Jesus College has announced that it is closing its China Forum two years before its remit was set to expire. The Forum was given a five-year remit in 2022. It will now close this September.

In December (5/12), Sonita Alleyne, Master of Jesus, told members of the College: “I want to let you know that The China Forum will conclude in September 2025”. She added: “In the meantime, the seminar programme will continue as usual”.

The China Forum is described on Jesus’ website as aiming to “deepen mutual understanding between China and the West,” through “interdisciplinary seminars”.

A college spokesperson said: “In 2022, the China Forum was granted a remit for five years. The College’s Council has decided that the current year’s seminar programme will be the last”.

Jesus declined to comment on the College Council’s reason for closing the Forum. Minutes of the Council’s most recent meetings going back to July 2024 include no record of the Forum’s closure having been discussed.

Ian White, Alleyne’s predecessor as Master, established the China Centre in 2016. The next year, the College Council appointed Peter Nolan, a Jesus fellow and scholar of China’s economic development, as the Centre’s director.

The goal of the Centre, Nolan told the Council in October 2017, would be to “investigate in a pragmatic and non-ideological fashion the issues that are important for meeting the common global challenges and satisfying the common interest of the whole of humanity”.

The Centre launched a seminar programme in 2019. In 2020, the Centre began to receive negative media coverage due to concerns over the transparency of the Centre’s funding, and over the seminar programme’s alleged reluctance to engage with topics such as human rights in Xinjiang, and democracy in Hong Kong.

In May 2021, these concerns led the College Council to commission a review of the China Centre.

That review found that some of the press coverage had “contained misunderstandings and misrepresentations,” and attributed some of the criticism to confusion about the nature of the China Centre.

However, while seminars on Hong Kong and Xinjiang were held in 2021, the review suggested that the lag between these topics entering the news cycle, in 2019 and 2018 respectively, and their being discussed at the Centre, caused Jesus College “reputational damage”.

It said: “The absence of seminars on Hong Kong and Xinjiang had contributed significantly to the negative press coverage that had been directed at the China Centre and the College in 2020”.

The review also issued a list of recommendations for the College, regarding the Centre. These included reviewing the funding model, and giving the Centre a remit to operate for a fixed number of years.

Jesus accepted these recommendations in 2022, when a five-year remit was given, and the Centre was renamed the China Forum. Now, however, that remit seems to have been dropped.

The review considered the possibility of the China Forum’s closure. It said: “If the China Centre were not at Jesus College, it would probably not be located somewhere else in the University or in some other college: in all likelihood it would simply not exist”.

A spokesperson from Jesus College said: “The College has a long history of engagement on China and we will continue to support the work of our fellows and students who pursue scholarly work in this area.”

They added: “The China Forum has run an excellent academic seminar series, covering a broad range of topics and views, for the benefit of the University and the wider academic community.”