Nathalie Loiseau, chairman of the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Security and Defense.
The French weekly “Focus” revealed last month that the Chinese government has reached out to universities and society, causing an outcry and the resignation of former law dean Mester of the University of Schaumburg. The Chinese Embassy in France tried to stop the bleeding by posting a propaganda film on Xinjiang yesterday, but it had a negative effect.
According to the report, Christian Mestre, former dean of law at the University of Strasbourg, not only publicly endorsed China’s concentration camp policy, but also had close ties with China through the Confucius Institute, and even influenced the region’s investment cooperation with China, including the possible promotion of huawei‘s factory in the suburbs of Strasbourg.
According to the Global Times, Meister publicly stated during a seminar in China in 2019 that the Uyghur Muslim minority was “not in prison, but in mandatory vocational training courses. Meister told Global Times that the threat of terrorist attacks in Xinjiang is serious, and that Education camps are the answer to avoiding the growth of terrorism, hoping that France and European countries can learn from Xinjiang.
Meister is a well-known scholar and ethics officer for the Eurométropole de strasbourg, which oversees official discipline and conflicts of interest. The report caused an uproar and Meister immediately resigned from his position as ethics officer.
In an interview with France3, Antoine Bondaz, a researcher at the French Foundation for Strategic Studies (FRS), said that “the report is not just about Beijing‘s influence at the University of Strasbourg, but in all universities, through some of the professors or the upper echelons”.
He noted that Beijing has tried to influence opinion leaders in civil society around the world over the past few years. Meister is one example in France, but there are other cases, such as Maxime Vivas, a French academic and journalist. “The aim is to convince people at Home and abroad that there are people who support the Communist Party and to create networks abroad that benefit the interests of the Communist Party and present a viewpoint against the Western model to developing countries.”
Poindazi stressed that it is not to end the cooperation with China, but to pay more attention to assessing the risks that France and China may pose in academic research cooperation.
In an exclusive interview with French media, Jérémy André Florès, the special correspondent in Asia who uncovered the incident, said that it was not the problem of the academic or the researcher, but only a moral flaw, if any. The fault lies in the fact that the powers that be have no framework and no legal regulations, such as the declaration of income for activities abroad.
The Chinese embassy in France even posted an animated film on its Twitter account yesterday to stop the bleeding.
The posting sparked criticism from political figures and a large number of netizens expressed disbelief, with nearly 4,000 retweets in one day and almost unanimous negative comments.
Nathalie Loiseau, chairman of the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Security and Defense, retweeted: “First, torturing the Uighur people; second, not truly reflecting the current situation in Xinjiang; third, treating the outside world like children who want to hear a story before bedtime. Really, the Communists hit all at once.”
Marie Pierre Vedrenne, Vice President of the European Parliament’s Committee on International Trade, criticized, “This propaganda film from the Chinese Communist Embassy in France has reached a new peak of denial and shame. The EU should react and remind that access to the European market has a price: respect for our standards and values.”
Romain Caillet, an advisor on Islamic issues, said in a mocking tone that “not only are the people who made this film idiotic, but they think we are more idiotic than they are.
Following French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian’s condemnation of China’s “institutional oppression” of Uighurs at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on the 24th, and President Emmanuel Macron’s suspected failure to mention Uighur human rights in a phone call with Xi Jinping on the 25th, the issue of Xinjiang’s education camps has become a major concern. The issue of Xinjiang’s education camps continues to fester in French public opinion after the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva condemned China’s “institutional oppression” of Uighurs on the 24th, and after President Emmanuel Macron and Xi Jinping’s 25th phone conversation, which allegedly failed to mention Uighur human rights.
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