Chen Guancheng, who escaped China after speaking out against the government, is being kicked out of NYU. (
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Chen Guancheng, the blind human-rights activist who arrived at New York University with such great fanfare last May, is now being shown the door. The back door, that is. University officials have quietly told him that it’s time for him to move on.
Word on the street is that the university’s plans to open a campus in Shanghai this fall have been put on hold by Chinese officials, who have made it clear that Chen’s continued residence at NYU is a stumbling block. And that NYU has caved under this pressure.
Pardon me if I take Chen’s plight a bit personally. You see, I was fired from Stanford University years ago for largely the same reasons that Chen is now being abandoned by NYU.
Like Chen, I was a critic of China’s one-child policy. While Chen encouraged the women of his district who had been forced to abort to file a lawsuit against local government officials, I was an eyewitness to the forced abortions themselves. I saw women who were seven, eight, even nine months along given “poison shots” into the womb. I witnessed cesarean section abortions, and learned that babies born alive were routinely killed by lethal injections.
The articles I wrote describing what I had seen, like Chen’s lawsuits, did not endear me to the Chinese government. In fact, the head of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences secretly wrote to Stanford “demanding that [I] be punished severely” for blowing the whistle on the one-child policy. Otherwise, he threatened, Stanford researchers would be cut off from China. Stanford buckled before that threat, as New York University is buckling now.
Chinese communist officials have become more subtle than in my day. (Either that, or American universities have become even more spineless). In any event, I doubt if any Chinese official needed to put any threats about NYU’s presence in China in writing. Just a hint over a glass of Maotai was probably enough to get the point across that Chen had to go.
Anybody who thought that the Beijing regime would simply forgive and forget its public humiliation of last year over the Chen Guancheng affair, when Chen created an international incident by seeking asylum in the US Embassy in Beijing, has no idea how spiteful Chinese officials can be.
Bob Fu, the head of the human-rights organization CHINAaid, knows something about the sheer vindictiveness of Communist officials. As Fu commented to me, “The Chinese Communist Party has a long memory, and continues to punish critics (and their relatives) long after the rest of the world has forgotten them.”
New York University, for its part, is flipping out excuses for its behavior like hotcakes off the griddle.
They claim that the approval for NYU to build a satellite campus in China came through months before they accepted Chen, so that the two couldn’t possibly be related.
This is ludicrous. “Approval” means nothing in a state not governed by the rule of law. Chinese officials can find a thousand excuses to slow down or derail the project. So Chen must go.
They also claim that Chen hasn’t given university seminars or sat on academic panels, the implication being that he hasn’t been pulling his load. The fact is, however, that the Chinese dissident has done everything the university has asked him to. If they wanted him to give a seminar, they should have asked him. They didn’t.
Instead, NYU officials have allegedly discouraged him from speaking out against the Chinese government. Why would they behave this way if they did not have cause to worry about their NYU Shanghai endeavor?
It is also likely that many on the NYU faculty are uncomfortable with Chen’s attacks on the one-child policy. My own experience at Stanford taught me that many academics believe that China’s forced-abortion and sterilization policy is a cruel necessity. One of my former colleagues dismissed my reports by saying airily, “After all, China does have an overpopulation problem.” Those who are inclined to think this way will not find whistleblowers like Chen a particularly sympathetic figure.
To say that Chen is being “purged” is probably a little over the top, I know. It is more accurate to say, now that NYU officials have milked Chen for all the publicity they can get, now that he has become a hindrance to their ambitions in China, that they are simply discarding him.
But anyone who still thinks that academics have a backbone, that they stand up to tyrannies, and that they are committed to the defense of academic freedom is naive. Ask Chen Guancheng.
Steven W. Mosher is the President of the Population Research Institute (www.pop.org). He was the first American social scientist allowed to do research in China.