While taking £800k of taxpayer money for an anti-British culture hit piece in the aim of amplifying ‘marginalised’ voices, the University of Edinburgh is more than happy to take money from organisations linked with those responsible for the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Edinburgh – the quaint capital city of Scotland, primarily known for housing the nation’s picturesque landscape, and historical architecture – is home to a rather “prehistoric” university that has stood the battles of time; 441 years to be exact.
The University of Edinburgh considers itself to be “global” leaders in “research, development, and innovation.” In fact, they ranked 22nd in the 2024 QS World University Ranking, and 57th in the national woke ranking conducted by Civitas, though in light of their academics work in decolonising their curriculum institutionally, I can see them climbing the ranks to a much higher spot in Civitas’ woke ranking report.
The UK Research and Innovation Centre (UKRI) is a public body of the British government that is responsible for deciding which research projects the government should invest in. Recently, they awarded researchers and academics at the University of Edinburgh with just over £809,000 for a three year project to unveil the work of renowned Scottish poet and novelist, Robert Louis Stevenson.
Stevenson was born and educated in Edinburgh where he resided until moving to Samoa at the ripe age of 40. He was a novelist, essayist, poet, and travel writer, being most commonly known for his works such as Treasure Island and the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. To give you an idea as to how much he was respected for his influence in the craft, in 2018, he was ranked just behind Charles Dickens as the “26th most translated author in the world.”
The project, appropriately titled “Remediating Stevenson: Decolonising Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific Fiction Through Graphic Adaptation, Arts Education and Community Engagement,” is an overtly obvious attempt by woke academics to discredit the most famous Scottish novelist, as a racist bigot, by investigating how he treated the indigenous populations at some islands within the Pacific vicinity.
The use of the term ‘decolonising’ is particularly noteworthy, considering its increasing prevalence among university campuses, in a campaign of marxian-style progressive steps, eradicating euro-centrism and the “white straight male” from history, instead amplifying the voice of the ‘historically marginalised.’
While it used to refer to the “withdrawal of political, military, and governmental rule of a colonised land by its invaders,” like the dried-up term “racist,” it’s been subverted to a much wider, broader sense, that now means something entirely different.
In fact, the academics even state in their reports abstract that the new-definition is their intended goal, “given that educational institutions throughout the world are actively engaged in decolonising their curricula, Stevenson’s work and legacy present a particularly valuable focus of inquiry.”
I’m extremely curious as to when research became less about the facts, and more about discrediting historical figures by presenting unsubstantiated opinions as “fact-based research” and pumping it into the mainstream, purely because of the hatred one has of another’s skin colour and alleged ‘colonial’ roots in bigotry.
The UKRI is made up of a multitude of different councils with different research focuses, to ensure funding is split equally among the different fields. For example, they have an Economic and Social Research Council and a Medical Research Council. Interestingly, it was the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) that awarded them this grant, in particular. One might expect a public-body organisation that specialises in cultural artefacts would at least be a tad stand offish when funding a research piece designated the purpose of restructuring our cultural system by historically revising topics, and discrediting cultural remnants.
The authors working on this report claim, “his Pacific fiction, while iconoclastic in featuring indigenous protagonists with considerable agency and dignity, and offering a critical proto-modernist perspective on western imperialism, still upholds many of the colonial stereotypes typical of fin-de-siecle western literature.”
This is easily translated; while they acknowledge that much of his work portrayed indigenous people as having their own agency and dignity, breaking away from the passive and submissive representation they typically dealt with, being unconventional for the epoch and subverting expectations. They also acknowledge his criticisms of western imperialism at the time with points which foreshadowed what would later be regularly conversed on by modernist writers in the modern era. Despite these acknowledgements, he still perpetuated, or so they claim, colonial stereotypes commonly found in ‘’ 19th century Western literature.
What I don’t understand is that they admit how progressive he was for that time period, depicting those indigenous people in a way that gave them dignity, which was, at the time, extremely uncommon. Their main criticism is of some colonial stereotypes he refused to let go of. In the 19th century, there weren’t many writers that were massively critical of Western imperialism, nor anticipatory of modernist themes, as he was – so where’s the issue?
The colonial stereotypes researchers are kicking up a fuss about arise from some of his works like The Ebb Tide and The Beach of Falesa. In these works, he portrayed indigenous people as inherently noble, however, he is accused of claiming they were still primitive and in need of guidance or influence from Westerners. I fail to see what’s so triggering about this portrayal. Third World countries are by definition primitive, and not as advanced (technologically and otherwise) as the west, so what’s the issue with suggesting guidance? He’s also criticised for pushing our indifferences. For example, he emphasised the indigenous Pacific islanders as “exotic”, which some believe contributed to the perception of them as “other”, which some fools believe reinforces the colonial attitudes of superiority and creates distance between the colonisers and colonised.
But as “offensive” as these stereotypes are (couldn’t say that with a straight face), he used his influence on an international level to make large critiques at a system he somewhat disagreed with, yet a few stereotypes that he kept in his books, which are typically based on his personal experiences (remember he lived his last few years in Samoa around those people and thus used his experiences to form stereotypes – the same way everyone instinctively does), are enough for the dead man’s name to be dragged through the mud?
Even for advocates of woke ideology, this doesn’t make any sense, and is extremely disrespectful to his family.
It seems this research piece is solely stemming from a place of hatred for euro-centrism and white British cultural producers.
What really puts the cherry on the cake, is the fact that while they discredit his life’s work because of a few perpetuations of colonial stereotypes, feeding into the imperialists agenda, their university – Edinburgh – has links to organisations with very real human rights concerns, and very current human rights abuses.
Isn’t a massive section of wokeism and decolonisation about amplifying ‘marginalised’ voices (among other things)? Wouldn’t it make more sense to fight for those who are genuinely marginalised in the current epoch, rather than for people whose great great great great grandparents were “victims”?
I’m of course talking about Falun Gong practitioners and ordinary non-CCP Chinese citizens.
Between 2017 and 2022, the University of Edinburgh has received between £12,694,684 and £13,894,683.95, with 96% of it being traced back to links with the PLA – or the People’s Liberation Army.
The PLA is the armed wing of the CCP and the primary military force of the PRC (People’s Republic of China), they were also the driving force, along with the red army, behind Mao Zedong, helping him attain power and persecute those in the five black categories during the communists time of upheaval. The five black categories included; right-wingers, ‘bad influencers,’ counter-revolutionaries, rich farmers, and landlords. People within these categories, including teachers and “sexual deviants” (which involved homosexuals you woke activists), were beaten, tortured, humiliated, and executed.
It was the PLA who carried out the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, killing several thousands protesters for non-compliance.
It was the PLA, alongside the then-created 610 Office, that began the persecution, imprisonment, and torture of Falun Gong (Chinese equivalent of yoga) practioners spamming from 1999 and is still ongoing.
The PLA were also involved in the heinous occupation of Tibet since the mid 1950s, heavily suppressing religious and cultural freedom.
Furthermore, the PLA is directly associated with the Uyghur Internment camps in Xinjiang, where Uyghurs and other Muslims were subjected to mass arbitrary detention, forced labour, and other human rights abuses.
It’s believed that the PLA also has some involvement with the humongous organ trafficking rings that exist there as well. Major general Gao Xiaoyan, formerly PLA, was disgraced in 2014, for what was believed to be a power struggle between her and Jiang Zemin. She has since been detained accused of taking bribes during the construction of facilities at the 309 hospital in Beijing. She was recently exposed independently for being a perpetrator in a mass scandal for organ harvesting Falun Gong practitioners. The CCP has been mute on the matter. Though if this were true, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest that the CCP were involved in some way shape or form.
Let’s break down the funding. Between 2017 and 2022, between £10,590,801.05 and £11,790,801.00 was from Huawei Technologies, an organisation exposed for being deeply embedded within the organs of the PLA, and entrenched with Chinese armed forces personnel.
Let’s not forget that even the Pentagon listed Huawei as being directly controlled by the PLA. Although this didn’t stop our government from being willing to give them access to our 5G network – the only reason the British establishment didn’t was because of the major backlash and outcry from rightly concerned citizens.
Another company that donated to the university was Jiangsu Dingying New Material Co. Ltd, who in 2021, gave them £1,552,066 for the study of graphene-based hybrid material. According to Citivitas they have, “an industrial partnership with Jiangsu Industrial Technology Research Institute, a key MCF centre which manufactures semiconductors, and has multiple partnerships with China’s military industrial complex, including with three members of the Seven Sons of National Defence.”
The Seven Sons of National Defence is a grouping of public Chinese universities in Beihang, Harbin, and Nanjing, with deep roots in the military and defence industry. They are heavily affiliated with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China – believed to have close ties with the PLA.
A further £75,000 was from Tsinghua University for a multiphase flow measurement collaboration project. According to a “unitracker” posted by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute think tank, “Tsinghua University is designated very high risk for its high level of defence research and alleged involvement in cyber attacks.”
It’s believed that Tsinghua University is immersed in the Chinese military industrial complex, including factions of the PLA.
Additionally, in 2022, tech conglomerate Tencent, handed them £39,866.95 for a project entitled, “Serving Big Machine Learning Models.” Civitas exclaims, “Tencent is a key partner to the deployment of China’s BeiDou satellite navigation system. BeiDou is developed for both civilian and military applications, and allows for BeiDou terminals to be deployed throughout the PLA ground forces, PLA Navy ships, Second Artillery Force, and the PLA Air Force.”
To see this piece come from such self-proclaimed virtuous advocates, endorsed by the university, UKRI, and leftists celebrating decolonisation, is utterly hypocritical when the money they take is drenched in the blood of truly oppressed people fighting to the death for their freedom.
How on earth one can claim to be woke, then omit the clear atrocities committed by CCP military complexes that fund the same university they’re complaining about “stereotypes” from, even though their complaints are from a much different time period, and the other atrocities are still ongoing, is incredibly erroneous and shows yet another example of double standards from the far left… as if Communism can do no wrong.
https://civitas.org.uk/content/files/The-Strategic-Dependence-of-UK-Universities-on-China-.pdf
