‘This may be the last piece I write’: prominent Xi critic has internet cut after house arrest

Authored by theguardian.com and submitted by maxwellhill
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Exclusive: professor who published stinging criticism of Chinese president was confined to home by guards and barred from social media

‘This may be the last piece I write’: prominent Xi critic has internet cut after house arrest

The Chinese professor Xu Zhangrun, who published a rare public critique of President Xi Jinping over China’s coronavirus crisis, was placed under house arrest for days, barred from social media and is now cut off from the internet, his friends have told the Guardian.

Xu’s passionate attack on the government’s system of controls and censorship, Viral Alarm: When Fury Overcomes Fear, was published this month – a rare, bold expression of dissent from the liberal camp under Xi’s rule.

A friend of Xu’s who spoke on Sunday on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals said police placed Xu under house arrest soon after he returned to Beijing from his lunar new year break at his home town in Anhui province.

“They confined him at home under the pretext that he had to be quarantined after the trip,” the friend said. “He was in fact under de facto house arrest and his movements were restricted.”

During those days, at least two people stood guard in front of his house around the clock and a car with a signal box was parked in front of his residence. Security agents also went into his house to issue warnings to him, the friend said.

Those restrictions were lifted late last week, but his internet connection has been cut off since Friday, the friend added.

“He tried to get it mended but found out that his IP [internet protocol address] has been blocked. He lives on the outskirts of Beijing and is far away from shops and other services. Under the current [coronavirus] situation, things are very difficult for him.”

Friends say that since publication, Xu’s account has been suspended on WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, and many have been unable to get in touch with him for days. His name has been scrubbed from Weibo, a Twitter-like microblog, with only articles from official websites several years ago showing up on the country’s biggest search engine, Baidu. Calls to his mobile phone went unanswered on Sunday.

Phone calls to the Ministry of Public Security also went unanswered on Sunday. The staff member who answered the phone at Changping branch of Beijing Public Security Bureau said she had no knowledge of Xu.

Another friend who also spoke on the condition of anonymity had managed to correspond with him through text messages but said his situation was worrying. “I fear he might be under surveillance,” said this friend. “He has not directly responded (to my queries) but just told me not to worry.”

When Xu published his essay, he warned that he was likely to be punished. He said he had already been suspended from teaching and had “freedoms curtailed” over critiques published nearly a year earlier.

“I can now all too easily predict that I will be subjected to new punishments; indeed, this may well even be the last piece I write,” he wrote at the end of his latest essay.

Xu’s criticism of the country’s leadership came shortly before a widespread debate on freedom of speech convulsed the country. The death on 7 February of whistleblowing doctor Li Wenliang, who had tried to warn colleagues about the virus but was reprimanded and silenced by security forces, triggered an outpouring of grief and anger and an unusual public discussion about censorship.

“Li’s death has thoroughly exposed the ills of the party’s governance and control; this has a huge impact on people’s minds,” said Hong Zhenkuai, an independent historian who is currently working outside China, as a visiting scholar at Tokyo University.

The mechanisms that normally constrain Chinese journalists have also eased slightly, with some of the most powerful stories about life in quarantined Wuhan and the latest news about the evolution of the outbreak coming from mainland newsrooms like that of magazine Caixin.

But public anger over censorship, and the particular circumstances of a national emergency, should not be mistaken for any fundamental change within the Chinese Communist party, which has been honing its ability to control the national conversation for decades, activists and intellectuals say.

In a further reminder of the government’s strict controls, two citizen journalists who were reporting from the epicentre of China’s coronavirus outbreak have vanished this week, apparently detained.

The Chinese military surgeon who exposed the government’s cover-up of the Sars outbreak in 2002-2003 has been under de facto house arrest since last year, the Guardian revealed this month. Detention came after he wrote to the top leadership asking for a reassessment of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement.

“There is no space for speech freedom in China now,” said Hong. “The impacts on the individuals are multi-faceted. Economically, they would cut off your livelihood [academics get fired, writers can’t publish and no one dares hire you]. You would get sidelined by mainstream society, you’d lose friends and, worse than that, you might lose your personal freedoms, so a number of intellectual elites have chosen to leave China.”

Since he took power in late 2012, Xi has tightened ideological control and suppressed civil freedoms across the nation, reversing a trend under his predecessor to give Chinese media some limited scope to expose and report regional corruption and lower-level officials’ misdeeds.

Even within the Communist party, cadres are threatened with disciplinary action for expressing opinions that differ from the leadership.

Under Xi’s crackdown on speech and academic freedoms, a number of prominent liberal intellectuals, journalists, rights lawyers and NGO workers have either been silenced, jailed or escaped abroad.

GraveyardPoesy on February 16th, 2020 at 12:54 UTC »

A lot of people don't see the big big picture. The modern CCP is dragging the whole world down a very dark road.

After years of multi-laterism, with Western powers building institutions and organisations like the UN, the World Health Organisation and pushing for democracy / global standards on human rights, China is now trying to unpick it all for their own advantage.

China is actively subverting democracies around the world - especially Taiwan and Hong Kong, which are most likely preludes to how it will treat other countries in the future. The CCP are expansionist; they are trying to steal territory left right and centre (from 'disputed' regions with its neighbours, to the South China Sea, Tibet, Taiwan, the Arctic and even space). They are trying to expand their sphere of power and influence outwards, appeasing them by giving them Taiwan or the South China Sea will most likely have no better results than it did with a certain German leader.

For anyone who would say that comparing the CCP to the Nazis is crude and contrived, you need only look to the facts. The CCP achieved power through civil war, they refuse their own people political alternatives or decision-making power, they are expansionist and they are actively attacking freedom of information / human rights around the world, they are oppressing their own people (stifling religious, political and even intellectual freedom / expression), and they are trying to export their lowest common denominator, free for all policy abroad by flirting with every dictatorship they can, who they have no moral qualms about endorsing or empowering.

That is the true face of the CCP, they are undermining efforts to hold any country anywhere to any standard, because they would rather pump money into unaccountable dictatorships, regardless of what wrongs or atrocities they might be committing, than lose face and embrace democracy. The CCP believe in unaccountable, top down power, as long as they can be at the head of the table they don't care if we all one day live in a world populated by cruel and arbitrary authoritarian regimes that operate as open-air prisons. They would prefer it if each of those regimes imported Chinese surveillance technology and acted as information silos, with limited access to outside information (that might hold the regimes to account) and no rights to criticise the government or explore political alternatives.

The Chinese government is actively subverting the UN charter of human rights by trying to create its own version, arguing that social stability (as defined and dictated by the government) is the most fundamental human right. In other words, as long as the government is, very broadly speaking, providing some form of stability, any other human right is secondary, and can be violated in pursuit of 'stability'. China is now trying to sell this version of human rights around the world to justify the kinds of practices you see at home, in Hong Kong etc. etc.

I hope the experience of the coronavirus is a wake up call for the Chinese people, because the good people of Wuhan have been Xinjianged - they have been put on lock down, dragged out of their homes and forced into shoddy temporary quarantine sites that don't have sufficient medical resources, and when they have tried to speak up they have been drowned out by the states propoganda and censorship. The government has actively killed as many people as it has saved due to its heavy-handed miscalculations and its inability to show efficacy without resorting to unnecessary force.

Again, please don't buy products from China where it can be avoided, the country has been enriched by positive foreign business relations and engagement in recent decades, and instead of responding in kind (opening up, becoming more democratic) the CCP have been betraying and trying to manipulate the rest of the world ever since. They have tried to punch a whole in the world economy by systematically stealing foreign technology, subsidising their own companies in a way that does not respect WTO rules and denying foreign companies fair access to their own markets. Economically empowering modern China is empowering the CCP, and they have shown themselves to be bad actors in almost every conceivable way. We should not be buying the future the CCP want to foist on us, we shouldn't be rewarding them economically (and politically) while they are actively subverting all democracy, human rights, trust in politics and freedom around the world. We should not be paying them or letting them off the hook for making our world a worse place for us and future generations just because their products are relatively cheap (they are cheap because they lie, cheat and steal, and will continue to do so).

The intellectual in this article is waiting for his fellow Chinese to wake up, but we all need to wake up because this rabbit hole goes very deep.

Surr0Mate on February 16th, 2020 at 12:00 UTC »

It's insane how 18% of the people in the world live under such an oppressive government. Why isn't the rest of the world reacting to them? To keep their pockets full of money?

FanDiego on February 16th, 2020 at 11:42 UTC »

Here is a link to the piece he wrote.

And that is why people like me—feeble scholars though we are—are useless, for we can do nothing more than lament, take up our pens, avail ourselves of what we write to issue calls for decency and advance pleas on behalf of Justice. Faced with the crisis of the coronavirus, confronting this disordered world, I join my compatriots—the 1.4 billion men and women, brothers and sisters of China, the countless multitudes who have no way of fleeing this land—and I call on them: rage against this injustice; let your lives burn with a flame of decency; break through the stultifying darkness and welcome the dawn.

Let us now strive together with our hearts and minds, also with our very lives. Let us embrace the warmth of a sun that proffers yet freedom for this vast land of ours!

Dr. Xu Zhangrun sounds like a patriot, to me.