MCLC: more on Xia Yeliang firing

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: more on Xia Yeliang firing
***********************************************************

Some interesting points by Cao Yaxue regarding the debate over the firing
of Xia Yeliang.

Paul

==========================================================

Source: China Change (11/25/13)
http://chinachange.org/2013/11/25/why-is-a-math-professor-at-wellesley-so-h
ard-hitting-against-an-economics-professor-fired-by-peking-university-in-ch
ina/

Why Is a Math Professor at Wellesley So Hard Hitting against an Economics
Professor Fired by Peking University in China?
By Yaxue Cao

To be sure, there is nothing wrong about a math professor—or a marine
biologist, an astronaut, an alchemist, for that matter–speaking out
against Professor Xia Yeliang, defending Peking University’s decision to
fire the professor of Economics who “happens to be” a dissident and a
critic of the communist regime, and lashing out at his Wellesley
colleagues for their support of professor Xia.

For those of you who have not been following news from China that closely,
here is a quick review of the Professor Xia Yeliang Incident: Professor
Xia is a professor of economics at Peking University. On October 18, the
university notified him that a faculty committee voted not to renew his
contract. Professor Xia’s firing made international news because it so
happened that he has also been an outspoken critic of the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) regime in China, and one of the first signatories of
Charter 08, a proposal for political change in China initiated by Liu
Xiaobo that landed him in jail for “subverting the state power” (He now
enjoys the rare distinction of being the only jailed Nobel Peace Prize
winner in in the world). An ultra-anti-American, anti-West film titled
Silent Contest, produced by the Chinese military that has been available
recently, portrayed him as an enemy of the state
<http://www.linktv.org/linkasia/blog/post/1425/chinese-military-video-portr
ays-xia-yeliang-as-an-enemy-of-the-state> along with other liberal
intellectuals. The New York Times published an editorial to put the
dismissal of Professor Xia Yeliang in the larger picture, an insidious
pattern, of China’s effort to suppress academic freedom and political
dissent.

Peking University, as well as state media, reacted promptly, declaring the
decision to fire Professor Xia had nothing to do with politics and
everything to do with how poor a teacher he had been and how poorly the
students thought of him. A debate unfolded among many foreign journalists
and China watchers. Mr. Eric Fish wrote in the Atlantic, on October 22,
dismissing the outcries of American journalists and academics. He pointed
out that no one had bothered to go to the university to talk to the
students and find out what they had to say about Professor Xia. So he did.
He didn’t explain how he found his samples (I wish he did and I actually
asked him to do so on Twitter, given how diverse his samples were and how
quickly he was able to identify, and talk to, them over a weekend), but he
seemed to have found the near perfect sampling to reach his conclusion:
Even in China, Dissidents Sometimes Get Fired Just for Being Bad at Their
Jobs 
<http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/10/even-in-china-dissidents-
sometimes-get-fired-just-for-being-bad-at-their-jobs/280759/>.

Another prompt response, largely unnoticed by English speakers, came from
a “full professor of mathematics at Wellesley College” by the name Bu
Qiyue (步起跃), and it was published almost simultaneously (within less than
an hour) on the websites of Xinhua News Agency
<http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2013-10/22/c_117826383.htm> (Chinese),
People’s Daily 
<http://politics.people.com.cn/n/2013/1022/c1001-23291810.html> (Chinese)
and CCTV website 
<http://news.cntv.cn/2013/10/22/ARTI1382441148655909.shtml> (Chinese) the
essential mouthpieces of the Chinese Communist Party. I only read the
article, written in Boston on October 21, this weekend.

From the start, it was clear that Professor Bu was deeply irritated by
over a hundred of his Wellesley colleagues who, “without any factual
bases, jointly wrote an open letter
<http://www.boston.com/yourcampus/news/OpenLetterPekingUniversityXiaYeliang
.pdf> to accuse Peking University of obstructing Professor Xia’s academic
freedom and declared that the cooperative relationship between Wellesley
and Peking University shall be reconsidered.”

Most of these hundred Wellesley professors “have never even been to China,
and have even less an idea about the School of Economics of Peking
University,” Professor Bu continued. “What makes them think they can point
fingers at the internal affairs of a university on the other side of the
planet?”

“Americans are used to freedom, especially on a noble issue such as
academic freedom. So they responded with eagerness, signed their names in
haste without thinking. However, ‘listen to both sides and you will be
enlightened; heed only one side and you will be benighted.’ It only shows
that even professors at a top American private college like Wellesley can
be prone to such low-grade mistake when they only listen to one side.”

I would imagine Professor Bu doesn’t know either what was going on at the
School of Economics of Peking University from Boston. He didn’t seem to
think he is making the same mistake of listening to one side only when he
quoted the decision of the School’s Faculty Evaluation and Appointment
Committee to make his counter argument. While the side that supported
Professor Xia has a well-documented pattern of suppression from which to
draw their conclusions, the fact remains that in Peking University, there
are plenty of inept professors who comfortably keep their jobs even though
they are hated by students. I know this because I was a student there.
And what Professor Bu has to say next is anything but apolitical despite
the article’s apolitical title In American Universities Faculties Also
Have to Be Evaluated to Get Contract Renewal:

“It is worth noting that American media has been lopsided in their
accusation of Peking University. This is probably the work of the cold war
thinking in ideology. The American media have always cared and loved
Chinese dissidents the most. Impartialness has long been inexistent in
their coverage of China. On Tibet and on the Olympics, examples abound.
This is why the New York Times and other American media outlets have a bad
reputation among Chinese intellectuals, especially among young Chinese.”

Really? Chinese intellectuals and young people hate the New York Times?
That’s news to me. I do know that China’s Great Fire Wall blocks all the
sites of foreign media and social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and
has long been using tactics to obstruct
<http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/13/navigating-the-constraints-
on-reporting-from-china/?_r=0&gwh=A886FFA214202A6111E0F4FE044A281F> the
work of foreign journalists in China from denying visa
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/world/asia/reporter-for-reuters-wont-rec
eive-china-visa.html>s to outright personal threats.
On October 29, Professor Bu opined again, this time in English in The
Wellesley News 
<http://thewellesleynews.com/2013/10/29/why-the-pku-partnership-is-good-for
-wellesley/>. He applauded the partnership between Wellesley and Peking
University at length, and then he again criticized the one-sided coverage
of American news media. “It is worth noting that Professor Xia’s case has
attracted disproportionate coverage from U.S. news media, mostly
one-sided. The reason for the outcries perhaps is that Professor Xia
happens to be an outspoken activist against the Chinese government. Anyone
familiar with China’s history knows that PKU is the most liberal
university in China. All of the student movements in Chinese history
originated from that campus. PKU faculty members are known to be outspoken
about their political views which cover the whole political spectrum.
Nobody has ever been fired for political reasons.”

Now, I’m really scared to reach the end of Professor Bu’s paragraphs. What
a stop.

Professor Bu is right about that there have been many outspoken faculty
members in Peking University, but that’s a quality, and courage, of these
faculty members and not by the sanction of the university authority,
which, as all universities in China, is under the strict control of the
CCP. The truth is, free thinking has always been monitored closely and
insidiously trammeled through varying methods. One of which is student
reporting.  Some of Professor Xia Yeliang’s students “complained” to
school officials about him talking about the political and economic
disasters in the Mao Zedong era in the classroom. This spring, the CCP
stepped up control over university teaching by issuing a gag order to
universities, known as the “7 no-mentions” (七不讲), that bars discussion of
Western constitutional democracy, universal values of human rights, media
independence, civil society,  pro-market neo-liberalism, and
nihilistcriticisms of the party’s traumatic past.

I don’t know what time span the word “ever” covers when Professor Bu says
“Nobody has ever been fired for political reasons.” It’s a ridiculous
untruth if we go back to the 1950s, a terrible lie if we go back to the
1960 and 1970s, and an willful whitewash if we consider the faculties and
students who were “disciplined,” fired, or put in jail in the wake of the
Tian’anmen square democracy movement, from which Professor Bu might be a
Beneficiary.

(After the bloody crackdown, President H. W. Bush issued the Executive
Order 12711 to defer deportation of Chinese nationals and their direct
dependents who were in the US between 5 June 1989 and 11 April 1990, and
gave them employment authorization. On May 21, 1992, the Senate passed The
Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992 to grant green card—also known as
the “Blood Card”—to all Chinese who were born in China and entered the US
before April 11, 1990. An estimated 100,000 benefited from the Act, and
Professor Bu, a Chinese student at the time, his family and friends were
likely among them.)

I digressed. Readers interested in researching more examples of political
persecution at Peking University in the 1990s can look up these names:
Chen Po (陈波, Department of International Studies), Wang Tiancheng (王天成,
Department of Law), and Yuan Hongbing (袁红冰, Department of Law).

A more recent case was Jiao Guobiao (焦国标), an associate professor of
journalism at Peking University until he was fired for writing the article
Crusade against the Propaganda Department in 2005. “The university
announced that I left the job of my own initiative,” professor Jiao told
the Voice of America
<http://www.voachinese.com/content/a-21-2005-03-30-voa99-57788367/1057015.h
tml> (Chinese). “But I have been persecuted by the university since I
published the article. First they barred me from teaching the
undergraduate, then, the graduate.  After that they tried to transfer me
from the School of Journalism to the Center for Ancient Chinese Classics &
Archives. I rejected it. The university was planning to fire me for
rejecting the transfer. Right around that time, I was invited by the US
National Endowment for Democracy for six-month academic research. The
school opposed my trip to the US, but I came anyway. Now they punished me
and announced that I had left my job at the university.”

I took pains to translate Professor Jiao’s explanation in order to show
that, obstruction of academic freedom and punishment of political dissent
come in different forms – often in more insidious forms than outright
expulsion, such as secret monitoring and  reporting by student party
members, warning, non-promotion, teaching ban
<http://chinachange.org/2013/08/26/law-professor-suspended-from-teaching-fo
r-pro-constitutionalism-expressions/> (Chinese), etc. This is particularly
true today when Chinese universities are seeking more and more
international alliance
<http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1331803/nine-chinese-universities-s
ign-academic-freedom-pact>s and trying to raise their profiles while
benefiting from top-tier researchers around the world. They need to make
their foreign counterparts believe they have academic freedoms, and they
cannot afford to fire professors one after another for political reasons
without losing their coveted “international cooperation.” For example,
someone argued that, “Look, Peking University has not fired Professor He
Weifang (贺卫方), and that goes to show Professor Xia Yeliang wasn’t fired
for political reasons.” Well, no, the most obvious reason for keeping
Professor He Weifang would be that Peking University will lose an arm or
leg if they fire Professor He Weifang. Has He Weifang been pressured over
the years? Google it for yourself, or better yet, talk to him.

On November 3rd, Professor Bu wrote again on the topic, this time in a
letter 
<http://chronicle.com/blogs/letters/journalists-should-ask-peking-u-student
s-about-yeliang-xia/> to the editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education
to bring its attention to the “only article from the U.S. that offered
balanced view,” the Eric Fish piece in The Atlantic
<http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/10/even-in-china-dissidents-
sometimes-get-fired-just-for-being-bad-at-their-jobs/280759/>.
In all three articles, Professor Bu cited how important the Sino-US
relationship is and what a success the partnership between Wellesley
College and Peking University has been and must continue.
Well, Wellesley faculties have already voted to continue that partnership
and no one in the world thinks the Sino-US relationship is unimportant.
Professor Bu must have breathed a sigh of relief.

Now, has Professor Bu been writing as someone, anyone, who just happens to
have an opinion about the matter, or is there more to it?
In April of this year, the website of Chinese Communist Party Changzhou
Committee’s Department of United Front Work published a feature story
<http://210.73.136.76/tx/view.jsp?uid=ac560d1d-4691-4a96-8ee0-1027daa3bb6c>
 (Chinese) about Professor Bu, titled Changzhou Bu Qiyue: Rewrite the
History of a Famous American University.  We learned that he was the first
Chinese to become the Chair of the Board of Admissions at Wellesley; that
among Wellesley’s many distinguished alumni are two Secretaries of the
State, Albright and Hillary Clinton, as well as Soong May-ling, wife of
Chiang Kai-shek, and Bing Xin, a prominent Chinese writer of the last
generation; and that Professor Bu has been retained as an “overseas
commissioner” of The Federation of Overseas Chinese of Changzhou since
2006.

(The official website <http://www.czql.cn/folder1005/index.php> [Chinese]
of the organization describes it as “a people’s organization under the
leadership of Chinese Communist Party Changzhou Committee.” It is a unit
in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. “Upholding high
the patriotic, socialist flag, focusing closely on the Party’s central
tasks, the Federation for more than two decades……has carried out all items
of works….and contributed to the building of socialist modernism and the
unification of the fatherland.” According to its bylaw
<http://www.czql.cn/folder1005/folder1028/index.php> [Chinese], it is
financed by taxpayer’s money.)

We also learned from the same article that Professor Bu and his family had
once been received by a ministerial level Chinese official with a banquet
at Diaoyutai State Guesthouse (钓鱼台国宾馆), the place where Chinese
government 
receives foreign leaders and dignitaries.

 <http://chinachangedotorg.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/e6ada5e8b5b7e8b783e4
b88ee69d8ee88287e6989f.jpg>Professor Bu (right) and Li Zhaoxing (李肇星),
former Chinese ambassador to the United States and former foreign minister
of China. Courtesy of http://sjtu.cuepa.cn/show_more.php?doc_id=81956

That’s really impressive for a non-Nobel winner overseas Chinese. Has
Professor Bu solved any crazy problem the like of Goldbach Conjecture? The
common impression you get from reading Chinese newspapers is that
Nobelists of Chinese descent and math supermen get that kind of treatment,
but apparently Chinese leaders befriend other types too.
As recently as last month, Professor Bu was received
<http://www.czql.cn/folder1006/folder1018/2013/10/2013-10-1629877.html> by
the deputy director and Chairman of CCP Changzhou’s Department of United
Front Work and the chairman of The Federation of Overseas Chinese of
Changzhou.

In any case, I wonder, what channels one must go through, and what kind of
coordination it takes, for an article by someone outside the Chinese
government’s propaganda system on its very top level, and even outside
China, to be posted on the site of China’s three most prominent propaganda
organs almost simultaneously?

As I researched for this article over the weekend, I learned that
Wellesley’s Freedom Project is going to invite Professor Xia Yeliang to be
a visiting fellow. I hope this materializes. It looks like Wellesley could
be having more arguments over Mr. Xia where he has strong supporters and
also at least one formidable detractor. Writing this post, my hope is that
Professor Bu, in future discussions of Professor Xia, will be forthcoming
about his close ties with CCP and the Chinese government. Nothing is wrong
with having such ties, right? But many will agree that it is problematic
to hold back such extraordinary ties from his Wellesley colleagues while
criticizing their support for Mr. Xia, and Professor Bu owes his
colleagues some perspective and balance.

Citizen Power for China (also known as Initiatives for China) is shocked
to learn that the Chinese regime has handed down a severe sentence of 11
years to Mr. Liu Hui, a brother-in-law of Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu
Xiaobo, in a Beijing suburb court on June 9, 2013, right after the
conclusion of the summit between China’s president Xi Jinping and the U.S.
president Obama.

We strongly condemn the verdict in this politically motivated case which
has been completely fabricated by the Chinese Communist regime in order to
further persecute Liu Xiaobo, his wife Liu Xia, and their extended family.
Clearly their hope is to  bring Liu Xiaobo to his knees, and to eliminate
the emergence of China’s Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi, a conspiracy
formed in 2010 after Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At that
time China’s national security police threatened his wife, Liu Xia,
specifically warning that since her brothers were in business, they could
surely find some way to get even. That threat has now come to pass.

We also condemn the fact that the Chinese regime–in a further example of
how much human rights has regressed in China–has once again begun to use
the barbaric practice of “guilt by association,” and punishing political
dissidents’ direct family members or even entire extended family, as was
done in feudal China and under the dictator Mao Zedong’s rule.

We emphatically denounce the trial and sentence of Liu Hui, which is not
only unjust and unfair, but also illegal even under the Chinese regime’s
own laws. The regime has indeed “lost its conscience” as Liu Hui pointed
out after hearing his sentence.

We firmly believe that the persecution of Liu Hui has once again exposed
the evil nature of the Chinese regime that has no desire for an
independent judicial system, rule of law, basic and human rights for
Chinese citizens, but a perpetual one-party rule over China, and the
regime is willing to do anything to crackdown the opposition.

The Citizen Power for China is determined to launch an international
campaign to raise awareness of Liu Hui’s case and to call on the
international community, particularly the United States government, not to
form a “new type of great power relation” with the Chinese regime, for
only when the Chinese regime begins to respect their own people’s
constitutional rights, can it be trusted to follow international norms in
its international relations.

We pledge to lobby the U.S. government and other democratic countries to
hold those individuals who persecute Liu Xiaobo, Liu Xia, Liu Hui and
other members of their extended family accountable by banning those human
rights abusers from traveling in the U.S. and other democracies, and
freeze their directly- or indirectly-controlled assets.