Student demonstrations spreading across U.S. campuses have drawn attention in Beijing, where comments by some officials and state media have conveyed sympathy for the protesters and criticism of what is seen as a U.S. double standard on protest crackdowns.
Any demonstrations, especially by students, are an extremely sensitive topic in China, where student movements have faced harsh crackdowns from the authorities, including the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Most recently, students fed up with years of campus lockdowns joined nationwide protests against Beijing’s Covid-19 restrictions in late 2022. Afterward, many who took part in the protests faced interrogation, detention and arrest.
China has often drawn attention to police response to protests in the U.S. After demonstrations in response to the 2020 killing of George Floyd in police custody, Chinese state media criticized police efforts to contain the protesters as heavy-handed. They also accused Washington of a double standard on human rights, referring to how the U.S. has condemned China’s own handling of protests, including in Hong Kong.
Even before police this week removed pro-Palestinian demonstrators from a Columbia University building they had occupied, several official media outlets, including the state broadcaster, have carried detailed accounts of American police confronting protesters.
In a Sunday tweet accompanied by a video of what appears to be chaotic police arrests on different U.S. campuses, Hua Chunying, a senior Foreign Ministry official, wrote on X, “Remember how US officials reacted when these protests happened elsewhere?”
Official comments have suggested understanding for the students involved in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations, possibly reflecting that the protesters’ cause is in line with Beijing’s support for Palestinian rights.
Liu Pengyu, a spokesman at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, responded to a query that China won’t comment on U.S. internal affairs, but said, “Relevant country must no longer turn a deaf ear to the call for justice from people with conscience across the world.”
The protests have also been an occasion for Beijing to call out what it sees as American hypocrisy in supporting Israel despite the suffering the conflict with Hamas has caused in Gaza.
Liu, the embassy spokesman, reiterated that China supports the rights of the Palestinian people and that the “relevant country,” an apparent reference to the U.S., “must no longer talk about the need of a cease-fire while pouring weapons into the conflict, and talk about aid while creating obstacles for humanitarian access.”
Chinese officials have seized on the conflict in Gaza to portray Beijing as a force for stability in the region, seeking to win points with the developing world and rally it behind Beijing’s challenge to a U.S.-led world order. Beijing has appealed for peace but has resisted Washington’s requests that it use its influence in the region to restrain Hamas and prevent the conflict from spreading.
An account run by People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, wrote on Chinese microblogging platform Weibo, “Why are college students from these prestigious American universities demonstrating? Because on the Palestinian-Israeli issue, they support Palestine, and they can no longer stand the U.S.’s double-standard behavior and habit of favoring Israel.”
Chinese social-media users have been overwhelmingly supportive of the student demonstrations in the U.S. “These are good kids, full of a sense of justice,” one user commented on the Chinese app WeChat.
“The students’ enthusiasm and actions to take part in and discuss political affairs on college campuses are admirable,” another social-media user wrote.
Chinese students in the U.S. are mostly observing the protests without participating, university staff, faculty and students say, partly because many fear the potential consequences of being arrested and deported.
One Chinese Columbia student said she has been posting about the protests on Chinese social media since last fall. She said she was in China during the 2022 protests and that there had been so little transparency about what was going on that she got most of her information from overseas Chinese posting about them on foreign social-media platforms Chinese can only access with virtual private networks, or VPNs.
“At least now, I’m seeing what’s happening with my own eyes,” she said.
Write to Liyan Qi at Liyan.qi@wsj.com