MCLC: Peking University's purge

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: Peking University's purge
***********************************************************

Source: WSJ (10/16/13):
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230456100457913716406389
6456

Peking University's Purge
Western partners of China's top university ignore its persecution of a
political professor.

Chinese democracy advocate Xia Yeliang has suffered police interrogations,
detentions, a period of house arrest, even harassment by as many as 50
silent phone calls in the middle of the night. Now the professor of
economics at the country's most prestigious school, Peking University, may
lose his job. This summer Prof. Xia learned that administrators planned a
vote of the faculty to revoke his
tenure.

Meanwhile a growing list of Western universities have lined up joint
degree programs, research centers and teaching exchanges at Peking
University. Those institutions are keeping mum on Prof. Xia's case.

One exception is Wellesley College in Massachusetts, where last month more
than 130 professors (40% of the faculty) criticized Peking University for
targeting the professor "based solely on his political and philosophical
views." In June, Wellesley formally partnered with Peking University,
announcing plans for research collaboration and exchanges of faculty and
students. The protesting Wellesley profs consider Prof. Xia a colleague
and argue that his fair treatment should be a condition of continued
cooperation.

In 2008 Prof. Xia was among the first signatories of Charter 08, the
democracy manifesto for which his friend Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace
laureate, now sits in prison. In 2009 he called for the end of government
censorship in an open letter to Communist Party propaganda chief Liu
Yunshan, now one of seven Politburo Standing Committee members who call
the shots in Beijing. And more recently he has used his microblog to
criticize President Xi Jinping's campaign against constitutional
government.

The good sense of the Wellesley faculty is particularly notable next to
the silence of other schools with significant Peking University
partnerships. They include the University of California, Penn State, the
University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia
University, Cornell University, the University of Michigan, the University
of Toronto, the London School of Economics, Seoul National University,
Waseda University and the University of Tokyo.

Stanford University is an especially interesting case: It hosted Prof. Xia
as a visiting fellow this summer and operates the Stanford Center at
Peking University. Stanford's website brags that the research and teaching
facility "breaks new ground in U.S.-Sino cooperation."

Stanford would break more ground if it joined with Wellesley in denouncing
the treatment of their Chinese colleague.