Source: The Australian (6/20/21)
The scholar speaking out on China’s crackdown on intellectuals
By AFP
Wu Qiang was fired from the prestigious Tsinghua university shortly after he conducted fieldwork at the Occupy Central protests in Hong Kong. AFP
In a small, book-strewn apartment in Beijing’s outskirts lives one of the last Chinese academics who refuses to be silenced by the ruling Communist Party’s relentless crackdown on intellectuals.
Wu Qiang, 50, once had an enviable career as political science lecturer at the elite Tsinghua University.
“This caused shockwaves at Tsinghua. I was cut off and they thought I was a troublemaker,” he said, adding that the university instead gave an “obscure technical reason” for his dismissal.
He also filed a labour lawsuit against Tsinghua earlier this year.
“It is very important not to stop speaking out. You need to comment on politics and society; that’s how you participate in it,” he said.
“Ten years ago, perhaps every weekend in every corner there would be a large number of salons and meetings (in Beijing),” he said.
In a sign of the sweeping changes to come, a leaked 2013 internal communique — known as Document No. 9 — warned against promoting “false ideological trends” such as constitutional democracy, civil society and press freedom.
Intellectuals, NGOs, civil rights lawyers and liberal media were the first in line to be targeted by successive state-backed purges of dissent, which reached a peak in the 2015 nationwide “709 crackdown” when over 300 lawyers and human rights activists were arrested.
Meanwhile, former Central Party School professor Cai Xia fled to the US and was expelled from the Party last summer, after a recording of a lecture surfaced in which she likened Xi to a “mafia boss”.
The silencing of dissent comes as China, having successfully tamed the coronavirus, flaunts an unprecedented level of confidence on the global stage, sparring with Western countries who view it as a strategic threat.
“The anniversary is, to a large degree, to celebrate how China avoided the fate of many other Communist parties in eastern Europe, as well as the Soviet Union, that collapsed after the Cold War,” Wu said.
Within China, public intellectuals who voice liberal opinions or engage with foreigners are frequently trolled by ultra-nationalists – while those with strident pro-China views are promoted by the state.
“Like how labourers derive meaning and self-actualisation through work … my comments are my labour and the source of my fulfilment,” Wu said.
“You only need to have tasted freedom once to not give it up.”