The spy system in Chinese universities

University graduates - could 1 in 10 students be informers?
 (China Photos/Getty Images)

Professor Yang of the University of Political Science in East China has talked about officially taboo subjects in class. His speeches were reported by his students to the City Board of Education and the Public Security Bureau. It was later reported on the Internet about the direct recruitment and management of students as informers in Shandong Tek Chow Institute.

On one hand, the news openly revealed recruiting students as secret agents. It is widely published through media or in the form of reports.

On the other hand, it allows only a single point of contact; this means that there is no way of contact between the secret agents.  Their style is similar to the (communist) ‘underground party’ in the past.

The public disclosure is to let people know that they are being closely monitored at all times and that their speeches and deeds will be reported. Keeping the spies identity confidential will create suspicion among people as they do not know who the spies are and there will therefore be self-restraint. These two seemingly contradictory extreme practices have reached a high degree of unity.

Informers are not uncommon in a university. When I was in high school, one of my room-mates was an intellectual. On a Tuesday afternoon he grumbled in our room that Tuesday was the most annoying day because every Tuesday morning was a political lecture and in the afternoon was learning about politics. On the next day during the General Assembly his name was called for criticism. The informer was one of the room-mates. He was the secretary of the branch of a student group.

Student informers

I used to think that this was the remnants of thought of the ultra-leftist Cultural Revolution. It is unbelievable that after 30 years, not only there is an alarming increase in the number of university informers; it has even been developed into a system. The above-mentioned informers exist in almost all universities in China. These secret agents keep an eye on the professors and students in the universities.

There are at least two types in the open. One is the "staff and student information system," sometimes known as "the teaching staff information system," It was first established in the year 2001 at Wuhan University and later spread nationwide. Recruitment is done openly and meetings are held on a regular basis. The identities of the members are not confidential. Their main job is to give feedback to the school, about professors, lecturers, and students’ teaching and studying conditions. If a professor lectures on some forbidden topics, as Professor Yang did, they have an obligation to report, but only to the school and not to the police.

The other type is more complicated. It is known as "security staff information system." According to a document "the Administrative Approach to Recruit and Manage Student Security Members “at Tek Chow Institution "the student security team is a secret internal force, directly supervised by the associated leaders of the Institute Defensive Commission and the Management of Inhabitant Regulation.  The team is not open inside or outside the institute. The security members have only a ‘single-way’ of contact.  There is no connection and communication between the members.  Information provided is strictly confidential.

This can be regarded as a professional secret service. The number of this type of government subsidized semi-professional agents in universities is unknown. There is no statistical evidence. However, based on the awards bestowed on the so-called “safe campus of Shanxi Province”  by the Shanxi Province Comprehensive Management of Public Order, the Provincial Education Department and the Provincial Public Security Department, it confirmed that there are 2627 security informers among the students. On top of this, they are developing 65 Special Reporters among the professors and students. The total number of students in the university was over twenty six thousand. This means that there is one secret agent to ten students.

Things have yet not come to an end. According to the same document, the student secret agents are established on the base of the ‘National Protection Group’ of the Institute.  As we all know, ‘National Protection’ is the abbreviation of ‘Protection of National Security Department’. This is a system specially used by the police to persecute religion, beliefs, political dissidents and human rights activists. The establishment of a police system of professional secret services in universities is far more serious than student snitching.

In one of my published articles -'Paradise of Secret Agents' I analysed and explored the issue of the culture of secret agents in Chinese society. In this article, I discussed only its system. Let us put aside whether Professor Yang had talked about the ‘Nine Commentaries’ and Falun Gong in class. It is clear that the informers used these two incidents as a major bargaining chip for some scraps of rewards.

The prevalence of a secret agent system in a society is based on the encouragement of the informers’ behaviour by the state. The special group that the government considered as the number one enemy is the source of rewards that secret agents are seeking, because the informers are always able to find targets that match the label the authorities define. This can easily mobilize the authorities to act like crickets being stirred by stems.

Everywhere around the country there are reports of cases that tire the Beijing police out: the local frequent petitioners were taken as Falun Gong practitioners. There are also situations where the national security group arrested ‘Pan-Blue’ alliance as Falun Gong practitioners.

Most people are not interested in being secret agents. As a matter of fact, so long as the Chinese authority continues to create enemies, continues to rule the country and schools by political movements and continue to see their own people as a threat, the secret agent system will continue to exist. As soon as the creator of the system, the Chinese Communist Party, is eliminated, the secret agents will automatically disappear.