taiwanese students may still earn recognized degrees from at least 154 other Chinese universities that remain available.
Politicians from the opposition Kuomintang party (KMT), which is generally more favorable to China than the DPP, criticized the blackballing of Chinese universities as a political stunt.
“Academic cooperation should be based on international accreditation, not political considerations. The DPP is using this as part of its broader political strategy for 2025, creating division instead of fostering engagement,” charged KMT chair Eric Chu Li-luan.
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