Rogue Nation

Scholars Are Being Punished Amid Growing Squeeze On Public Expression
By ANTHONY KUHN

Staff wait at the Cambridge University Press stand at the Beijing International Book Fair in August. An international outcry ensued when the publisher agreed to block certain articles from one of its journals after pressure from Beijing. The press later reversed its decision.

When students returned to Beijing Normal University for classes last month, there was a notable absence in the classical Chinese class taught by Shi Jiepeng: Shi himself.
University authorities fired the assistant professor in late July, citing a number of offenses, including "expressing views outside the mainstream of society."
The charges still puzzle the lanky teacher, as he sits speaking to me in a café just outside the university's main gate.
"Sure, my views are a bit different from the mainstream and from official views," he concedes. 

"But an open society should be able to tolerate them."

China apparently can't. 

In the past five years, space for public expression has been tightening in media, the arts and civil society. 

Education hasn't been spared: The ruling Communist Party and congress have ordered the country's institutions of higher learning to build themselves into bastions of socialist and Marxist ideology, while purging campuses of liberal thought and subversive foreign ideas.
The drive could have an impact on one of China's stated ambitions, to boost its colleges and universities into the world's finest. 

It seems sure to affect the millions of Chinese students who seek education in the U.S. and other countries, as well as foreign scholars studying China.
Spearheading the drive is the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the party's internal control apparatus, which, besides rooting out corruption, appears to have taken on the additional duty of enforcing political loyalty and ideological conformity in academia.
This year, the CCDI sent inspection teams to around 30 of China's top universities. 

Roughly half were named and criticized for their "weak political work."
When CCDI inspectors arrived at Beijing Normal University in February, conservatives who objected to Shi Jiepeng's ideas reported him to the team.
"The party secretary of my institute told me that the inspectors had criticized me by name," Shi says.

Clashing with the party line
Shi was not fired for his teaching or academic work. 

He says his students never complained about his classes. 

Instead, the inspectors appear to have targeted him because of columns he wrote for a newspaper and his postings on social media.
Oddly, Shi points out, university administrators seem to have overlooked the fact that the CCDI is supposed to enforce Communist Party rules — but since he isn't a party member, it should have no jurisdiction over him. (China has roughly 88 million Communist Party members, or less than 7 percent of the population).
Beijing Normal University didn't respond to NPR requests for comment. 

Nor did China's Ministry of Education.
In his social media postings, Shi criticized Mao Zedong, the leader of China's Communist revolution, as a "demon" for his role in political mass movements including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which cost millions of lives due to political violence and famine.
Shi points out that the party itself admits that Mao made mistakes, so he feels this shouldn't have gotten him fired. 

But if such statements were not grounds for substantial punishment a few years ago, they apparently are now: Another scholar was fired by an architectural university in Shandong Province in January after he criticized Mao.
Shi Jiepeng's criticism of another Chinese ruler — an ancient one — also ticked off many conservatives.
Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty ruled China a few decades before Julius Caesar ruled ancient Rome. 

Wu's wars of conquest against nomadic tribes on China's borders expanded the Chinese empire in all directions, but an estimated one-fifth of the empire's population perished in military adventures, forced labor on huge infrastructure projects and mass executions of anyone suspected of plotting rebellion.
Shi says he criticized Wu "because I believe the welfare of the individual is more important than any ruler's political or military achievements."
Shi has also expressed the opinion that individual welfare is more important than the form or structure of any nation. 

So he sympathizes with Hong Kong and Taiwan residents who do not identify with China and might advocate independence. 

He sees local identity as an important kind of freedom.
All of these ideas clash with the official Chinese line that a unitary state, rather than a collection or federation of smaller states, is the only acceptable form for China. 

Discussion of alternative forms of statehood is forbidden.

An ideological purge

Shi has never been prosecuted for breaking any law. 

But the Communist Party made clear in a 2013 internal document what ideas it considers taboo and does not want taught on college campuses: constitutional democracy, judicial independence, freedom of the press and an independent civil society – in other words, liberalism.
After being fired, Shi turned for advice to a prominent liberal historian named Zhang Ming, who recently retired from the People's University in Beijing.
Zhang says he thought Shi's firing was unprecedented, and believes it was entirely Beijing Normal University's decision.
"No doubt, politics are veering to the left, and there's an ideological purge going on," he says. 

"But I don't think there's a comprehensive official plan for it all."
For decades, university administrators have been able to ignore or deflect government political campaigns, letting offending academics off with a slap on the wrist. 

But now it appears the political pressure is too intense, and administrators "are afraid of losing their official jobs," says Zhang.
Zhang defended Shi on Weibo, the country's main micro-blogging platform. 

His Weibo account was suspended for three months, apparently as punishment.
Zhang says he advised Shi to protest his treatment and not suffer in silence. 

Zhang's own conservative critics repeatedly called for him to be fired, but his university ignored them.
"If they fire me, then they fire me, it's not like I'm going to starve to death," Zhang sniffs. 

Unlike under Mao, unemployed academics these days can always find work elsewhere, he says.
Indeed, the current campaign pales in comparison to the biggest purge of intellectuals under Communist rule. 

The so-called "anti-rightist movement" launched by Mao in 1957 handed many workplaces quotas of rightists (who, in the Chinese context are generally political liberals) to be identified and punished. An estimated half-million people were persecuted.
Mao distrusted intellectuals because of their independent thought. 

During the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, they were denounced and persecuted as a "stinking ninth caste," and students were encouraged to beat and humiliate their teachers. 

From the 1960s through 1990s, college professors were often paid less than manual laborers.

Attempts at censorship
The effect of China's ideological tightening on international scholarship became clear in August, when Chinese censors succeeded briefly in getting the Cambridge University Press to censor articles from an online edition of its influential scholarly journal, the China Quarterly.
The 315 articles were about subjects China's government considers politically sensitive, including Taiwan, Tibet and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
The publisher's explanation of why it at first complied was "to ensure that other academic and educational materials we publish remain available to researchers and educators in this market." 

But the move triggered an intense outcry from international scholars concerned about academic freedoms, and the material was restored.
Cambridge University Press' decision to pull the material "was bad not just because it meant that academics in China were deprived of access to state-of-the art scholarship from another part of the world," says University of California, Irvine historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom. 

Worse, he says, it misled people in China "into imagining that a journal was not publishing what it in fact was. So it violated the integrity of the journal."
Chinese authorities also tried to censor another Cambridge University Press publication that Wasserstrom edits, the Journal of Asian Studies. 

But after the outcry over the China Quarterly, the authorities dropped their request.
The current ideological purge and the attempted censorship is a worrisome step backward, says Wasserstrom, after years in which foreign scholars were "more able to have true collaborations" with their Chinese counterparts.
"There's a tendency to think that since Mao's death in 1976, that with some occasional slips back, there's been at least a two-steps-forward, one-step-back pattern, in a kind of lessening of controls on campuses," he says. 

But for the past seven or eight years, things have been moving in the wrong direction, he says.
Beijing Normal University's Shi Jiepeng consoles himself by taking the long view. 

During China's imperial dynasties, he says, intellectuals were often persecuted for what they wrote. That form of persecution is known as a "literary inquisition."
"Back in those days, people's whole families were executed," he says. 

"Me, I only lost my job. So things are much better now."

Rule by Fear and Torture

A tortured, broken lawyer and a hawkish judge cast deep pall over China’s legal system

By Simon Denyer

Zhou Qiang, chief justice of the country’s Supreme Court, gives a report during the third plenary meeting of the National People's Congress, at the Great Hall of the People, in Beijing, March 13.

BEIJING — For 500 days, Li Chunfu, once a lively and tough human rights lawyer, was kept in secret detention by China’s Communist Party. 

When he was finally released last Thursday, his wife was so shocked she could hardly believe her eyes.
Instead of her 44-year-old husband, stood a thin, pale and sick man who looked as if he was in his 70s, Bi Liping said, a fearful and paranoid person who seemed to have been broken by the system.
A Beijing hospital soon gave him a tentative diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Li was one of 300 lawyers and advocates who were rounded up in a crackdown in July 2015: although most were soon released, two have been sentenced and four remain in detention.
In statements to the China Change website, relatives and fellow lawyers said Li had been severely tortured and drugged during detention.
But his story is not the only one to have cast a dark shadow over the rule of law in China this month.
In a remarkable speech on Saturday, the chief justice of the country’s Supreme Court told provincial judges to resist “erroneous” Western ideals of judicial independence, constitutional democracy and the separation of powers.
“One needs to have a clear-cut stand, and dare to show the sword against them, to struggle against any erroneous words and actions that deny the leadership of the Communist Party, or slander the rule of law and the judicial system of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” Zhou Qiang said.
While the idea that the Communist Party is in firm control of the legal system is hardly new, to see the idea of judicial independence so explicitly condemned by the country’s topmost judge, a man once seen as a reformer keen on limiting officials’ power over local courts, came as a shock to many people.
Two open letters are circulating expressing outrage at Zhou’s remarks, one signed by 23 lawyers, and another signed by 155 leading liberal intellectuals.
“In the past few years, the legal community has been working hard toward establishing an independent judicial system,” said Lin Liguo, a former lawyer based in Shanghai, who wrote the lawyers’ letter and said Zhou’s remarks had burst reformers’ optimism.
“What Zhou said is basically that we don’t need judicial independence at all,” he said. 

“That’s why people are so upset.”
At a key meeting in October 2014, the party’s top leaders promised to give judges more independence from interference by local officials, while Xi Jinping has often pledged to strengthen the rule of law — while at the same time underlining that the Communist Party remains firmly in control and effectively above the law.
Yet such was the controversy stirred by Zhou’s remarks that the Supreme Court issued five separate social media posts on Sunday and Monday, each hundreds of words long, explaining and amplifying his remarks. 

At first, they attracted hundreds of comments from ordinary people, until censors shut down the comment function.
In a blog post, Jerome Cohen, an expert in Chinese law at New York University School of Law, called it “the most enormous ideological setback for decades of halting, uneven progress towards the creation of a professional, impartial judiciary.”
He said there was “enormous dissatisfaction among many judges at the restrictive, anti-Western legal values being imposed by Xi Jinping, with many younger officials leaving the courts and procuracy for work in law firms, business and teaching.”
Eva Pils, an expert in transnational law at King’s College, London said Zhou’s speech had come as a “real shock” to people in the legal system who had been educated to believe that China was striving for better rule of law, and who found it unacceptable that their country was “departing so completely and so rapidly from the reform path.”
It is, in other words, one more nail in the coffin of the idea that China’s legal and political system would ultimately move in a more liberal direction, experts said.
“I think that lots of people are still in denial about this departure from the reform path, and the turn to rule by fear, and that they are unwilling to consider the full implications of the new rhetoric,” Pils said.
Experts said Zhou may have come under pressure to publicly declare his loyalty to the party, especially as a team from the Communist Party’s anti-corruption arm had been reportedly carrying out an inspection of the Supreme Court since mid-November — or to have his appointment renewed at a major party congress in October.
But Zhou’s words still came across as particularly strident, as he insisted on the importance of “ideological work,” and recommended judges “severely strike” at people who use the Internet to endanger national security — code for undermining the Communist Party.
He also recommended judges protect the images of leaders, heroes and historical figures, “to resolutely safeguard the glorious history of the Party and the People’s Army.”
Zhou’s warning chimes with Xi’s campaign against “historical nihilism — questioning the Communist Party’s heroic account of its own history. 

In the past few weeks alone, a Chinese professor and a government official were both sacked, and a television producer was suspended, for criticizing Mao Zedong, who is officially revered as the founder of modern China even though he presided over the deaths of tens of millions of people in a famine during the Great Leap Forward and unimaginable cruelty during the Cultural Revolution.
The case of lawyer Li has underlined what happens to people who dare to challenge the party.
Li grew up poor in China’s central Henan province, dropping out of school at 14 to work in factories but then spending six grueling years studying in his spare time to follow in his brother’s footsteps to become a lawyer.
Maya Wang at Human Rights Watch said it was unclear what he was supposed to have done wrong — perhaps demonstrating outside a police bureau in Heilongjiang in 2014 to demand access to his client, perhaps being the brother of Li Heping, a well-known civil rights lawyer who was also detained in July 2015, or perhaps simply being tarred as an agent of a hostile foreign government.
But what broke him is no mystery, she said in a statement, citing how suspects are frequently beaten, hung by their wrists and deprived of sleep, as well as subject to indefinite isolation and threats to their families.
Lawyer Chen Jiangang said Li had lost around 30 lbs. in detention. 

He described his close friend’s mental health as worrying.
“He is constantly in doubt and fear after his release,” Chen said. 

“He is always fearful of police showing up to take him away. He is always fearful of leaving the house. Even when he is surrounded by family and friends, he still keeps asking ‘are they coming to get me?’”
Human Rights Watch’s Wang said China will have “zero credibility on rule of law” so long as individuals are tortured with impunity. 

“Li will likely never be the same after this horrific experience — and neither should Beijing,” she said.