Britain's Worst University Strike in Years: What Are Chinese Students Fighting For?

This is both a nationwide campaign for rights and an attempt by Chinese students to take part in local politics.

Pan Pan, a master's student at King's College London, was halfway through her spring term. What she couldn't work out was whether she had any classes left in the other half.

In late January, Pan saw news on a study-abroad WeChat official account that the union was voting on a strike, but "at the time I thought, so there's a strike, so what — I never imagined it would get this serious, and I even thought it might be fake news." It wasn't until February 5 that one of her instructors walked into the classroom and told Pan and her classmates: the strike would start at the end of February, "there's no chance of it changing, and there won't be any makeup classes."

That was how the students' protest began.

For a long time, Chinese-language media and study-abroad WeChat accounts said nothing about this strike, which hit more than 60 British universities. In fact, as early as January 22, the University and College Union (UCU), which represents university staff, had already voted to hold 14 days of strike action in stages starting February 22, after failing to reach agreement on pension reform with Universities UK (UUK), which represents employers. According to the union's official notice of February 20, 64 institutions — including Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College London and the University of Edinburgh — would take part, affecting more than 1 million students.

For students at these universities, about a third of the classes in the roughly ten-week spring term would be lost. How, or whether, that would be made up or compensated was still unknown.

Pan was enrolled in King's Cultural and Creative Industries (CCI) program, a standard one-year master's degree. In the 2017-2018 academic year, the program charged students from outside the UK and the EU £9,825 per term. She reckoned that once the strike took effect, every international student would see at least £3,000 of tuition go to waste.

Pan decided to defend her own rights — to demand that the school refund tuition for each day of the strike. She, who says she "never had any grand ambitions," and a liaison group then took a series of actions, joining a wave of petitions spreading through British universities. This may have been the first time Chinese students abroad had collectively taken part in a local political issue.

Action

The strike was set off by a pension reform Universities UK had proposed: switching from the current defined-benefit scheme to a defined-contribution one. That meant how much pension money university staff could draw would no longer be a figure they could count on, but would rise and fall with the securities market. An independent model used by the union showed that under the new scheme an average lecturer would get £200,000 less in pension, leaving them worse off than primary and secondary school teachers.

Michael Thompson, deputy director of Universities UK, told QDaily that the staff pension scheme was now £6.1 billion in deficit, that reform was therefore necessary, and that universities would go on offering staff an attractive and sustainable pension. He also said Universities UK had held 35 rounds of talks with the union over the past year, and that the only pension proposal the union had put forward would force universities to cut money for teaching and research, creating serious employment risks.

Students received strike notices one after another. In one email, King's College London advised students to "study independently" during the strike, and the attitude behind that word left Pan furious. "All the pressure falls on us," she said. As she saw it, students had become the real victims of a fight among a funding crisis, the union and Universities UK.

Conrad Whitcroft White, a British student in the politics department at the University of York, took a similar view. "The issue is that nobody seems to care what happens to students," Whitcroft White told The Guardian. "They [universities] make us pay but don't give us consumer rights. If I paid my water bill and no water came out, of course I'd want compensation — that's the same as what we're asking of our universities [a tuition refund]."

February 5 was a Monday. Pan went to a rally organized by Robert Liow, a student from Singapore, and came away with the idea of an online petition. On Tuesday, Pan and four Chinese students from the Arts and Cultural Management (ACM) program "hit it off instantly" and decided to form a liaison group to fight for their rights. To widen its reach, the group brought in "Mr. Li" from the education policy department and one more Chinese student from CCI. That same day, the seven of them began drafting a statement addressed to Chinese students, and contacted Robert that night to prepare a letter to the principal. On Wednesday they mapped out the next steps, "putting on hold" the door-to-door tactics — posters, marches — and settled that evening on Chinese and English wording for an online petition demanding a tuition refund. On Thursday the petition went live; by then the campaign's group chat had grown to nearly 200 members.

"We moved fast," Pan said.

The petition, which went live on February 8, made two demands: first, that the principal — also King's representative at Universities UK — return to the negotiating table with the union; second, that if the talks broke down and the strike went ahead, the school compensate students in some form. The petition drew more than 500 signatures within eight hours and has since gathered more than 3,800 — more than one in ten of all King's undergraduate, master's and doctoral students. By the group's own count, more than 80% of the signatures came from foreign students.

At the same time, the seven took the union representative's advice and wrote a collective letter of complaint to the principal. Two days later it drew a formal reply: he understood the students' demands, promised to keep the disruption to a minimum, would track the scale of the strike as it happened, and did not rule out makeup classes.

"The attitude was passive, the response vague," one member of the group said. Even so, the seven called off the email protest at once, as a show of respect.

Neither the online petition nor the email protest had yet produced a satisfying answer. In an interview on February 21, "Mr. Li" told us the next steps they were weighing included widening the petition to put more pressure on the school, and joining forces with student organizations at other universities. They were also trying to reach the Chinese embassy, hoping for a public statement at a more official level.

"But what we really wanted to do is basically done; what's left is pushing things forward," "Mr. Li" told QDaily. He was not optimistic about where the campaign would end up. To him, the strike was "a major eruption of Britain's political contradictions."

"Who actually touched the pension money? Not the principal — the Conservative-led British government. When the lecturers try to get that money back, they aren't dealing with the school, they're dealing with the British government. If we students really want our rights, we have to move the government. But think about how likely that is."

Students have demanded money back from universities before. Last year a five-week strike led 10% of college students in Ontario, Canada to drop the term and get their tuition back. The difference here is that a one-year master's student who drops the current term has no chance to re-enroll, so the whole point of the contract with the university falls away. The legal questions that raises are more complicated.

Take King's. Its website has no consumer-rights page, but the school's General Terms and Conditions for Students, updated in July 2017, state that the contract between students and the school is made under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and other consumer law. Clause 12 says that when a course changes fundamentally, students may end the contract and recover the remaining tuition. For most of the students behind the petition, that is not an acceptable option. The question worth arguing is whether a "strike" counts as one of the circumstances the contract lists as grounds for changing a course. If it does not, then turning "teaching" into "independent study" may breach the school's contractual obligations and expose it to liability under the Consumer Rights Act.

Clause 12 also requires the school to take every reasonable step to minimize the effect on students when a course changes. That puts a question mark over "no makeup classes." In fact, neither the email from the King's principal nor the notice students got on the first day of the strike ruled makeup classes out.

Some of the Chinese students behind the petition have tried to find lawyers, so far without result.

Divisions

Unlike most of the Chinese students, Robert, from Singapore, had already spent two and a half years in Britain. A third-year law student, he was no stranger to political activity: he chairs the King's "International Students' Rights Movement," and also helps "One Day Without Us" speak up for the social standing of migrants. Robert told QDaily he had been teaching himself politics and economics since 2015, "which is how I reached my current level of awareness."

Robert was the first to call for refunds. The public rally he set up on Facebook, "KCL Refund Our Fees", drew Britain's mainstream press. But the February 5 rally did not go smoothly.

According to people who were there, Robert opened the rally by demanding the money back in heated terms. He then moved on to some "radical" proposals, complaining that the school treated international students as "cash cows" and calling for "free education."

"The British students really hated it. They said, can you not be so aggressive," one attendee recalled.

Robert then handed the microphone to an invited union representative, and what he said did not go down well either. "He's a Trotskyist," Robert said. "His reading of Marxism meant he disagreed with striking and demanding refunds at the same time. None of the students were convinced."

Robert stressed that this representative did not fully speak for the union's official position. Still, in a statement on February 13 addressed directly to students, UCU general secretary Sally Hunt said only that she was "not surprised" by the refund demands, and stressed that students could "play a key role" in ending the strike. She thanked students for supporting the union, and urged them to keep pressing the principal to bring Universities UK back to the table.

"Mr. Li" circled that "thank you" in red pen and put it in a slide deck. On February 20, encouraged by his instructor, who also heads the education department, he took part in a forum the department organized and set out the students' position to representatives from King's, the union and the National Union of Teachers. After quoting the union secretary's thanks, he said: "What we want isn't gratitude, it's an apology. What we support isn't the strike, it's a return to negotiation."

"The union is using us as a weapon," "Mr. Li" told QDaily. The group's public line was to back the lecturers while withholding agreement on the strike itself. "What we want is for the teachers to be treated fairly, and then to get back into the classroom as soon as possible."

Robert added the union's slogan to his Facebook profile picture: "I SUPPORT STRIKING LECTURERS." As he saw it, demanding a refund and supporting the strike did not clash; on the contrary, those actions made it more likely the school would give way under the pressure. He also disagreed with people who opposed refunds out of a "heroic martyr complex," afraid of damaging the "unconditional solidarity" between students and staff.

"I don't think staying in solidarity means accepting every sacrifice and giving up every right," he said.

Some union members were in fact joining the petitioners. In a tweet on February 22, Christopher Forde, a professor at Leeds University Business School, said the petition he had started demanding refunds from universities had collected 77,000 signatures.

"Cash Cows"

Behind the anger of Robert and the Chinese students lay something else: the tuition international students pay British universities is simply too high — the point Robert had wanted to make at that rather chaotic rally.

Some of the British press, covering the refund campaign, noted that students pay their schools more than £9,000 a year. What is rarely mentioned is that international students usually pay double that, with far fewer options for paying in installments. By the time the strike arrived, large amounts of their money had already become sunk costs.

"The British government has turned education into a commodity to be bought and sold," Robert told QDaily. "The government refuses to fund higher education, which gives universities more reason to commercialize. Some universities, University College London (UCL) among them, are chasing aggressive capital expansion and bigger international markets, and in the end it's students — international students above all — who get fleeced."

After the Conservatives took power in 2010, they did end the fiscal expansion in education and handed the job of raising money to the universities: the tuition cap rose from £3,225 a year to £9,000. The protests that followed came close to riots, and failed.

Ever-pricier tuition has not cooled anyone's appetite for higher education. The figures show that applications to British universities recovered quickly after a brief dip, and that the number of non-EU students hit a record high in 2014-15.

That convinced the British government and the universities that international students were an important and steady source of money. Last year several senior Conservatives pressed Prime Minister Theresa May to loosen student visa policy. Former Chancellor George Osborne wrote: "International education is a vital export industry, generating more than £10 billion of value every year. International students keep lifelong ties and affection for our country, and carry our values with them. That is soft power."

Earlier this month Theresa May wrapped up a state visit to China. Among the joint initiatives the two sides announced was a further push for English-language teaching in China — meaning more Chinese people will become potential customers for British universities.

"Mr. Li" grants that recruiting international students really does cost universities more, language and visa services included, but says tuition that steep is still out of proportion, and brings no matching protection with it.

An early draft of the petition statement carried this line: "This is not an isolated strike. The school's indifference shows exactly how little it cares about the rights of Chinese students, who are the largest group of international students and the largest source of revenue in the study-abroad industry."

The line was cut from the later version. "It really was a bit one-sided," Pan said. But she stressed that even though neither the school nor the union had singled out international students, international students lost more, and had less chance of making it back.

Robert, who complains that the government treats international students as "cash cows," goes further. "I refuse to contribute profit for the use of a public good." He argues for following Germany, charging all students little or nothing. He admits he was criticized at the rally for being too radical, and has softened his language since: "Even if not everyone believes in 'free education,' as long as we want the same thing, we're still united."

The seven-person group, for its part, hopes to end the lack of protection for Chinese students abroad at the level of the system itself, and to press universities as consumers do. What level such a system should sit at, who should write it, and whom it should cover, are all still unclear.

"This is also something for students thinking of coming to Britain to study to consider," "Mr. Li" said. QDaily asked Universities UK and the union whether they worried the strike would damage international students' confidence in British universities. The former dodged the question; the latter did not reply.

What Else Do They Care About?

Not every Chinese student supported what the seven were doing.

"Some upperclassmen and alumni had one word for us: naive," Pan said. The comment from within the student-abroad world that surprised her most was: "Are King's students so broke they've lost their minds?" Someone even complained in a group chat: "Our teacher says there's no strike. So sad, there goes our four-week break." Others replied with "……"

"I don't want this to turn into moral blackmail, but I've earned money myself, and I know it isn't easy." Before coming to Britain, Pan taught at an English-language school, and £3,000 was about half a year's salary for her.

As "Mr. Li" sees it, Chinese students on the whole were not paying much attention to the strike. His observation is that for many of them the point of a one-year master's is not the learning but the degree; what they care about is not the process but the result.

His other observation is about the difference in how Chinese and foreign students speak. "They [foreign students] don't treat the strike as some highly sensitive thing — they're more resolute. When we speak up, our position and our tone are more roundabout. We'd say, 'Could you consider a refund?' They'd say, 'The school is extremely stupid, the [fence-sitting] student union is extremely stupid.'"

When the online petition launched, the seven suggested that students who signed reply "signed" in the group chat, but capped it at 20 replies. After the petition passed 150 signatures, Pan posted a notice telling everyone the petition was anonymous and would have no effect on their studies.

"When it comes down to it, Chinese students abroad are a weak group, and a conservative one," "Mr. Li" said. He put that weakness down to a lack of local connections and an unfamiliar political culture.

Asked how much of a presence Chinese students have in British political life, Robert answered: "Apart from this petition, very little. I'm not sure why, but from some of our conversations about the petition, I'd guess they're worried about causing trouble."

On February 14, "Mr. Li" published a long essay on his personal WeChat official account, taking his title from a line Hu Shih and Chiang Monlin wrote on the first anniversary of the May Fourth Movement: "Absurd middle-aged and elderly people stir up trouble, and then ask underage students to abandon their studies and waste their time stepping in to put it right — nothing in the world is less economical than that."

Pan's plan was to show the Chinese embassy how serious things had become, hoping it would step in quickly. The group's members were cautious about taking that step.

"We discussed the question of political sensitivity," "Mr. Li" said. "If we don't go to the embassy, they may never even hear about this. The good thing about that is it's very safe; the bad thing is we lose some support. In the end we decided to contact them, because this matters too much. It may not happen only once — if it isn't settled this year, they'll strike next year, and the year after that. We believe the state should pay attention to this."

So far the embassy has not said what it will do next.

"Mr. Li" did not expect to "move the British government," but after students at more than 30 universities launched petitions, the government's tone did soften. On February 18, Sam Gyimah, the universities minister at the Department for Education, told BBC Radio 5: "I want universities to respect the consumer rights students have under consumer law, including compensation for cancelled classes." The same day, Education Secretary Damian Hinds backed the students' compensation demands on the television program The Andrew Marr Show.

But he added: "Universities are autonomous institutions, and they have the right to make the final decision."

The union kept raising the stakes. General secretary Sally Hunt warned that if the pension question went unresolved, the strike, due to end on March 16, could stretch into the exam period. Many one-year master's students, "Mr. Li" among them, worry that would badly set back their dissertations.

On February 22, the countdown clock on the University and College Union's website read 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0 seconds. There was no news from the negotiations. There was no sign of compromise. Many students got notices telling them to turn up to class as usual — until it was confirmed that their teacher was not there.

"Mr. Li" and Pan Pan are pseudonyms. Cover image from: Wikipedia