China's disappeared: Some of the people who vanished at the hands of the Chinese state in 2018

Canadian citizens, a famous actress, a security insider and a student Marxist disappeared in China this year
The Associated Press
Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig briefly disappeared this month before it was revealed they were taken into custody by Chinese officials. The two men's detention followed the arrest and detention of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou by Canadian authorities. 

It's not uncommon for individuals who speak out against the government to disappear in China, but the scope of the "disappeared" has expanded since Xi Jinping came to power in 2013.
Not only dissidents and activists, but also high-level officials, Marxists, foreigners and even a movie star — people who never publicly opposed the ruling Communist Party — have been whisked away by police to unknown destinations.
The widening dragnet throws into stark relief the lengths to which Xi's administration is willing to go to maintain its control and authority.
Here's a look at some of the people who went missing in 2018 at the hands of the Chinese state:

Canadian citizens
China threatened "grave consequences" if Canada did not release high-tech executive Meng Wanzhou, shortly after the Huawei chief financial officer was detained in Vancouver earlier this month for extradition to the U.S.
The apparent consequences materialized within days, when two Canadian men went missing in China. 

Both turned up in the hands of state security on suspicion of endangering "national security", a nebulous category of crimes that has been levied against foreigners in recent years.
Former Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig was taken by authorities from a Beijing street late in the evening, a person familiar with his case said. 

He is allowed one consular visit a month and has not been granted access to a lawyer, as is standard for state security cases.

Kovrig, an adviser with the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, remains in detention in China.

Also detained is Michael Spavor, who organizes tours to North Korea from the border city of Dandong. 

China has not said whether their detentions are related to Meng's, but a similar scenario unfolded in the past.
A Canadian couple was detained in 2014 on national security grounds shortly after Canada arrested Su Bin, a Chinese man wanted for industrial espionage in the U.S.
Like Spavor, Kevin and Julia Garratt lived in Dandong, where they ran a popular coffee shop for nearly a decade. 

They also worked with a Christian charity that provided food to North Korean refugees.
While Julia Garratt was released on bail, her husband was held for more than two years before he was deported in September 2016 — about two months after Su pleaded guilty in the U.S.

Tax-evading actress
Fan Bingbing was living the dream. 

Since a breakthrough role at the age of 17, Fan has headlined dozens of movies and TV series, and parlayed her success into modelling, fashion design and other ventures that have made her one of the highest-paid celebrities in the world.
All this made her a potent icon of China's economic success, until authorities reminded Fan — and her legion of admirers — that even she was not untouchable.
For about four months, Fan vanished from public view. 

Her Weibo social media account, which has more than 63 million followers, fell silent. 

Her management office in Beijing was vacated. 

Her birthday on Sept. 16 came and went with only a handful of greetings from entertainment notables.
When she finally resurfaced, it was to apologize.
"I sincerely apologize to society, to the friends who love and care for me, to the people, and to the country's tax bureau," Fan said in a letter posted on Weibo on Oct. 3.
Chinese actress Fan Bingbing poses for photographers upon arrival at the opening of the Cannes film festival in southern France in May. One of China's highest paid celebrities, Fan disappeared from public view for four months before apologizing for tax-evasion. 

Fan later admitted to tax evasion. 

State news agency Xinhua reported that she and the companies she represents had been ordered to pay taxes and penalties totaling 900 million yuan ($130 million US).
"Without the party and the country's great policies, without the people's loving care, there would be no Fan Bingbing," she wrote, a cautionary tale for other Chinese celebrities.
Xinhua concurred in a commentary on her case: "Everyone is equal before the law, there are no `superstars' or `big shots.' No one can despise the law and hope to be lucky."

Security insider
Unlike most swallowed up by China's opaque security apparatus, Meng Hongwei knew exactly what to expect.
Meng — no relation to the Huawei executive — is a vice minister of public security who was also head of Interpol, the France-based organization that facilitates police cooperation across borders.
When he was appointed to the top post, human rights groups expressed concern that China would use Interpol as a tool to rein in political enemies around the world.
Instead, he was captured by the same security forces he represented.
Former Interpol president Meng Hongwei delivers his opening address at the Interpol World congress in Singapore in July 2017. 

In September, Meng became the latest high-ranking official caught in Xi's banner anti-corruption campaign. 

The initiative is a major reason for the Chinese leader's broad popularity, but he has been accused of using it to eliminate political rivals.
Xi pledged to confront both high-level "tigers" and low-level "flies" in his crackdown on graft — a promise he has fulfilled by ensnaring prominent officials.
Meng was missing for weeks before Chinese authorities said he was being investigated for taking bribes and other crimes. 

A Chinese delegation later delivered a resignation letter from Meng to Interpol headquarters.
His wife Grace Meng told the AP that she does not believe the charges against her husband. 

The last message he sent her was an emoji of a knife.

Daring photographer
Lu Guang made his mark photographing the everyday lives of HIV patients in central China. 

They were poor villagers who had contracted the virus after selling their own blood to eke out a living — at a going rate of $7 a pint, they told Lu.
A former factory worker, Lu traversed China's vast reaches to capture reality at its margins. 

He explored environmental degradation, industrial pollution and other gritty topics generally avoided by Chinese journalists, who risk punishment if they pursue stories considered to be sensitive or overly critical.
His work won him major accolades such as the World Press Photo prize, but his prominence likely also put him on the government's radar.
This November, Lu was travelling through East Turkestan, the far west colony that has deployed a vast security network in the name of fighting terrorism. 

He was participating in an exchange with other photographers, after which he was to meet a friend in nearby Sichuan province. 

He never showed up.
More than a month after he disappeared, his family was notified that he had been arrested in East Turkestan, according to his wife Xu Xiaoli. 

She declined to elaborate on the nature of the charges.

Marxist student
In the past, the political activists jailed in China were primarily those who fought for democracy and an end to one-party rule. 

They posed a direct ideological threat to the Communist Party.
This year, the party locked in on a surprising new target: young Marxists.
About 50 students and recent graduates of the country's most prestigious universities convened in August in Shenzhen, an electronics manufacturing hub, to rally for factory workers attempting to form a union
Among them was Yue Xin, a 20-something fresh out of Peking University. 

Earlier this year, she made headlines by calling for the elite school to release the results of its investigation into a decades-old rape case.
This time, she was one of the most vocal leaders of the labour rights group, appearing in photographs with her fist up in a Marxist salute and wearing a T-shirt that said "Unity is strength" — the name of a patriotic Chinese communist song.
Yue, a passionate student of Marx and Mao Zedong, espoused the same values as the party. 

She wrote an open letter to Xi and the party's central leadership saying all the students wanted was justice for Jasic Technology labourers.
Her letter quoted Xi's own remarks: "We must adhere to the guiding position of Marxism." 

Yue called Marx "our mentor" and likened the ideas of him and Mao to spiritual sustenance.
Nonetheless, she ended up among those rounded up in a raid on the apartment the activists were staying at in Shenzhen. 

While most have been released, Yue remains unaccounted for.
She has been missing for four months.

It’s Time to Get Loud About Academic Freedom in China

American schools should pull out of partnerships with schools that persecute students.
BY ELI FRIEDMAN 

Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR), where I am an associate professor and director of international programs, recently suspended two student exchange programs with Renmin University in Beijing over concerns about infringements on academic freedom. 

I helped launch these programs in 2013 with the intention of creating opportunities for our students at one of China’s top universities. 

Renmin is home to the School of Labor and Human Resources—a close analogue of ILR in several respects, and widely seen as the country’s premier place to study labor issues.
But after an investigation of Renmin’s treatment of students who spoke up on labor issues, we decided that this partnership was no longer sustainable. 

While our final decision rested on specific violations of academic freedom, it is critically important to view this event in the context of worsening political trends in China. 

The erosion of academic freedom on campuses is directly linked with the increasingly repressive political environment outside universities.
The strategy of quiet diplomacy, adopted by foreign universities and governments alike over the past generation, has failed to generate greater space for academic freedom or political expression.

I saw this quite clearly in my private exchanges with Renmin, which produced no results whatsoever in terms of loosening restrictions on students. 

The lesson the Communist Party has learned is that there are no “red lines”; seemingly no matter how grave the violations, foreign institutions have thus far been unwilling to pass up the real or imagined benefits of engagement.
It was student participation in a labor conflict at Jasic Technologies in Shenzhen this past summer, and Renmin’s subsequent behavior, that spurred our decision. 

In addition to taking steps to prevent students from traveling to Shenzhen, university officials harassed and threatened students who had spoken up on the issue, and then deployed extensive surveillance to keep watch over those deemed as troublemakers. 

Most disturbingly, Renmin University was complicit in the forcible detention of a student who had traveled to Shenzhen, after which school officials threatened her with a yearlong suspension unless she promised to refrain from speaking out.
After weeks of privately expressing our concern and attempting to gain further information from Renmin, it became clear that internal channels had exhausted themselves. 

With no other method to register our fundamental differences, and following extensive internal deliberation and consultation, ILR resorted to suspending the programs.
The erosion of academic freedom on China’s campuses is directly linked with the increasingly repressive political environment outside the universities. 

This dynamic is quite clear with respect to labor issues. 

As I argued in my 2014 book Insurgency Trap, the Chinese state’s unwillingness to allow independent unions has resulted in workplaces where employers are generally free to flout the law. 

The workers at Jasic Technologies initially demanded that they be allowed to form a union under the auspices of the official All-China Federation of Trade Unions, as is their legal right. 

They did so with the hopes of addressing common workplace problems, including underpayment of social insurance and excessive workplace fines.
This simple rights-violation conflict could have been peacefully resolved, and the workers were seemingly committed to proceeding along the legal path of unionization within the official system. But, reversing earlier indications of support, the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Unions deemed their unionization requests illegal in July and the company fired six workers in retaliation.
The nature of the conflict changed dramatically when leftist university students from around the country began showing up in Shenzhen to support the Jasic workers. 

A first police crackdown on July 27 failed to deter the student supporters, and it was not until violent arrests of more than 50 people in late August that the movement was finally crushed.
This conflict quickly became a national security issue, as the state sees alliances between intellectuals and workers as particularly threatening. 

This is in part due to the student-worker alliance that emerged during the 1989 democracy movement. While the Jasic workers were dealt with in the courts, a number of recent university graduates, including prominent feminist activist Yue Xin, were disappeared. 

Responsibility for snuffing out further activism among current students was turned over to their universities. 

Thus, the state’s national security response morphed into a question of academic freedom.
The shocking ferocity of this round of repression is in line with recent trends. 

The state’s targeting of labor activists has accelerated in the past three years, and the impact has then been felt by labor scholars. 

In a notable instance from 2015, Sun Yat-sen University officials shuttered a prominent center for labor research operated jointly with the University of California, Berkeley, falsely claiming that the U.S. government was somehow behind the collaboration.
I personally experienced academic research space closing in December 2015. 

The night before a private research meeting in Guangzhou I had organized with my mother (a former American lecturer at Sun Yat-sen) and several Chinese scholars, the police showed up at my mother’s hotel room. 

They detained and interrogated her for hours, revealing that they had been reading our emails, and demanding that she cancel the event.

I have heard too many stories from my China-based colleagues about rights infringements to list. Common problems include: universities and publishers demanding that research questions and conclusions are in line with the current political orthodoxy, restrictions on traveling abroad for professional conferences, and incessant invitations to “have tea” with security agents.
Political repression is shutting down many more areas of academic inquiry than just labor scholarship. 

As the Chinese state cracks down on an increasing array of social actors, including rights lawyers, feminists, ethnic minorities, and religious minorities—both Muslim and Christian—the related topics become off-limits to academic researchers.
By undermining the autonomy of the academy, the state is similarly debasing the hard work of faculty. 

Academic freedom has been enshrined as a core principle precisely because it is necessary to ensure excellence in the twin missions of the university, namely research and education. 

The Chinese state’s security concerns increasingly appear to conflict with its stated aim of establishing world-class universities.
How should foreign universities respond? 

There is little we can do to directly counter the source of the problem, growing state repression under Xi Jinping. 

But academics worldwide should think carefully about reassessing our points of contact with Chinese universities.
The first step is to squarely face the reality that things on Chinese campuses have become markedly worse in the past five years. 

As well as the political crackdowns on domestic scholars, foreign researchers are frequently denied visas and have their research projects derailed; they are also subject to intense scrutiny and surveillance. 

Restrictions on academic freedom are not new, but they have intensified.
This has a direct impact on the value of academic engagement. 

My school’s situation was perhaps at the extreme end of things, given its labor-specific focus and how sensitive labor issues have become. 

But many other disciplines in the social sciences, humanities, and even natural sciences are likely to experience diminishing returns if scholars cannot freely engage in academic exchange in China.

Foreign institutions and governments must not try to mimic the Chinese state’s increasingly onerous restrictions on who can study what, and where.
Nonetheless, substantive, mutually beneficial exchanges must be built on a foundation of shared values. 

When those values are repeatedly and egregiously violated, as has been the case at a growing number of Chinese universities, scholars and politicians must think seriously about moving beyond the quiet diplomacy model. 

This is a matter not just of principle, but of ensuring academic quality and therefore the reputations of our universities.
Whether or not foreign universities will act in defense of principles they espouse is another question. Many institutions have a huge portfolio of engagements in China, including major financial interests. Faculty governance in the United States and elsewhere has been badly eroded in recent decades, and university administrators are often more concerned with appeasing wealthy donors than with upholding the principle of academic freedom. 

With threats to such freedoms apparent in the United States and other liberal democracies, it is more critical than ever for academics to act on principle and resist such incursions wherever they may appear.