In a move that sparked widespread debate in academic and cultural circles, the University of Manchester accused Britain's greatest novelist, Charles Dickens, of expressing “racist views” because he wrote an essay in 1851 criticizing the Chinese society.
The University, which has around 9,000 students from mainland China, said Dickens “expresses racist views, particularly against Chinese people.”
It wrote that any undergraduates “concerned” about reading the article are invited to discuss it with the course tutor at the university.
Critics branded the warning “historically illiterate” and accused the university of prioritizing its commercial links with the communist state.
The controversy comes days after it emerged Sheffield Hallam University had stopped one of its academics from investigating human rights abuses in China under pressure from the Chinese authorities, according to the Daily Mail.
The British newspaper said staff from China's National Security Agency are reported to have threatened the university's employees in China in an effort to get Professor Laura Murphy's research stopped.
They also blocked access to the university's websites from China meaning it could no longer recruit students, who pay several times what UK based undergraduates do.
The University of Manchester's warning, details of which have been obtained by this newspaper under Freedom of Information laws, has been issued to students studying an English Literature module called Victorian Rights: Victorian Wrongs.
It applies to an 1851 magazine article entitled The Great Exhibition and the Little One which Dickens co–authored with poet and critic Richard Horne.
The article praised England for maintaining commercial contacts with the whole world and criticized China for “coming to a dead stop.”
To illustrate their point, the authors compared the scientific and technological wonders on display in the Great Exhibition of 1851 with an exhibition of traditional Chinese arts and crafts running concurrently at Hyde Park Place in London.
