Criminal Nation

In Liu Xiaobo’s Last Days, Supporters Fight China for His Legacy
By CHRIS BUCKLEY

Protesters with pictures of Liu Xiaobo, the jailed Chinese Nobel Peace laureate, outside the Chinese liaison office in Hong Kong on Monday. 

BEIJING — As the life ebbs from Liu Xiaobo, China’s most famous dissident and only Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a battle is shaping up over his life, his legacy, his words and maybe even his remains.
It is a battle that other countries are largely sitting out, even though Mr. Liu could become the first Nobel laureate to die in state custody since Carl von Ossietzky, the German pacifist and foe of Nazism who died under guard in 1938. 

The tepid international response to Mr. Liu’s case is a reflection of China’s rising power, and its ability to deflect pressure over its human rights record.
The Chinese government has sequestered Mr. Liu in a hospital room in northeast China and refused his request to go abroad for treatment, saying it wants to ensure that he receives the best care for his terminal liver cancer. 

The hospital is surrounded by guards, and Mr. Liu has been filmed lying still and frail in his bed. 

The footage, which shows him surrounded by doctors praising his medical care, was released without his permission for propaganda purposes.
Mr. Liu’s supporters have expressed outrage, saying the government wants to control his last days in defiance of his lifelong cause: the right of the individual to live, speak and remember, free of authoritarian control and censorship.

“The key is control of his talk — they don’t want him to be able to speak freely,” said Perry Link, a professor of Chinese at the University of California, Riverside, who edited an English-language selection of Mr. Liu’s essays and poems. 

“If he’s let out for treatment, he could talk, and that’s what the regime is afraid of.”

Mr. Liu has written about “angry ghosts” who denounce official misdeeds from the grave, and Beijing seems fearful that he will become one of them, inspiring opposition even in his afterlife. 

On Tuesday, the hospital that is treating Mr. Liu said he had septic shock and organ dysfunction, suggesting his condition was grim.
The panoply of state censorship and propaganda around Mr. Liu is testament to his tenacious influence, almost seven years after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, nearly a decade after he was last detained and sentenced to 11 years in prison for inciting subversion, and 28 years after the Communist Party denounced him as a seditious “black hand” for backing the student protests that swept China in 1989.
Mr. Liu has not been allowed to speak freely since he was arrested in late 2008, and his wife, Liu Xia, has been under heavy police surveillance since 2010, when he was awarded the Nobel medal. But lately, the Chinese authorities have released images and videos abroad to make the case that the couple are contented and cooperative.
“They want everything to be controllable, and if he went abroad, he would lie beyond their control,” Cui Weiping, a retired professor of Chinese literature and friend of Mr. Liu, said from Los Angeles, where she now lives. 

“This has always been the purge approach for dealing with dissidents — minimize their influence so they don’t become a focus.”

A picture shared on Twitter by the activist Ye Du showing Mr. Liu and his wife, Liu Xia.

Yet while the government wants Mr. Liu to stay silent and to ensure that his legacy fades as quickly as possible, his supporters have mobilized, despite intense restrictions and police warnings. 

They want to win him the right to speak out, go abroad for palliative treatment and decide how he is memorialized.
Some sympathizers of Mr. Liu have tried to visit him in his hospital, where the police blocked their way; some organized a petition calling for him to be given freedom at the end of his life. 

Longtime friends of Mr. Liu have been warned not to speak out or placed under police watch, including Zhou Duo, a scholar who joined Mr. Liu on Tiananmen Square on June 3, 1989, as armed soldiers closed in, when they and two other friends negotiated the safe passage of protesters who were still there.
“To make Liu Xiaobo spend his final time like this doesn’t bring honor to the government, but they’ll stick to their ways,” said Wen Kejian, a friend of Mr. Liu who unsuccessfully tried to visit him in the hospital. 

“I think the chances that we’ll get what he wants are slim — that would require a dramatic change in the system — but we must try our best.”
Mr. Liu, 61, was moved from prison to the First Hospital of China Medical University in Shenyang, 390 miles northeast of Beijing, last month, and officials revealed that his cancer had already reached a terminal stage. 

Mr. Liu has said that he wants to travel to Germany or the United States for treatment. 

The Chinese government has not flatly rejected that request, but it has left little hope it will say yes.
But by keeping Mr. Liu locked up as he dies, the Chinese government has soiled its own image, said Liao Yiwu, an exiled Chinese author living in Berlin who knows Mr. Liu. 

Domestic Chinese news reports about Mr. Liu are heavily censored, and his illness has gone virtually unmentioned, except in English-language outlets read by few. 

But the images of Mr. Liu, gaunt on a hospital bed, have caused anger and disgust in China among the small minority who have seen them, Mr. Liao said.
“By locking him up and preventing him from traveling abroad, they’re actually making him even more symbolically powerful,” Mr. Liao said by telephone. 

“Now the whole world is paying attention, and I think that’s even more powerful.”
The tensions over Mr. Liu have also spilled abroad. 

Xi Jinping exudes disdain for human rights lobbying, and Western governments have weighed how far to press his case even as rights groups call for action.
A spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Geng Shuang, on Monday denounced calls for Mr. Liu to be freed to go abroad as “meddling” by foreigners, even though two doctors, a German and an American, who were invited by the government to examine Mr. Liu said that he could travel and that their hospitals would treat him.
“Politically, it’s 100 percent sure that the Communist Party doesn’t want Mr. Liu to be freed or leave China,” said Zhao Hui, a writer and friend of Mr. Liu who goes by a pen name, Mo Zhixu. 

He said: “Whatever chance we have of making that happen depends on external pressure.”
But so far most Western leaders, including Trump, have said nothing publicly about Mr. Liu, leaving any comment to lower-ranking officials.

The First Hospital of China Medical University in Shenyang, where Mr. Liu is believed to be undergoing treatment. 

When Trump met with Xi during the Group of 20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany, last week, Trump did not mention Mr. Liu, according to a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. 

But Trump’s national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, raised his treatment with Chinese officials, asking that he be allowed to go abroad for treatment accompanied by his wife, the official said.
European leaders have also chosen their words cautiously. 

The French Foreign Ministry said on June 29 that it was “preoccupied” with Mr. Liu’s condition and called on China to free him for humanitarian reasons.
A spokesman for Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, said on Monday that “this tragic case of Liu Xiaobo is a great concern of the chancellor” and that “she would like a signal of humanity for Liu Xiabao and his family.”
The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, and after Mr. Liu was announced as the recipient, the Chinese government vented its anger on the Norwegian government, curtailing diplomatic and economic cooperation. 

Ties revived only this year, and the Norwegian government has trod carefully on the subject of Mr. Liu’s terminal illness.
“This is a demanding case that we are following closely. We have waited over six years to return to normal relations with China,” said Frode O. Andersen, the head of communications for the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, according to Norwegian news reports. 

“Our thoughts go out to him and his family. It is important that he gets medical treatment.”
There is no guarantee that Xi would bow to stronger foreign pressure to free Mr. Liu. 

In past decades, Chinese leaders were willing to release political prisoners to Western countries after granting medical parole. 

They included Wei Jingsheng, the most prominent dissident of his generation, who reached the United States in late 1997 after Bill Clinton pressed his case with China’s president at the time, Jiang Zemin.
But as the Chinese government has grown more confident and impatient with Western criticism, it has stopped that practice. 

Xi appears particularly set against making concessions that could weaken his strongman reputation.
“The Chinese government is legitimate in its refusal of calls for Liu to be taken overseas for treatment,” the English-language edition of Global Times, a party-run tabloid with a nationalist tinge, said in an editorial on Monday. 

In any case, it added, “Western mainstream society is much less enthusiastic than before in interfering with China’s sovereign affairs.”
Even after Mr. Liu dies, his funeral arrangements could become a focus of contention. 

Chinese rules say that prisons control the funerals of prisoners and can cremate them even if the family objects.
But the “whole area of the rights of individuals serving sentences on medical parole is a murky one indeed, including funereal rights,” said John Kamm, the founder of the Dui Hua Foundation, an organization in San Francisco that has worked to free Chinese prisoners.
The Chinese government will almost certainly try to prevent any grave site for Mr. Liu from becoming a place of pilgrimage for dissenters. 

The grave of Lin Zhao, an outspoken writer executed during the Cultural Revolution, has become one such site, and Mr. Liu’s pull would be more powerful.

The Enemy Within: Chinese Fifth Column

On Campuses Far From China, Still Under Beijing’s Watchful Eye
By STEPHANIE SAUL

Students at the University of California, San Diego, where an organization of Chinese students is protesting the invitation of the Dalai Lama as a commencement speaker. 

SAN DIEGO — In the competition for marquee commencement speakers, the University of California, San Diego thought it had scored a coup this year — a Nobel Peace Prize winner, best-selling author and spiritual North Star to millions of people.
“We are honored to host His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama,” gushed Pradeep Khosla, the university’s chancellor, “and thankful that he will share messages of global compassion.”
Within hours of Mr. Khosla’s announcement, though, the university was blindsided by nasty remarks on Facebook and other social media sites: “Imagine how Americans would feel if someone invited Bin Laden,” said one.
At the center of the opposition was the U.C. San Diego chapter of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, which threatened “tough measures to resolutely resist the school’s unreasonable behavior.” 

The Chinese government accuses the Dalai Lama of promoting Tibetan independence from China, and if the student group’s message sounded a bit like the Beijing party line, that may have been no coincidence: The group said it had consulted with the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles on the matter.
China’s booming economy has increasingly allowed more of its young men and women to seek a college education in the West; 329,000 now study in the United States, more than five times the number recorded a decade ago. 

By far the largest contingent of foreign students, they can be an economic lifeline for colleges, since they usually pay full tuition, and they can provide a healthy dose of international diversity.
But Chinese students always bring to campus something else from home: the watchful eyes and heavy hand of the Chinese government, manifested through its ties to many of the 150-odd chapters of the Chinese Students and Scholars Associations.
The groups have worked in tandem with Beijing to promote a pro-Chinese agenda and tamp down anti-Chinese speech on Western campuses. 

At Columbia a decade ago, the club mobilized students to protest a presentation about human rights violations in China, urging them to “resolutely defend the honor and dignity of the Motherland.” 

At Duke, the group was accused of inciting a harassment campaign in 2008 against a Chinese student who tried to mediate between sides in a Tibet protest. 

More recently in Durham, England, the group acted at the behest of the Chinese government to censor comments at a forum on China-Hong Kong relations.
In many instances, members of the student group have been accused of spying.
The organization’s influence troubles scholars and human rights activists, who say it wields outsize sway over American campuses because of the sizable tuition paid by Chinese students abroad, a group recently exhorted by China’s government to increase their patriotism and devotion to the Communist Party.
“I basically don’t think that any student organizations that are controlled by their government — which clearly the C.S.S.A. is — should have a presence on foreign university campuses,” said Jeffrey Henderson, a professor of international development at the University of Bristol in England.
A Hong Kong expert, Dr. Henderson was invited to speak at a 2014 workshop at Durham University in England organized by the Chinese Students and Scholars and two other groups to discuss the Umbrella Movement — in which protesters had shut down streets in Hong Kong demonstrating against the Chinese government’s failure to hold democratic elections there.
Two days before the workshop, Dr. Henderson said, he received an email on behalf of the president of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association stating that the Chinese Embassy in London was “very concerned that nothing should go on in the workshop that disturbs the harmonious relationship between Hong Kong and China.”
Dr. Henderson arrived with plans to ignore the embassy guidance. 

Yet he found the seminar’s Q. and A. session tightly controlled, permitting only written questions that had been vetted.

Meetings in Motels
For the most part, the clubs function as run-of-the-mill campus groups, providing transportation for new arrivals, sponsoring Lunar New Year celebrations and organizing bilingual job fairs. 

Joining the Chinese Students and Scholars Association on some campuses is competitive. 

Students are required to apply for spots on club committees, and being accepted confers a certain measure of prestige; members often trumpet it on their LinkedIn pages.
Neither the Chinese embassies in Washington and London nor the consulate in Los Angeles responded to questions about their ties to the student organizations.
Leo Yao, departing president of the student association’s chapter at U.C. San Diego, said the group’s only regular interaction with the government was an annual meeting at the consulate, during which student safety and campus events are discussed.
“So it’s true that we have connections with the consulate, but it’s not the kind of relations that many people say we have,” said Mr. Yao, a probability and statistics major from Zhuhai, China. 

“They think we represent the Chinese government, that we do things the Chinese government tells us to do, things like that, but that’s not true.”
Chinese Students and Scholars Association groups started to spread in the 1980s as the number of Chinese students studying abroad began to grow. 

“I came to the U.S. and thought, ‘Wow, great, I’m in a free country, now I hope that everything is cool and happy,’” said Frank Tian Xie, who arrived in the late 1980s to study chemistry at Purdue University. 

“But I found out that the government extended their control to even Chinese students in America.”
Dr. Xie, now a professor at the University of South Carolina, Aiken, said the Chinese Consulate in Chicago tried to handpick officers of the organization and periodically sent a representative to meet with students in a motel room.
Li Fengzhi, a longtime employee of the Chinese Ministry of State Security who came to the United States in 2003 as a graduate student at the University of Denver, said that the Chinese government did not see the group so much as a spying operation, but rather as a propaganda and “information collection organization.” 

Mr. Li eventually defected and was debriefed by F.B.I. counterintelligence agents about the group’s activities.
The ties between the Chinese government and the student groups are not exactly secret. 

At some colleges, like the University of Connecticut and the University of North Texas, the groups’ websites mention that they are supported by or affiliated with Chinese consulates.
Michigan Technological University’s group acknowledges a relationship with the Chinese Embassy, then adds, “However, C.S.S.A. will not participate in any political revolutions, unless in special conditions.”
But their relationship can also be covert. 

In the 1990s, Canadian immigration officials accused a leader of the group’s chapter at Concordia University in Montreal of using funds from the Chinese government and supplying Chinese diplomats with information regarding pro-democracy Chinese students.
In 2005, authorities in Belgium said they had identified another Chinese spy — a member of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association at Leuven University — coordinating industrial espionage agents throughout Europe, according to an unclassified 2011 F.B.I. report.
Perry Link, a China expert and co-editor of the English version of “The Tiananmen Papers,” a compilation of secret Chinese documents relating to the Tiananmen Square protests, characterized the student organization as “a tool of the government’s foreign ministry” that, among other activities, keeps tabs on unpatriotic speech among Chinese students.
“The effect of that surveillance is less that certain people are caught and punished and more that virtually all Chinese students know they could be reported and, therefore, watch what they say in public fora,” said Dr. Link, now a professor at the University of California, Riverside.

Off-Limits Topics
At Columbia in 2007, a Canadian human rights lawyer, David Matas, arrived to find heavy security and a protest by the Chinese Students and Scholars Association against his presentation on China’s mistreatment of adherents of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice that combines portions of Buddhism, meditation and exercise and is banned by the government.
Later, a threatening email — apparently directed at Mr. Matas — was sent to the Columbia group’s website, stating, “Anyone who offends China will be executed no matter how far away they are,” Mr. Matas said recently.
Last month the Columbia chapter held its annual China Prospects Conference at the Low Memorial Library at Columbia, focusing on economic policy and sustainable development. 

Several dozen government, academic and business leaders spoke to an audience of mostly Chinese students, and the agenda avoided third-rail topics such as human rights, Taiwan and the Dalai Lama.
A conference program said it had “full support from the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China.”
Several colleges where the Chinese Students and Scholars Association openly acknowledges ties to the Chinese government, including Columbia, said such ties did not violate any college rules. 

But colleges have found themselves caught up in Chinese politics just the same.
After the University of Calgary conferred an honorary degree on the Dalai Lama in 2009, the Chinese government withdrew Calgary from its list of accredited international universities for a year. 

Enrollment from China dipped slightly, then grew again after accreditation was restored and is now a quarter of the university’s total international students.
At U.C. San Diego, about 3,500 undergraduates hail from China, or more than 10 percent of the student body. 

They pay more than twice what California students pay, providing critical revenue at a time when the University of California system is financially pressured.
Last year, Mr. Khosla, the chancellor, laid the groundwork for the Dalai Lama’s speech, meeting with him in Dharamsala, India, where the Dalai Lama has lived since fleeing Tibet after a 1959 uprising. Through his office, Mr. Khosla declined to be interviewed.

Chancellor Pradeep Khosla of the University of California, San Diego met with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, in October 2016.

Other than Mr. Yao, the exiting club president, members of the group declined requests for interviews. 

But some other Chinese students said they also were offended by the Dalai Lama’s invitation. 

At the Price Center, a campus student center and food court, several who were eating lunch one recent afternoon predicted protests on June 17, commencement day. 

One said his parents were going to miss his graduation because they refused to be present for the Dalai Lama’s speech.
Shiwei Terry Zhou, a junior from Wuhan, China, said the students felt targeted by the university’s decision. 

“We make good grades. We don’t make trouble. We pay a lot,” Mr. Zhou said. “What is the motivation?”
Despite the pressure, the university has not backed down. 

At a meeting with Mr. Khosla, members of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association asked that the university at least refrain from referring to the Dalai Lama as a “spiritual leader” and that he be prevented from discussing politics.
“Rebranding is very important so we won’t take this personally, maybe,” Mr. Yao said.
The university has not said if it will comply with those demands. 

In a statement, it said it has always “served as a forum for discussion and interaction on important public policy issues and respects the rights of individuals to agree or disagree as we consider issues of our complex world.”