4 US university professors teaching at a Chinese university are attacked in a public park

BEIJING – Four faculty members from Cornell College in Iowa who teach at Beihua University in northeast China were reportedly attacked with a knife in a public park, officials at the U.S. university and State Department said.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said on Tuesday that the injured had been taken to hospital for treatment and that none of them were in critical condition. Police are preliminary of Monday’s attack as an isolated incident and investigations are ongoing, ministry spokesman Lin Jian said at a daily press conference.

Jonathan Brand, president of Cornell College, said in a statement that the teachers were attacked while they were in the park with a faculty member from Beihua, a remote district of the industrial city of Jilin. Monday was a holiday in China.

The Foreign Ministry said in a statement it was aware of reports of a stabbing and was monitoring the situation. The attack came as both Beijing and Washington seek to expand people-to-people exchanges to strengthen ties amid tensions over trade and international issues such as Taiwan, the South China Sea and the war in Ukraine.

An Iowa state lawmaker posted a statement on Instagram saying his brother, David Zabner, was injured in a stabbing attack in Jilin. Rep. Adam Zabner described his brother as a graduate student at Tufts University who was in China as part of the Cornell-Beihua relationship.

“I spoke to David a few minutes ago, he is recovering from his injuries and doing well,” Adam Zabner wrote, adding that his brother was grateful for the care he received at the hospital.

In China, where the government maintains control over all information deemed sensitive, news of the incident was suppressed. News media had not reported it. Some social media accounts posted foreign media reports about the attack, but a hashtag about it was blocked on a popular portal and photos and videos of the incident were quickly removed.

Cornell spokeswoman Jen Visser said in an email that the college is still gathering information about the incident.

Visser said the private college in Mount Vernon, Iowa, is partnering with Beihua University. A 2018 college press release, when the program began, said Beihua was funding Cornell professors’ trips to China to teach a portion of computer science, math and physics courses over a two-week period.

According to a 2020 post on Beihua’s website, the Chinese university uses American teaching methods and resources to provide engineering students with an international perspective and English proficiency.

About a third of the program’s core courses are taught by American professors and based on U.S. textbooks, the post said. Students can apply to Cornell College for two years of their four-year degree and earn degrees from both institutions.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has unveiled a plan to invite 50,000 young Americans to China over the next five years, but Chinese diplomats say a U.S. State Department travel warning is deterring Americans from traveling to China.

Citing arbitrary detentions and travel bans that could prevent Americans from leaving the country, the State Department has issued a Level 3 travel advisory — the second-highest level of alert — for mainland China, urging Americans to “reconsider travel to China.”

Some American universities have suspended their China programs due to the travel warning.

Lin, spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, said China has taken effective measures to protect the safety of foreigners. “We believe this isolated incident will not disrupt normal cultural and people-to-people exchanges between the two countries,” he said.

___

Tang reported from Washington, D.C. Associated Press writer Summer Ballentine in Columbia, Missouri, contributed to this report.