From The International Herald Tribune: Harsh lesson for a Chinese professor BY ANDREW JACOBS | INTERNATIONAL NEW YORK TIMES 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 Mr. 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, Mr. Xia says he will likely be dismissed from his teaching post at Peking University, one of the nation’s most prestigious, 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 designed to head off criticism that his punishment was politically driven. ‘‘I’m not terribly optimistic for my future,’’ said Mr. Xia, 53, an animated man whose classroom lectures on macroeconomics are often flecked with colorful jabs at the party. The effort to silence Mr. Xia has thrown into sharp relief the challenges facing elite schools 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 school 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 school’s campus, and a growing list of other institutions, including Cornell, Yale and the London School of Economics, have established dual-degree programs or enhanced academic collaboration. Zhang Qianfan, a Peking University law professor, said punishing Mr. Xia was likely to harm the school’s efforts to elevate 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 Mr. 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 in Massachusetts 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, Mr. Xia first drew the ire of school 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 signatories 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, Mr. Xia posted his open letter to the nation’s propaganda czar comparing his department’s efforts to that of the Nazis. Since then, Mr. Xia says he has endured bouts of house arrest or found himself trailed by state security agents, although he says he has been largely left alone. In recent years, school administrators have permitted him to spend long stretches abroad as a visiting scholar, first at the University of California, Los Angeles and, until September, at Stanford. But last year, after he posted his online letter calling for a public discussion of political reform, school administrators demanded that he return to China and warned him to tone down his anti-government 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 are posted. (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, 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 classroom, among them civil rights, judicial independence and the failings 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 the China’s largely unenforced Constitution. In an interview, Mr. 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 due to the Internet. ‘‘Young people have come to realize that some of the problems affecting society have to do with the core system itself,’’ he said. ‘‘The government can no longer ram ideas down their throats and this has them in a panic.’’ Mr. Zhang remains optimistic that university students can retain their independent thinking amid an assault on liberal ideas, a sentiment not shared by Mr. Xia. In contrast to a decade ago, he said few students were 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, he 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,’’ Mr. Xia 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 Mr. Xia’s case, and the few that were showed little sympathy, 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 post-graduate physics student. ‘‘I think they made the right call.’’ But many of the students who attended Mr. 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 post-graduate economics student, said she was appalled to learn that Mr. 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.’’ Chen Jiehao and Ye Fanfei contributed research. ◼ Get the best global news and analysis direct to your device – download the IHT apps for free today! For iPad: itunes.apple/us/app/international-herald-tribune/id404757420?mt=8 For iPhone: itunes.apple/us/app/international-herald-tribune/id404764212?mt=8
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:08:31 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015