Dharamshala, 30th July: More than a hundred Nobel laureates have expressed their displeasure with the Chinese government’s attempt to “bully the scientific community” earlier this year by attempting to censor two Nobel laureates during the Nobel Prize Summit, hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Nobel Foundation in April.
The Nobel statement was postponed until the National Academies of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation had a chance to investigate, according to Science Magazine, which broke the story first. The incident occurred shortly after a tense meeting between Chinese officials and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman in Tianjin, China’s northernmost metropolis.
They claim that the Chinese Embassy in Washington urged that two speakers, the Dalai Lama and Taiwanese chemist Yuan T. Lee, be excluded from the summit because they have opposed Chinese policy toward their homelands. The Nobel laureates claim that after they refused China’s requests, a video feed during the session was disrupted “by a presumed cyberattack,” albeit they are unable to connect the disruption to China.
The Chinese Embassy did not respond to a request for comment, but the Chinese state-run Global Times referred to the two men as “secessionists,” adding that “U.S. politics is severely poisoning international science.” The State Department decried what it called Chinese “harassment” in a statement to NBC News.
“This, unfortunately, is just another example of the PRC attempting to suppress free expression and bully people and institutions outside of China whose views and values differ from the Chinese Communist Party’s political agenda,” the statement stated. The statement went on to say: “We are aware of an official from the PRC Embassy in Washington, D.C. harassing a senior National Academy of Sciences (NAS) official…We condemn this harassment, and have warned the Embassy against this inappropriate conduct.”
The State Department stated that it was unable to confirm any Chinese involvement “in the particular cyber disruption referenced in the letter, the PRC’s use of cyber harassment and online intimidation as a mechanism to expand the reach of its Great Firewall, especially among researchers, dissidents, and academics, is well-documented. Last year, for example, there were several reports of disruptions during events hosted on Zoom to commemorate the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.”
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