Dark matter

By G.e.

A long way from his rightful place

EVERY year at this time The Economist publishes an annual almanac predicting big events and trends to watch out for in the year coming. 

I’m publishing below a companion piece of the sort you won’t find in The World in 2014, because it is about the absence of change. 

For Liu Xiaobo, 2014 does not figure to be a special year. 

He is expected to endure it in the same way as he has this year. 

The same may be true for his wife, Liu Xia, though she manages on occasion to make herself heard, including a recent request for some basic freedoms.
Mr Liu was arrested five years ago this week, and he was sentenced four years ago this month. 

He has not been heard from directly since. 

At the ceremony awarding him the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize (pictured) his absence was marked by the empty chair he should have been sitting in. 

Uttering his name is in itself a political act. 

Perry Link, an eminent American China scholar long blacklisted from re-entering the country, writes that academic colleagues do not mention Mr Liu for fear of jeopardising their ability to work in China. 

I wanted to write about the absence of Mr Liu from the daily conversation, for in another sense he is ever-present:
Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, once wrote that intellectuals are “the soul of a nation”. 

He saw this as a tragic assignation. 

The intellectual he describes is a “lonely forerunner” who “can discern the portents of disaster at a time of prosperity, and in his self-confidence experience the approaching obliteration.”
Mr Liu is fulfilling his own prophecy. 

He is unlikely to be heard from in 2014. 

He remains in a Chinese prison cell, in the north-eastern city of Jinzhou—not terribly far from Changchun, the city in neighbouring Jilin province, where he was born in 1955. 

He is less than halfway through an 11-year prison sentence for his intellectual crimes (officially, “inciting subversion of state power”). 

His wife, Liu Xia, may not be heard from either in 2014; she is under strict house arrest despite not having been charged with any crime, and has had only rare contact with foreign reporters. 

Her brother, Liu Hui, too will not be heard from; he was sentenced in 2013 to a harsh prison term for alleged financial fraud, a punishment, some believe, meant to cow the family into total silence. 

Obliteration indeed.
But to the Communist Party’s enduring frustration, the Nobel prize assures that Mr Liu cannot be totally annihilated. 

He is the dark matter in every earnest discussion about China’s future, the invisible antagonist in any talk of progress and reform.
That would suit Mr Liu. 

Before he was a dissident of government, he was a dissident of his own flock, antagonising most anybody. 

In the late 1980s Mr Liu, a philosopher by training, reveled so much in attacking fellow writers and thinkers that he all but isolated himself without the help of any authorities. 

He dismissed the literature of the post-Mao era as mostly worthless (in a speech to its most celebrated practitioners); he dismissed an older set of intellectuals as “cultural pets” of their foreign Sinologist “discoverers”. 

By the time he was arrested and made an example of, in June 1989 after the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, he had made himself a rather convenient target. 

“He is an ideal sacrifice,” wrote Geremie Barmé, an Australian Sinologist, after Mr Liu’s arrest in 1989. 

“Many will make pro forma protestations at his treatment, but few will feel any real sympathy for this irascible and unrelenting critic.” 

And yet the official denunciations of Mr Liu and his refusal to give in—his continued, conscientious defiance not just in 1989 but through years of all sorts of detention afterward—earned him fame and admiration. 

In attempting to obliterate the man, the authorities created Liu Xiaobo, the symbol of individual bravery and defiance.
The irony is that many of Mr Liu’s peers deemed him not radical enough. 

He was by the standards of other activists a moderate who advocated “rational” and deliberate action on democracy, and he always resolutely espoused nonviolence. 

His most radical feature was a stubborn romanticism about his cause. 

In 2008 he co-authored a document, Charter 08, that called for an end to one-party rule. 

It was an echo of Charter 77, co-authored by Vaclav Havel in resistance to Soviet rule, and it resulted in Mr Liu’s arrest and current imprisonment. 

For his trial on December 23rd 2009, Mr Liu wrote a statement that would be read aloud at his Nobel ceremony the following year: “I have no enemies, and no hatred”, he declared, even for the individuals who carried out the state’s will against him. 

As the statement was read an empty chair denoted Mr Liu’s absence, the dark matter in the room.
Others share Mr Liu’s fate without the fame. 

Gao Zhisheng, a lawyer, was disappeared and tortured, and disappeared again, before authorities acknowledged imprisoning him in remote north-western China. 

He has to an extent been obliterated. 

Still other prisoners of conscience languish unremembered. 

In their absence the earnest conversations about China’s reforms continue.

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Isolation Under House Arrest for Wife of Imprisoned Nobel Laureate

By AUSTIN RAMZY

Liu Xia, the wife of the imprisoned Chinese Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, says she feels completely isolated living under house arrest in Beijing and finds rare happiness in reading, according to a July letter.
“My reading has no specific goal; for me it’s rather like breathing — I have to do it in order to live,” she wrote.
“When I find books that I love, I feel the author is writing for me alone, and feel a private joy.”
The letter offers a rare insight into the life of a woman who has been largely disappeared since her husband was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize three years ago.
Ms. Liu receives visits from family members but is otherwise shut off from the world.
Rights groups say her extrajudicial detention is meant to put pressure on her imprisoned husband and to prevent her from becoming a public advocate for his cause.
She is allowed monthly visits with Mr. Liu at his prison in northeastern China, where he is serving an 11-year sentence on charges of “inciting subversion of state power” for his role in writing and organizing signatures for Charter 08, a pro-democracy manifesto.
A copy and translation of the letter was provided to The New York Times by Perry Link, a professor at the University of California, Riverside.
Mr. Link said he received the letter from a Los Angeles-based activist, Ann Lau.
The addressee’s name was removed from the copy he received, Mr. Link said.
Mr. Link said he was confident of the letter’s authenticity.
Zeng Jinyan, a Hong Kong-based activist and friend of the Liu family, saw a copy of the letter and said the handwriting was Ms. Liu’s.
Jean-Philippe Béja, a China scholar who has written extensively about Mr. Liu, said he had seen the letter and had no doubts about it.
In the letter, Ms. Liu writes about the importance of reading to her daily existence, a habit that she says she grew up with but that has become pronounced in her isolation.
She describes herself as “feeding on books” and says one work she was recently consuming was a history of the Soviet gulag.
She offered a poem she had written in 2011 that offers a pessimistic vision of her life:

The future, for me,

Is a shut window.

The night within has no end

And the horrid dreams do not fade.

Ms. Liu goes on to say that she was doing much better since she wrote that poem.
“This is because all of you have helped me to open the window and let the sun rise. I know that all of this is not the end — even if justice is too long in coming,” she wrote.
“‘Eleven years’ in duplicate now weigh on me,” Ms. Liu wrote, probably a reference to both her husband’s sentence and and that of her younger brother, Liu Hui, who was given an 11-year prison term in June over financial fraud, a case that family and supporters say was politically motivated.
Mr. Béja said that from her letter, Ms. Liu’s outlook seemed positive, but it was possible she was putting on a brave face.
“I find her in a better mental state than I would have thought, given her situation,” he said.
“She is writing to a friend, so it’s hard know if she wants to reassure them or if she is really telling her state of mind.”
A group of reporters from The Associated Press visited Ms. Liu in December 2012, slipping past her guards while they were on lunch break.
She trembled and cried while speaking with the journalists, calling her situation absurd and physically draining.
Ms. Liu wrote an open letter to President Xi Jinping of China in June, denouncing her detention and the treatment of her family.
“Perhaps in this country it’s a ‘crime’ for me to be Liu Xiaobo’s wife,” she wrote.
Ms. Zeng, the Hong Kong-based activist, said she was worried that Ms. Liu’s extreme isolation was exacting a heavy psychological toll, but suspected that Ms. Liu would be wary of receiving any care provided by the authorities detaining her.
“I can understand why she would be fearful of seeing a doctor when the police are with her,” she said.
For now she gets what support she can from reading, said Ms. Zeng.
“Her daily life is trying to do more reading,” she said.
“She gets power and peace from books.”
Below is a copy of the letter as translated by Perry Link:
Dear XXX,
I’ve read your “epistolary novel.” 
If I imagine myself an outside reader, I can only wonder how or through what special power you manage to keep on writing when the protagonist for whom you are pleading is absent. 
It moves me.
I have always loved reading, and do much of it. 
Most of the books in our home are ones I personally purchased and brought here, and most of the hours in my life are spent in reading them. 
I describe myself as having grown up “feeding on books.” 
My reading has no specific goal; for me it’s rather like breathing — I have to do it in order to live. When I find books that I love, I feel the author is writing for me alone, and feel a private joy.
In the 1980s I, too, wrote fiction and film scripts. 
I have faith that there will come a day when that absent person writes another part of his (her) story.
Please tell XXX that the book I am currently “feeding on” is A History of the Gulag.
Living in almost total isolation, I find the road before me populated by countless books. 
I hide among the books and meander in the world.
You can imagine how terrified I felt to face the world alone after they came to take Xiaobo away. 
I have had no choice but to accept that reality. 
I have been extremely tired.
Let me offer you one of my poems. 
Hah! This will be a challenge for your translator!

“Fragment 8”

The light of death

That often appears, as I gaze at my reading,

Feels warm.

I feel sad that I must leave.

I want to go to a place that has light.

That tenacity, mine for years,

Has turned to dust.

A tree

Can be felled by a bolt of lightning

And think nothing.

The future, for me,

Is a shut window.

The night within has no end

And the horrid dreams do not fade.

I want to go to a place that has light.

(Written in 2011)

“Eleven years” in duplicate now weigh on me, but I do not feel as depressed as when I wrote “Fragment 8.” 
This is because all of you have helped me to open the window and let the sun rise. 
I know that all of this is not the end — even if justice is too long in coming.
I chose this life myself, so need to see it through to the end.
In 1996, at the Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., I bought a postcard that showed a pile of shoes of Jewish people. 
Since then, innumerable Jewish people have been standing in my memory. 
I think that some day we, too, will have a memorial building to remember those people who are slipping out of the memories of Chinese today. 
We will. For sure.
I’ll tell you a funny story. 
In 1996 when I was in Boston a friend invited me to go out drinking. 
We went from bar to bar, but they always asked to see my passport for proof that I was of drinking age. 
I was 35 then, but had left my passport in New York. 
My hair was long then, so I bundled it up and then let it go, repeatedly, hoping this would make me look old enough to drink. 
Finally, around midnight, we did get a drink at an outdoor bar. 
I’ll find a 1996 photo of me — maybe you Americans really can’t tell the age of Oriental people. 
The memory makes me want to chuckle. (A photo here)
Next time, I’ll write only about happy things.
XXXXXXXXX
Liu Xia
July 26, 2013

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The Transparent Chinese

By MURONG XUECUN
Murong Xuecun, the pen name of Hao Qun, is the author of “Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu.” This article was adapted from a speech delivered in New York on Nov. 14 at a symposium on surveillance, co-sponsored by PEN America.

BEIJING — About once a month, Hao Jian is politely asked by the police “to have a cup of tea.” 

He knows it wouldn’t be prudent to say, “No thank you.”
A government critic and professor at the Beijing Film Academy, Mr. Hao signed Charter 08, a 2008 manifesto modeled on Charter 77, the 1977 document that helped usher in the end of one-party rule in Czechoslovakia. 

He has participated in forums about democracy and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, where his cousin died from a bullet wound.
The police tap his phone, read his email and follow him. 

On special occasions, like for several months after Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, the government forbids him to leave China. 

“To me, your life is totally transparent,” a police officer told Mr. Hao during one of his recent chats.
Among my acquaintances and friends like Hao Jian, dozens are compelled to lead transparent lives. 

And in addition to government critics, the authorities watch organizers of church services held in private homes, Falun Gong practitioners and simple petitioners. 

No one knows how many people are under surveillance. 

We can’t even be sure which agency oversees that daunting task.
The Edward J. Snowden affair finally raised a chilling question for the whole world: How much privacy do citizens have to give up for the sake of public security? 

For us Chinese, this question is slightly different: How much privacy do we have to give up for the sake of the government’s security?
China is blanketed with surveillance cameras. 

They have been installed on most streets, in supermarkets and in classrooms. 

The official purpose of this growing network — known as Skynet — is often described as “law-and-order management.” 

But high-profile crimes — like the murder of an infant in a stolen car in Jilin Province earlier this year — suggest that the cameras have little to do with fighting crime: The costly camera network was criticized by the public for failing to find a suspect in that case.
By contrast, the surveillance system worked perfectly when targeting Li Tiantian, a Shanghai-based human rights lawyer. 

According to Ms. Li, security officials tried to show her boyfriend video footage of her walking into a hotel with other men, suggesting she was unfaithful. (He refused to watch it.)
The main purpose of the surveillance, of course, is control and intimidation. 

For almost a decade, “weiwen,” or “maintaining social stability,” has been the government’s public mantra, but this pursuit is simply a way to justify the Communist Party’s hold on power. 

“Stability” has been deemed more important than education, health care and even national defense. 

In the 2012 government budget, expenses for domestic security exceeded $111 billion, compared with a defense budget of $106 billion.
Wang Lijun, the former police chief of Chongqing who is in prison for seeking refuge in a U.S. Consulate in 2012, among other crimes, gave a glimpse of how the surveillance power is abused. 

He boasted in 2010 that his city’s surveillance system had identified 4,000 “unwelcome” people who had entered Chongqing around the time of Chinese New Year. 

Most of them were found and forced to leave the city within hours.
Yet most Chinese citizens seem unconcerned about living transparent lives. 

Even on social media, the most open opinion platform in China, few people question the legality and necessity of the extensive surveillance network. 

A survey conducted in 2012 among students in Central China Normal University showed that only about 55 percent of them were opposed to the installation of cameras in dormitories.
As an outspoken writer, I have become paranoid. 

I often suspect that I am being followed and videotaped, but I have no way of proving it. 

I occasionally turn around to see if the police are nearby. 

When I sit down at a café with friends, I often cannot help checking under the table for a listening device.
My internal battle to fight off the constant fear of not knowing what could happen to me at the hands of the government affects my judgment. 

I don’t know if this has affected my writing. 

Intuition tells me it hasn’t, but I have trouble trusting my intuition. 

It is the breakdown of trust — trust of oneself, trust of others — that is the worst consequence of living a transparent life.
At a party a few months ago, I witnessed one friend accusing another of being an agent for the Communist Party. It was not an isolated incident. 

I cannot avoid the thought that among my acquaintances someone is spying on me. 

I tell myself to be sincere with everyone, but my sincerity is frequently mixed with caution.
People under surveillance often cannot help look for ulterior motives behind ordinary social interactions. 

We are cautious when interacting with strangers. 

If a conversation with a stranger is inevitable, we tend to avoid speaking our minds. 

We fear whatever we say may be used against us. 

A friend recently told me that he has not made a single good friend in the past few years because it is difficult for him to trust people.
The Chinese government talks about building a “harmonious society.” 

But how can a society become truly harmonious if surveillance cameras are everywhere and everyone has to live with suspicion and fear? 

What kind of lives can we lead without trust?

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Xia Yeliang: The China Americans Don't See

   

A Peking University economics professor who was sacked for his political views explains the underside of elite Chinese higher education. 
 By DAVID FEITH

The 21st-century romance between America's universities and China continues to blossom, with New York University opening a Shanghai campus last month and Duke to follow next year.
Nearly 100 U.S. campuses host "Confucius Institutes" funded by the Chinese government, and President Obama has set a goal for next year of seeing 100,000 American students studying in the Middle Kingdom.

Human Rights Watch Director of Global Initiatives Minky Worden on China's latest human rights hypocrisy
Meanwhile, Peking University last week purged economics professor Xia Yeliang, an outspoken liberal, with hardly a peep of protest from American academics.
"During more than 30 years, no single faculty member has been driven out like this," Mr. Xia says the day after his sacking from the university, known as China's best, where he has taught economics since 2000.
He'll be out at the end of the semester.
The professor's case is a window into the Chinese academic world that America's elite institutions are so eager to join—a world governed not by respect for free inquiry but by the political imperatives of a one-party state.
Call it higher education with Chinese characteristics.
"All universities are under the party's leadership," Mr. Xia says by telephone from his Beijing home.
"In Peking University, the No. 1 leader is not the president. It's the party secretary of Peking University."
Which is problematic for a professor loudly advocating political change.
In 2008, Mr. Xia was among the original 303 signatories of the Charter 08 manifesto calling for democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law in China.
"Our political system continues to produce human rights disasters and social crises," declared the charter, written primarily by Mr. Xia's friend Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace laureate who is currently serving an 11-year prison term for "inciting subversion of state power."
Mr. Xi, 53, says he had a mostly apolitical youth in Anhui province, west of Shanghai, where both of his parents were shipyard workers for China's navy.
He never considered himself a communist and says he always felt drawn to the West, thanks partly to foreign picture books from his childhood.
He imagined life as a painter or translator, and after graduating college in 1984 went to work as an interpreter for the government's Foreign Affairs Office.
His political awakening came later, in 1987-89, when he studied management at the University of Toronto, visited several European democracies—and read Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose."
Friedman's writing helped make Mr. Xia a classical liberal and, by the mid-1990s, a student of economics. Today he cites F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, James Buchanan and Gary Becker among his intellectual idols.
The list also includes Xiakuai Yang, the Chinese economist—and Mao-era political prisoner—who convinced him that China cannot thrive without imitating the institutions, and not just the technologies, of the West.
Institutions like multiparty constitutional democracy, which Mr. Xia and his Charter 08 comrades demanded five years ago.
The following year, Mr. Xia went out on his own to condemn government censorship in an open letter to Communist Party propaganda chief Liu Yunshan, who now sits on Beijing's seven-man supreme decision-making body.
Last year the professor helped start an online petition demanding an investigation into the suspicious death of democracy activist Li Wangyang, and more recently he has taken to Weibo (China's Twitter) to criticize new President Xi Jinping and his signature "Chinese dream" vision of party-led national greatness.
Such is the context for Mr. Xia's firing, but Peking University insists that the matter is purely academic.
"Xia Yeliang's teaching evaluation scores were for many years in a row the lowest of the entire university," school officials said this week, adding that 25 professors have been similarly fired since 2008.
"Slander," replies Mr. Xia, who says that his evaluation scores were stronger, and that in any case the school's dismissal process was a sham based on "no written rule."
Mr. Xia says he first heard of the dismissal proceedings in June, when the party secretary of the school of economics gave him a dressing-down over the telephone: "You could make suggestions and recommendations and we can send that to the leaders," Mr. Xia recalls being told, "but you don't have to say it this way in public. This is ruining the image of the party and the government."
He had been hearing similar messages since 2009, when university authorities warned him to "take good care" of his position on the faculty (as he told the Associated Press at the time).
The state-run Global Times newspaper, for its part, denounced the professor last month as an "extremist liberal... advocating freedom and democracy," even as it too claimed that his professional troubles are entirely nonpolitical.
This claim would be easier to credit if Mr. Xia hadn't already endured years of intimidation and abuse, on campus and off: blacklisted from providing commentary on state television, fired from two research institutes, tailed by plainclothes police, detained and interrogated repeatedly, harassed by nighttime phone calls, kept under house arrest for days, constantly monitored and occasionally hacked online.
With these measures failing to silence him, denying him a livelihood is an obvious way for the government to escalate.
And why wouldn't Peking University play enforcer?
Well, perhaps the school could be discouraged if it had to pay a price—within China, where it still maintains some reputation for relative liberalism, or more likely abroad, where it has established lucrative partnerships with Western universities that supposedly cherish liberal principles.
These include Columbia, Stanford, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania, Penn State, UCLA, the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, the London School of Economics and the University of Toronto.
But as he waited between his June conversation with the Communist Party secretary and the university's ruling, only Wellesley College in Massachusetts took up his cause (with 40% of professors calling to make his fair treatment a condition of the school's continued ties with Peking University).
No other Western schools have raised their voices in the days since his ouster.
"I don't want to encourage them to cut off the exchanges and the cooperation," says Mr. Xia of Peking University's partners in the West.
"I don't want to be blamed by people from both sides. I think that they have the freedom to choose."
OK, but if he were among the deciders?
"If I were working in the U.S., I would say always take academic freedom as a basic principle. I don't want to sacrifice the principle to have some kind of cooperation or exchange."
He continues: "Some American faculty members and leaders like to favor the Chinese Communist Party and the government. Because those guys, when they come to China, sometimes they are treated as honored guests."
That includes, he says, fat speaking fees, grand banquets and five-star accommodations.
Of the Wellesley faculty, Mr. Xia says, "I'm very grateful for their support."
Yet clearly it wasn't enough.
"If Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Columbia [and] Chicago did the same thing," he notes, Peking University might have held off: "The top leaders would seriously consider it."
Even now some outside pressure might help: "I don't know whether they could call me back or not, but they might try to make some kind of compensation."
Mr. Xia speaks pointedly about the broader matter of China and the West.
Westerners have a mistaken impression of his homeland, he says, "because the Chinese economy looks so good, and people are getting a better material life. But I think that we have very huge social costs. With pollution, with poisonous food, with a very bad, party-controlled ideological education system. I think that it's very dangerous."
He is scathing about what he sees in universities: "The nature of the scientific research in China is just unbearable. We expend huge expenditures for scientific research, but there's very little real scientific research done."
Some 70% of research funds, he says, goes to personal use—"travel, hotels, meals, computers, mobile phones, iPads, printers, all things you can imagine"—and professors routinely falsify invoices.
"Universities have the same problem" as the China Railway Construction Corp., he says, where officials were recently disciplined for spending $135 million on receptions for guests last year.
Which brings us back to the U.S.-China academic romance.
Chinese universities, Mr. Xia argues, "need famous foreign brand names to protect their very vulnerable capabilities for research and teaching."
The Chinese may "boast" that Peking University is one of the world's best, "but no people really believe that." 
Nowadays in China, he says, "the middle-class and rich persons and officials' children—they're sent to the U.S. to study. They know which schools are good and which are worse."
President Xi and his disgraced former rival, Bo Xilai, chose Harvard for their children.
Western academic ties provide China with "a kind of coating or makeup," says the professor.
"Because in Chinese universities we don't have real freedom of academic research, so there's no way to train great masters. Whether it's in science or in humanities and arts—no way."
Asked about China's prospects for change in light of recent events, Mr. Xia surprises with some optimism. Waiting for a Chinese Gorbachev would be like "Waiting for Godot," he argues, but there are stirrings from below, including the Internet's power to educate citizens, expose officials and organize movements; the increasing willingness of business leaders to challenge the political status quo; and the roughly 200,000 local-level protests a year against injustices such as unpaid military compensation, environmental degradation and illegal land seizures.
"Within 10 to 15 years," he believes, China's Communist Party will collapse. 
"I'm very optimistic about that."
The professor's personal situation is another story.
He'd like to continue teaching, "but I don't think any university in China would dare to accept me."
His wife works as an accountant—at Peking University, of all places.
And he accuses the administrators who fired him of threatening her job, too, by warning that his treatment could worsen if he spoke out publicly.
"I feel sorry for my family members," he says.
"In China if you want to make institutional change, you must prepare to sacrifice or pay some high cost."
It's admirable, then, that on Thursday Wellesley College said it wants to host Mr. Xia as a visiting scholar through its aptly named Freedom Project.
The brave economist could be a powerful presence in an American academy that often checks its principles at the door when it enters China.

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Beijing’s Assault on Academic Freedom

The New York Times

Peking University’s decision last week to dismiss Professor Xia Yeliang, an economist and advocate of the free market, is making news around the world. 

The dismissal could hurt Peking University’s connections with American and European universities, and tarnish its reputation. 

In the spirit of academic freedom, universities that have collaborative relations with Peking University — Stanford, Cornell, Yale, the London School of Economics and many others — should be putting pressure on China’s leading university to reinstate Mr. Xia.
In September, 130 faculty members at Wellesley College urged in a letter to the president of Peking University not to fire Mr. Xia “based solely on his political and philosophical views.” 

They said that if he is fired, they would ask Wellesley College to reconsider the formal academic relationship it signed with Peking University in June.
A recent editorial in the state-run Global Times castigated Mr. Xia as an “extreme liberal” advocating “freedom and democracy.” 

His troubles with state and university authorities began when he signed a petition urging democratic change in 2008. 

The primary author of the petition, known as Charter 08, is the Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, who is serving an 11-year sentence for subversion.
Yet this month, Peking University was one of nine Chinese universities to sign a pact to uphold academic freedom along with the League of European Research Universities, Australia’s Group of Eight universities, and the Association of American Universities. 

Peking University has been trying to enhance its mark as an internationally recognized center of learning. 

But the government’s ideological and political hold over the university makes a mockery of its claim to academic freedom.
The dismissal of Professor Xia is part of a wide crackdown on scholars, lawyers and writers who have discussed democracy and freedom. 

In recent months, Chinese President Xi Jinping has been leading a campaign of “ideological purification” to suppress dissent. 

On Sunday, a prominent Chinese businessman, Wang Gongquan, who has supported human rights causes, was arrested in Beijing for “assembling a crowd to disrupt order in a public place.”
The rising number of arrests has one aim: to instill fear. 

As the editor in chief of a prominent publishing house in Beijing said in an interview with The Times: “Self-censorship has become the most effective weapon. If you let something slip through that catches the attention of a higher-up, it can be a career killer.” 

Peking University’s treatment of Professor Xia sends a message to the entire academic community that destroys free inquiry and has severe societal consequences.

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China continues crackdown on any criticism of the government and party — Peking University Professor sacked

By William Wan

Professor Xia Yeliang from the school of Economics, at Peking University. On the blackboard it reads ‘Freedom’ (top-left), ‘Constitutional Democracy’ (top-right), ‘Checking Balance’ (bottom-left) and ‘Rule of Law (bottom-right).

BEIJING — A top Chinese university has decided to remove a politically outspoken professor who has advocated for free speech and democratic reform, said the professor Xia Yeliang.
Xia said he was notified by Peking University’s School of Economics that a committee had voted not to renew his contract.
The action comes after persistent rumors he would be dismissed in recent weeks, which had sparked concern from U.S. academics, whose universities are increasingly expanding into a Chinese market that is lucrative but remains politically repressive.
Peking University officials did not answer calls to its office on Saturday.
In recent years, Xia, an economist, had called for more public discussion of political reform.

In 2008, he signed a petition demanding far-reaching changes to China’s single-party, authoritarian Communist rule. 

The party responded by imprisoning the main organizer of that petition, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo.
But what may have offended party leaders most was an open letter Xia wrote in 2009 criticizing Liu Yunshan, then-head of China’s powerful propaganda ministry. 

In it, Xia derided China and Liu’s iron-fisted censorship practices. 

After he postd the letter, Xia said university leaders asked him to confess to wrongdoings.

Liu has since become one of the seven party standing committee members who have absolute rule over the country.
And more recently, Xia has criticized Chinese President Xi Jinping’s favorite new catchphrase of promoting a new “China Dream.”
Xia said he was summoned Friday afternoon to a meeting with the school dean, the department’s Communist party chief and head of the employment committee. 

They told him he had been ousted at a meeting from which he was excluded by 30 faculty votes against him, three in support and one abstention.
“They kept warning me I cannot tell foreign media I was fired for political reasons but purely academic ones,” Xia said in a phone interview, noting that he had just passed an academic assessment without problems late last year.
“Even now having been fired, I cannot say it is political. In China, they can take harsh measures against you, for example attacking my family members,” he said. 

“I would remind you that my wife also works at Peking University.”
As one of China’s most prestigious institutions, Peking University had come under sharp criticism recently for seeking Xia’s ouster.
Last month, 136 faculty members at Wellesley College in Massachusetts signed a petition protesting Peking University’s actions and expressing concerns over a new academic partnership between Wellesley and Peking University.
Xia’s case “illustrates more general problems and paradoxes that arise as American liberal arts institutions increasingly work in authoritarian countries. What are the rules of engagement when we enter into such partnerships?” 

Wellesley sociologist Thomas Cushman wrote last month explaining the decision. 

“If more American academics take a stand against such persecution, it might be possible to invest these partnerships with our fundamental principles and some degree of authenticity rather than have them stand as charades that work against the values and principles of the liberal arts.”
In August, the New York-based Committee of Concerned Scientists also issued an open letter of support for Xia.
Long considered one of China’s most elite and liberal institutions, Peking University has boasted of partnerships with several other foreign universities including Stanford and Yale. 

Demand for the prestige and name-brand degrees of Western universities has grown alongside the rise of wealthy elite in China. 

And U.S. universities have been eager to enter the vast untapped market.
Xia’s dismissal comes on the heels of a wider crack down on public expression of liberal opinions.

In recent weeks, authorities have arrested many political activists, bloggers and whistleblowers in a continuing wave of repression.
In August, another outspoken professor, Zhang Xuezhong was prohibited from teaching any more courses at East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai.
Xia said his employment will officially end on Jan. 31, and finding another job will prove impossible given his ouster.
“No school would dare to hire me now,” he said.

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As China Moves to Lower Professor’s Profile, Colleges Are Seeking to Raise Theirs

“When Communist values replace traditional values, the most severe consequence is that people lose their conscience, like during the class struggles of the past, when sons were told to kill their fathers.” -- Xia Yeliang

By ANDREW JACOBS

Xia Yeliang, an economics professor at Peking University, at home in Beijing last month. He says he expects to be fired for criticizing the ruling Communist Party in his writings and in the classroom.
BEIJING — It is hard to know exactly which transgression propelled Xia Yeliang, an accomplished Peking University economist, from opinionated irritant to a marked enemy of the ruling Communist Party. 

There was his 2009 public letter that ridiculed the technical school degree held by the nation’s propaganda minister and the interview he gave last year to Radio Free Asia, describing China as a “Communist one-party dictatorship.”
But Professor Xia, a former teenage Red Guard turned free-market advocate, says he most likely crossed a line last year when he posted an online jeremiad calling on Chinese intellectuals to gather in public squares to debate political reform. 

“That seemed to really upset school administrators,” he said recently. 

It also apparently upset powerful figures in the Communist Party.
In the coming weeks, Professor Xia says, he is likely to be dismissed from his teaching post at Peking University, one of the nation’s most prestigious schools, a move he and others say reflects the government’s determination to control intellectual discourse at the nation’s leading educational institutions.
Administrators have told him his fate will be decided by a panel of his peers, a feint he says is intended to head off criticism that his punishment is politically driven. 

“I’m not terribly optimistic for my future,” said Professor Xia, 53, an animated man whose classroom lectures on macroeconomics are often flecked with colorful jabs at the party.
The effort to silence Professor Xia has thrown into sharp relief the challenges facing elite colleges and universities like Peking University, caught between political controls at home and their ambitions to gain international respect as grand centers of learning. 

In recent years, the university has waged a muscular and well-financed effort to raise its global profile through partnerships and exchanges with some of the world’s top institutions.
Last year, Stanford University opened a $7 million research center on the Peking University campus, and a growing list of other colleges and universities, including Cornell, Yale and the London School of Economics, have established dual-degree programs or enhanced academic collaboration.
Zhang Qianfan, a law professor at Peking University, said punishing Professor Xia would most likely harm the university’s efforts at elevating its stature abroad. 

“It would send out a message that the university is not able to resist political interference and is unable to separate politics from academics, which is a basic requirement for those trying to carry out decent academic work,” he said.
The campaign to silence Professor Xia has not gone unnoticed overseas. 

The Committee of Concerned Scientists has taken up his plight, and last month more than 130 faculty members at Wellesley College signed an open letter calling on administrators to reconsider their partnership with Peking University should he be fired.
Neither the office of Peking University’s president nor the economics department responded to interview requests.
A prolific author and once a frequent commentator on Chinese news programs, Professor Xia first drew the ire of university officials in 2008, when he was among the first to add his name to a manifesto that demanded an end to single-party rule. 

The petition, called Charter 08, drew 300 signers and deeply unnerved top party leaders, prompting the prosecution of its primary author, Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel laureate who is serving an 11-year sentence for subversion. 

A year later, Professor Xia posted his open letter to China’s propaganda chief comparing his department’s efforts to that of the Nazis.
Since then, Professor Xia says, he has endured bouts of house arrest or found himself trailed by state security agents. 

But he says he has been largely left alone. 

In recent years, university administrators have permitted him to spend long stretches abroad as a visiting scholar, including at Stanford until September.
But last year, after he posted his online letter calling for a public discussion of political reform, university administrators demanded that he return to China and then warned him to tone down his antigovernment invective.
Since then, he has continued to criticize the Communist Party while advocating Western-style democracy through microblog postings that are often deleted as soon as they go up. (His current microblog on Sina Weibo is called “Xiayeliang the Ninth” because the previous eight accounts have been shut down.) 

“I’ve never advocated revolution,” he said. 

“Just peaceful change.”
If he is punished, he will be the latest Chinese intellectual caught up in a growing campaign against dissent that has led to the detention of dozens of lawyers, activists and public intellectuals. 

The crackdown, which has escalated since the elevation last March of Xi Jinping as China’s first new president in a decade, has been accompanied by a drive to root out what party leaders see as subversive currents in society. 

Those were identified recently in a secret memo as the advocacy of electoral democracy, news media independence and “universal values” like human rights.
Chinese universities, already tightly run by party-appointed administrators, have also found themselves swept up in the push for ideological rectification. 

Students have been required to participate in essay contests on the “Chinese dream,” a centerpiece of Mr. Xi’s drive to rally the public around themes of national rejuvenation, and some professors have complained about an edict disseminated by the party’s Central Committee that bars discussion of seven topics in the classroom, among them civil rights, judicial independence and the failings of Mao Zedong.
This summer Zhang Xuezhong, a professor at East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai, was suspended from the classroom after he wrote an article advocating greater adherence to China’s largely unenforced Constitution. 

In an interview, Professor Zhang said the move against him and other attempts to constrain academics reflected the party’s fear that its ideological sway over Chinese students was waning, in large part because of the Internet.
“Young people have come to realize that some of the problems affecting society have to do with the core system itself,” Professor Zhang said. 

“The government can no longer ram ideas down their throats, and this has them in a panic.”
Professor Zhang remains optimistic that university students can retain their independent thinking amid an assault on liberal ideas, a sentiment not shared by Professor Xia. 

In contrast to a decade ago, he said, few students are attracted to democratic ideas and fewer still seem bothered by the shrinking public space for discussing politically delicate subjects. 

Party-appointed class monitors increasingly provide “guidance” to excessively opinionated classmates, he and others say, and e-mail traffic on university servers is closely scrutinized.
These days, Professor Xia and other academics say, students largely value careers over ideals. 

“They’ve been taught by their parents to avoid politics and strive to become civil servants,” he said. 

“Their goal is to land the kind of jobs that will allow them to buy an apartment.”
In interviews, several Peking University students said they were unaware of Professor Xia’s case, and the few who were aware were unsympathetic, saying he had crossed a line by repeatedly provoking the party. 

“I can understand why the government would sacrifice a little bit of democracy and righteousness,” said Chu Yiqi, a postgraduate physics student. 

“I think they made the right call.”
But many of the students who attended Professor Xia’s Institutional Economics class one recent evening said they appreciated his unfettered speaking style, even if some of his statements struck them as didactic. (At one point during the lecture, he said, “When Communist values replace traditional values, the most severe consequence is that people lose their conscience, like during the class struggles of the past, when sons were told to kill their fathers.”)
As the classroom emptied out, Grace Zhang, a postgraduate economics student, said she was appalled to learn that Professor Xia could be fired for his public comments. 

“It’s unthinkable that the university could stifle these kinds of voices,” she said. 

“Accommodating such voices is what a university education should be all about.”

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