MCLC: long shadows of Chinese blacklists

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: long shadows of Chinese blacklists
***********************************************************

Perry Link’s very articulate look at China’s blacklisting of American
academics, including some of the not always so obvious side effects.

Paul

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Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education (11/22/13):
http://chronicle.com/blogs/worldwise/the-long-shadow-of-chinese-blacklists-
on-american-academe/33359

The Long Shadow of Chinese Blacklists on American Academe
By Perry Link

[Perry Link, a professor of comparative literature and foreign languages
at the University of California at Riverside.]

A blacklist somewhere in the Ministry of State Security in Beijing bears
my name. I study Chinese language and literature, and since 1996 have been
denied visas to the People’s Republic.

The news media have recently reported on China’s decision to deny visas to
American journalists and put pressure on companies like Bloomberg and The
New York Times because of their reporters’ critical coverage of China.
Such efforts have raised the question of whether the Chinese government is
engineering American perceptions of China. The problem exists—and has
far-reaching implications—in academe as well.

I do not know why I am barred from entering China. There are many possible
reasons; I speak and write often in support of human rights in China and
in criticism of the Chinese government. But no one in the government will
say exactly where or when I crossed a line.

Giving clear punishment for unclear reasons will cause any person, whether
directly involved or merely an observer, to be cautious and to censor what
one says on politically sensitive topics. The Chinese Communist Party has
used this technique on its own people for decades. I wrote about the
problem in a 2002 essay in The New York Review of Books
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2002/apr/11/china-the-anaconda-in
-the-chandelier/> that I called “The Anaconda in the Chandelier.”

I miss going to China. My latest book, An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm,
Metaphor, Politics (Harvard University Press, 2013), draws examples from
many kinds of language, including alleyway brogue and graffiti at tourist
sites—things that not even Google, but only on-site observation, can
yield. (My on-site data are all from 1996 or earlier.)

But—by a wide margin—this is not the most painful part of being on a
blacklist. The worst part is that I become a tool of the Chinese
government and there is nothing I can do about it. Long-term blacklistees,
like me and my friend Andrew J. Nathan, a political-science professor at
Columbia University, have become known in China studies as examples of
what happens to you if you cross a line. Since my blacklisting I have had
countless inquiries, especially from younger scholars, who are invariably
polite but always want to ask, one way or another, “How do I not end up
where you are?”

Here are some examples:

* Two assistant professors who were blacklisted a few years ago,
apparently for having attended a conference on the Chinese region of
Xinjiang (for the Chinese government, a politically sensitive “minority
peoples” area), approached me for advice. Both were preparing to travel to
Chinese consulates (in New York and Chicago) for interviews with Chinese
officials about their visas. In the interviews the officials advised both,
in general terms, to be more careful in what they said and wrote. “Do not
hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.” Both young scholars felt
humiliated and outraged, but neither would say anything in public, and
both asked that I keep their names confidential. Both soon faced tenure
decisions and felt that their careers could be at stake. One of them later
did get a visa to go to China.

* In the late 1990s, a graduate student at Princeton (where I taught most
of my career) asked me for advice on his dissertation topic. He wanted to
write about Chinese democracy, but his advisers in the politics department
were cautioning him that this might not be a wise career move.  What if it
cost him his access to China? The young man decided to write on something
else. I wanted to nudge him back toward his first love, but could not in
good conscience do it.

* A bright undergraduate at Princeton, who had studied Chinese language
with me, was delighted when she told me she had secured a summer
internship with Human Rights Watch. A few days later she heard about the
blacklist and came back to me. “Do you think I should still do it?” she
asked. “Of course you should,” I said. In this case, the student was being
far too fearful. The anaconda in the chandelier was looming too large. A
stint with Human Rights Watch would not ruin her future, I said. In the
end, she declined the internship.

* Another smart Princeton undergraduate, then president of the student
body, came to me for advice because the Chinese government had invited the
student-body presidents of all the Ivy League schools for a three-week
junket in China. He wanted to go, and I encouraged him, but he was
extremely worried about how to behave. Can I mention the Tiananmen
massacre? Can I even say the words “Dalai Lama”? Can I talk about my
friends from Taiwan? Here, too, the anaconda loomed, and was causing much
deeper self-censorship than was necessary.

As these examples show, blacklists induce self-censorship not just in
people who are blacklisted but, far more broadly, in people who merely
fear that they might be. (Actually, for people like me on long-term
blacklists, fear gradually subsides. A knife fallen loses the deterrent
power of threatening a fall—or, in the Chinese farmers’ proverb, “Dead
pigs aren’t afraid of hot water.”)

But if the circle of affected scholars extends beyond those who are
blacklisted, another affected circle, wider still, is the general public.
I have a dear friend, a distinguished historian, who declined a few years
ago to go on the PBS NewsHour to talk about the Falun Gong religious
movement (another topic super-sensitive to the Chinese government).  She
wanted to preserve her research access to China, so for that evening,
anyway, PBS viewers did not get the best commentary they could have had.

This might be called a “direct cost” to the public, and such costs are
real; but they are far smaller than the indirect costs that are embedded
in the ways China scholars, wary of the anaconda in the chandelier, shape
their speech on sensitive topics. One avoids a term like “Taiwan
independence”; one speaks instead of “cross-strait relations.” The word
“liberation” appears as shorthand for the Communist victory in 1949. One
does not mention Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who sits in
prison, at all.

It would be unfair to say that Sinologists are naïve about their verbal
accommodations. Most of them are not. Their ways of speaking are a sort of
professional code that insiders understand and that, with time, comes to
seem utterly normal. But when scholars use their code to write and speak
to students and to the public, which they often do, wrong impressions are
communicated. Listeners understand that 1949 really was a liberation, that
Taiwan independence really isn’t much of an issue, and that a Nobel Prize
winner in prison is really not worth mentioning.

American universities—NYU, Duke, and others—have begun to build campuses
in China or offer courses and degrees on Chinese campuses, and many others
have set up exchange programs and offices. American administrators
uniformly vow loyalty to academic freedom but on the whole have very poor
understandings of the cultural and political contexts they are entering.

I have personally spent many hours on study-in-China programs for
Americans and am a strong supporter of more and better exchange. On the
question of protecting academic freedom, I am not optimistic that American
university administrators will dare to take my advice, but will offer it
here anyway.

The American side should be explicit and concrete in raising the very most
sensitive of topics. Hold seminars on the thought of Nobel Peace Laureate
Liu Xiaobo. Establish a speaker series on Tibet that honors the Dalai
Lama. Offer a regular course on the pros and cons of one-party
dictatorship. The point here is nothing so small-minded as to “stick a
finger in an eye.” The point is that only by planting flags at the outer
boundaries can you insure the integrity of the entire field. Without the
flags, the wordless  anaconda will take over, the boundaries will creep
in, and academic freedom will be strangled. It is also crucial to bear in
mind that, when you raise sensitive topics, you will not be affronting
“China.” Communist authorities will not like what you do, but most
students and intellectuals will welcome it, and many will be secretly
cheering for you.

In the end, administrators at American universities should understand the
fact that a dozen or so China scholars who cannot work in China is only a
very small part of the cost of Chinese-government blacklists. The much
larger problem is the subtle but pervasive self-censorship that blacklists
help to induce.