MCLC: campaign to stifle Xia Yeliang

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: campaign to stifle Xia Yeliang
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (10/14/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/world/asia/as-china-moves-to-lower-profes
sors-profile-colleges-are-seeking-to-raise-theirs.html

As China Moves to Lower Professor’s Profile, Colleges Are Seeking to Raise
Theirs
By Andrew Jacobs

BEIJING — It is hard to know exactly which transgression propelled Xia
Yeliang <http://econ.pku.edu.cn/english/displaynews.asp?id=1759>, 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 Professor 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, Professor Xia says, he is likely to be dismissed from
his teaching post at Peking University, one of the nation’s most
prestigious schools, 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 intended to head off criticism that his
punishment is politically driven. “I’m not terribly optimistic for my
future,” said Professor Xia, 53, an animated man whose classroom lectures
on macroeconomics are often flecked with colorful jabs at the party.

The effort to silence Professor Xia has thrown into sharp relief the
challenges facing elite colleges and universities 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
university 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
Peking University campus, and a growing list of other colleges and
universities, including Cornell, Yale and the London School of Economics,
have established dual-degree programs or enhanced academic collaboration.

Zhang Qianfan, a law professor at Peking University, said punishing
Professor Xia would most likely harm the university’s efforts at elevating
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 Professor Xia has not gone unnoticed overseas. The
Committee of Concerned Scientists has taken up his plight
<http://concernedscientists.org/tag/xia-yeliang/>, and last month more
than 130 faculty members at Wellesley College signed an open letter
<http://www.boston.com/yourcampus/news/OpenLetterPekingUniversityXiaYeliang
.pdf> 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, Professor Xia first drew the ire of university 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 signers 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, Professor Xia
posted his open letter to China’s propaganda chief comparing his
department’s efforts to that of the Nazis.

Since then, Professor Xia says, he has endured bouts of house arrest or
found himself trailed by state security agents. But he says he has been
largely left alone. In recent years, university administrators have
permitted him to spend long stretches abroad as a visiting scholar,
including at Stanford until September.

But last year, after he posted his online letter calling for a public
discussion of political reform
<http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-03/14/c_131466552.htm>,
university administrators demanded that he return to China and then warned
him to tone down his antigovernment 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 go up. (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, news 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 the classroom,
among them civil rights, judicial independence and the failings of Mao
Zedong.

This summer Zhang Xuezhong, a professor at East China University of
Political Science and Law in Shanghai, was suspended
<http://www.globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/ID/807125/Professor-suspended-for-
law-breach-university.aspx> from the classroom after he wrote an article
advocating greater adherence to China’s largely unenforced Constitution.
In an interview, Professor 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 because
of the Internet.

“Young people have come to realize that some of the problems affecting
society have to do with the core system itself,” Professor Zhang said.
“The government can no longer ram ideas down their throats, and this has
them in a panic.”

Professor Zhang remains optimistic that university students can retain
their independent thinking amid an assault on liberal ideas, a sentiment
not shared by Professor Xia. In contrast to a decade ago, he said, few
students are 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, Professor Xia 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,” he 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 Professor Xia’s case, and the few who were aware were unsympathetic,
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 postgraduate physics student. “I
think they made the right call.”

But many of the students who attended Professor 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 postgraduate economics
student, said she was appalled to learn that Professor 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.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 14, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article
misidentified the man behind a drive to rally the public around themes of
national rejuvenation. It is President Xi Jinping, not Prof. Xia Yeliang.