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Spied on. Fired. Publicly shamed. China’s crackdown on professors reminds many of Mao era
By ALICE SU
JUNE 27, 20204 AM
BEIJING —
The professor was under surveillance. Cameras taped her every lecture. She couldn’t publish or give talks outside the university. She knew she had to be careful when she taught on one of China’s most sensitive and dangerous topics: the Cultural Revolution.
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Sun is among a growing number of university professors who have been targeted and punished for “improper speech” in recent years, part of a Chinese Communist Party drive to tighten ideological control.
Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, the party banned discussion in 2013 of “Western concepts” such as universal values, a free press, civil society and the party’s historical errors. In 2018, teachers from kindergarten through university were ordered to adhere to “Xi Jinping thought” and defend the party.
Those guidelines have hardened during a nationalist surge around the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to public shaming of intellectuals that remind many of the Mao Zedong era.
Professors have been betrayed by their own students or attacked online, then formally punished: In February, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences fired Zhou Peiyi, a visiting lecturer from Hong Kong, after she criticized China’s coronavirus response on social media.
Last week, Hubei University fired literature professor Liang Yanping and revoked her party membership for publishing “incorrect speech” on social media related to Japan and Hong Kong. At least two other professors in Hainan and Harbin are under investigation for similar reasons.
Liang had been harangued online for supporting Wuhan novelist Fang Fang, whose coronavirus lockdown diary — at first embraced as an honest depiction of people’s suffering — became a target of nationalist anger once it was published in English.
Critics accuse Fang Fang of “handing a knife” to Western countries to smear China. They have sent her death threats and condemned her supporters, digging through their old social media posts to find anything that deviates from the party line.
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Chinese people have lived through generations of revolution, war, famine, massacre and other traumas since 1949. The coronavirus is the latest. Yet they have never been allowed to confront their own history or speak freely of it to their children.
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This year, Sun quit her job and left China. There is no free space left, she said.
Only two other history professors were teaching the Cultural Revolution at Fudan. One is retiring this year, and the other has been pressured into changing what he teaches.
“That’s what the party wants,” Sun said: either praise or silence.
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https://twitter.com/KittySn52889207/status/1277258803365306368?s=19
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https://twitter.com/KittySn52889207/status/1277253099480952833?s=19
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The “Red Scare” of today is not coming out of Moscow. It’s coming out of Beijing.
by Markos Kounalakis
June 24, 2020
During the height of the 1950s Red Scare, when there were Communists under every bed and spies in every closet, America saw threats to its national security everywhere. Justifiably, there were purges of those who really sought to sneak state secrets to the Soviets. War plans and bomb-making schematics were the most important of those confidential documents. Accusations abounded; not everyone was guilty.
Fast forward to 2020, and the new Red Scare is Beijing, not Moscow. The fear is that China’s long reach is not only touching but grabbing some of America’s dominant industries, institutions, plans and, of course, people. Scientists and researchers are in the crosshairs. Dr. Charles M. Lieber, the Harvard professor who recently was arrested by U.S. officials for allegedly sending research to China—and lying about it to American authorities—pleaded not guilty on Tuesday.
Lieber was Harvard’s chair of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department and received $15 million in U.S. government research grants. Good work, prestigious position. It turns out Lieber also was working with Wuhan University and a target of China’s deeply suspect “Thousand Talents” program, which recruits and nurtures key individuals abroad to tap their expertise, networks, research and intellectual property. Lieber was offered a lot of support by the U.S. government while, it’s alleged, he was offering a lot to China. If Lieber is found guilty, all universities may undergo greater government scrutiny, research oversight and likely even more restrictions on academic freedom.
America’s National Security Strategy identifies this moment as one of great power rivalry between the United States and China (and Russia, too). In an international political environment where Beijing and Moscow are seen as America’s strategic competitors, any technological edge they gain is considered a national security threat. Those technological advantages exist in the private sector and at tech companies, of course, but basic R&D is mostly done in America’s most open and vulnerable institutions: universities.
Weaknesses in the university system were revealed by the recent Varsity Blues admissions’ scandal that ultimately caught actress Lori Loughlin in its net. The scam helped get a large cohort into college via corrupt insiders who showed the moneyed how to make end runs around a relatively fair admissions system.
Like Loughlin, China, too, leverages the inherent weaknesses of America’s open, trust-based, higher-education system, where intellectual freedom reigns supreme and shared research leads to career advancement and generates knowledge. China actively exploits this system, breaking into university-research structures that intertwine higher education with government, society, innovation and capital.
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The case against Lieber is about more than just a university professor trying to make a few extra bucks with a foreign side gig. Rather, it will set the tone for how paranoid America and the world are about China’s intentions. Does Beijing seek global domination or a peaceful rise? What is China willing to do to achieve this goal? There will be no simple answers.
While Lieber claims his innocence, the trial and popular jury are still out on the bigger question of China’s global challenge.
For the full article:
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/06/24/how-china-now-threatens-americas-academic-freedoms/
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