British universities must fight for democracy and are failing to defend Hong Kong protesters Universities have been stifling their students’ freedom of speech when they have tried to campaign in favour of Hong Kong

In our globalised age, few conflicts or disputes remain local or regional for long. That particularly applies to Hong Kong’s struggle to stay free of the control of China.

We’ve all watched the footage of a relatively liberal society wrestling desperately to avoid being crushed by its acquisitive totalitarian neighbour.

This is a very 21st century battle for liberty – a “revolution of our times”, as the protesters’ slogan puts it.

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It is fought on the streets of the city, where protesters face beatings and worse from the increasingly thuggish police and the gangsters who fight alongside them.

It is fought online, where they share footage and photographs illustrating the brutality they face, and the Chinese state deploys a mixture of real and automated accounts to pump out its propaganda in reply.

And it is increasingly fought, albeit on a smaller scale, around the world: expatriate Hong Kong and Chinese citizens, and their respective sympathisers, have started to protest and counter-protest outside embassies and on university campuses in numerous countries.

That’s certainly been happening here in the UK, sometimes with disturbing effects.

Hong Kong supporters in Birmingham, Manchester and Newcastle allege they were filmed and photographed by counter-protesters supporting China.

Many regard this as intentionally menacing, given the human rights abuses the Chinese state routinely commits and the way in which dissidents in Hong Kong have been targeted.

Some, in London and Manchester, have been pelted with eggs for expressing their support for a free Hong Kong while, in Sheffield a beer bottle was allegedly thrown during a protest.

In our country – not in Hong Kong, or China, but here, on British streets – some democracy campaigners tell me they feel the need to hide their faces to avoid reprisals against family members and friends 6,000 miles away.

Sympathy for democrats engaged in a fight for their lives reaches around the world, but so does the influence of the totalitarians they are fighting against.

In the UK, the issue is particularly hotly contested on university campuses.

That is not a surprise – activism is part of life for many students, and there remains, thank goodness, a strain of instinctive liberalism within university politics, despite the rise of the hyper-sensitive offendotrons who have become the modern stereotype.

At the same time, British universities now play host to more students from mainland China than ever before, providing a readymade constituency for anyone hoping to counter expressions of sympathy with Hong Kong.

Disagreement is a natural, healthy thing. It turns the stomach to see people wave the flag of a tyranny that, as well as trying to beat Hong Kong into submission, is currently waging a massive campaign of internment, torture and “re-education” against the Uighur population of Xinjiang.

But it is a good thing that, here at least, Chinese state propaganda can be challenged and debunked.

Violence and intimidation obviously threatens that free and open debate. But so, troublingly, do some university authorities.

It recently emerged that, at York University, students from Hong Kong were instructed by student union-controlled campus security to take down a Freshers’ Fair display about the democracy protests, following complaints from the University Chinese Society.

Elsewhere, activists have been advised that they ought to limit their activities in case counter-protests were too threatening.

How dare they? What better place could there be for vigorous and open difference of opinion than at a university, where people come to improve their minds and where our society hopes the germs of its future – philosophical, technological, cultural and political – will be sown?

Students’ unions and universities ought to be energetic defenders of free speech, for the good of themselves, their students and wider society.

Except, of course, that is no longer an obvious or universally held principle.

Freedom of thought on campus is under pressure from a confluence of two disturbing trends.

First, the arrival of offence culture, in which the limit on acceptable speech is defined by the most easily offended person within earshot. And second, by the growing eagerness of our higher education sector to access money from China.

Far too often, our universities have shown a pathetic willingness to sacrifice fundamental principles –and fundamental rights – to pamper and indulge the unreasonable demands of over-sensitive groups among their customers, be they British leftists or Chinese totalitarians.

This doesn’t serve the majority of students, who have no interest whatsoever in censoring their peers, and it does insidious harm to the universities themselves.

It doesn’t even make business sense, if money was their concern.

How long do they think their product – a high-quality education – will keep its value if they undermine the foundations on which it stands, such as free expression?

There are plenty of cautionary tales about the risk to academia of ill-considered pursuit of money with dubious connections.

The London School of Economics’ immoral entanglement with the Gaddafi regime cost the LSE’s director his job, and hammered the institution’s reputation around the world.

It isn’t too late for our universities to see sense, and reassert their principles. They should do so before the cost of selling out becomes crippling.

Mark Wallace is executive editor of ConservativeHome