U.S. COLLEGE PROFESSORS BLACKLISTED IN CHINA
Daniel Golden and Oliver Staley wrote in Bloomberg, “Some of America’s most prominent China scholars who explore hot-button issues are banned in Beijing. Perry Link, a professor emeritus at Princeton University Riverside, hasn’t been able to enter China since 1995, he said. Link smuggled a dissident astrophysicist into the U.S. embassy in Beijing during the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising and helped edit the “Tiananmen Papers,” a 2002 collection of leaked internal documents. [Source: Daniel Golden and Oliver Staley, Bloomberg August 10, 2011]
Link’s co-editor on the “Tiananmen Papers,” Columbia University Professor Andrew Nathan, said he is also blacklisted. Robert Barnett, who directs Columbia’s Modern Tibetan Studies Program, ignored two warnings from Chinese officials that he should “lean more in China’s direction,” he said. He then encountered roadblocks from Chinese authorities dealing with Tibet when he applied for visas in 2008 and 2009, he said. He didn’t feel a need in his case to ask Columbia administrators for help and hasn’t sought a visa since, he said.
U.S. universities should fight for professors blacklisted by China, said Columbia President Lee Bollinger. He’s discussed Nathan’s situation with Chinese officials, who promised to “think about it,” he said.
U.S. College Professors Blacklisted in China for Views on Xinjiang
Daniel Golden and Oliver Staley wrote in Bloomberg, “They call themselves the “Xinjiang 13.” They have been denied permission to enter China, prohibited from flying on a Chinese airline and pressured to adopt China- friendly views. To return to China, two wrote statements disavowing support for the independence movement in Xinjiang province. They aren’t exiled Chinese dissidents. They are American scholars from universities, such as Georgetown and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who have suffered a backlash from China unprecedented in academia since diplomatic relations resumed in 1979. Their offense was co-writing “Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland,” a 484-page paperback published in 2004. [Source: Daniel Golden and Oliver Staley, Bloomberg August 10, 2011]
“I wound up doing the stupidest thing, bringing all of the experts in the field into one room and having the Chinese take us all out,” Justin Rudelson, former senior lecturer at Dartmouth College, who helped enlist contributors to the book and co-wrote one chapter, told Bloomberg. The sanctions, which the scholars say were imposed by China’s security services, have hampered careers, personal relationships and American understanding of Xinjiang.
Colleges employing the Xinjiang scholars took no collective action, and most were reluctant to press Chinese authorities about individual cases. Dartmouth almost fired Rudelson because he couldn’t go to China, he and Rieser said. “As a group, most of us have been very disappointed in the colleges’ and universities’ lack of sympathy and support,” said Dru Gladney, an anthropology professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California, who described himself and his American co-authors as the “Xinjiang 13.” Colleges are “so eager to jump on the China bandwagon, they put financial interests ahead of academic freedom.”
Gladney’s invitation to speak at a conference in Tianjin, China in April was rescinded after a Communist party official vetoed his participation, he said. A professor of Chinese history at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, Linda Benson contributed the chapter on minority education in Xinjiang. After writing a 2008 book about British women missionaries to China’s Muslim regions, she was invited to a May 2010 Christian-history conference in Gansu Province in northwest China. She was denied a visa. The chapter written by Gardner Bovingdon, an associate professor at Indiana University in Bloomington, compared Uighur and official Chinese histories of Xinjiang. When Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s board met in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, in 2006, it asked Bovingdon to speak. He couldn’t get a visa.
Disputed Book on Xinjiang
Daniel Golden and Oliver Staley wrote in Bloomberg, Xinjiang had attracted little academic attention until the New York-based Henry Luce Foundation approved a $330,000 grant to the School of Advanced International Studies, or SAIS, at Johns Hopkins in 2000, said former foundation Vice President Terry Lautz. “We expected that the project would fill a gap,” said Lautz, who described the book as “very scholarly, very thorough, very carefully written and researched.” [Source: Daniel Golden and Oliver Staley, Bloomberg August 10, 2011]
S. Frederick Starr, the volume’s editor, chairs the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at SAIS, which is based in Washington. He recruited the book’s 15 co-authors: 13 Americans, one Israeli, and one Uighur. Contributors were paid $3,000 apiece, Rudelson said. Each tackled a different aspect of Xinjiang history and society, from the province’s economy, ecology, education and public health to Islamic identity and the Chinese military presence.
“I remember people saying at the beginning, “Do you think China will ban us?” Rudelson said. Starr decided against having Chinese co-authors because he didn’t want to cause them trouble with their government. He also informed the Chinese embassy at the outset about the book, giving assurances that the tone would be objective. In response, the embassy “sent senior scholars who were obviously on a fact-finding mission,” Starr said. “We sat and had very pleasant conversations.”
Then the Xinjiang Academy of Social Sciences prepared a translation of the Johns Hopkins book for Chinese officials and scholars. In an introduction to the Chinese translation, Pan Zhiping, a researcher at the academy, portrayed “Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland” as a U.S. government mouthpiece. Featuring “a hodgepodge of scholars, scholars in preparation, phony scholars, and shameless fabricators of political rumor,” the book by the Xinjiang 13 “provides a theoretical basis for” America “one day taking action to dismember China and separate Xinjiang,” Pan wrote.
Sichuan Airlines, a government-owned regional airline, put six of the authors on a no-fly list in 2006, according to a document provided to Bloomberg News. In the “urgent” communication, the airline’s Beijing management office instructed sales representatives to inspect the scholars’ documents and prevent them from boarding. As the co-authors began applying to return to China, their visas were denied without explanation.
“If I had pulled together a book like this that got an entire generation of scholars on a certain topic banned from the country they research, I’d like to think I would step forward to organize a coordinated response,” said James Millward, a professor in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service who co-wrote two chapters on Xinjiang’s political history. Starr “just wanted nothing to do with it.” The Luce Foundation’s Lautz said he urged Starr to “at least raise the issue” with China. “That didn’t really happen,” Lautz said.
On Being Blacklisted by China, And What Can Be Learned from It
In response to the Bloomberg piece of being blackliste in China , James A. Millwar of Georgetown University, one of the blacklisted Xinjiang 13, wrote in The China Beat, “The Bloomberg piece creates some misconceptions...There are a couple of key issues involved. Of special importance to scholars of China: are you in danger of being banned for what you write? My answer below will be, “not really.” And for universities, grant agencies and other institutions involved in academic exchanges with China, the episode raises the question of what you should do in the face of official Chinese interference in curriculum, research, guest lectures or other academic matters. I will suggest that a strong and collective response, organized by institutions and not left to the affected scholars themselves, is imperative. The reason for such a response is not simply to help individual scholars get visas, but to make the point that academic exchange must be unhampered and reciprocal and to set the right tone for future academic interchange with China. [Source: James A. Millwar of Georgetown University, The China Beat August 24, 2011]
On why contributors to the Xinjiang were refused visas, Willwar wrote: “Believe it or not, it was not the content per se of the Starr volume that caused the trouble. Those who have read it, in China and outside, are surprised that it caused such a furor. This volume on Xinjiang doesn’t touch directly on the most sensitive issues of human rights or terrorism, for example. Is it different in approach and argument from writing on Xinjiang published in China? Of course. Could it have been translated into Chinese and openly distributed in China? No. But in this it is no different from anything written outside China on such “sensitive” issues as contemporary Chinese politics, Taiwan, Tibet, the environment, Falun Gong, the Cultural Revolution or CCP history. We can’t know for sure (few if any people are ever told explicitly why a visa is denied), but it seems that the contributors to this volume were refused visas more because of context than content, because of the fact of the book’s existence and the manner in which authorities learned of it, rather than what was in the book itself.
The following are among the special circumstances that led to the trouble: 1) Politicization of the project (Editor Frederick Starr, not a China specialist, contacted the Chinese embassy at the very start...seeking official Chinese collaboration. I believe this put the work on radar screens it otherwise would not have got on. A better approach would have been to work through Chinese academic contacts. Also possibly contributing to the problem was the fact that meetings associated with the book were held in Washington, D.C. and... the book was mischaracterized in Chinese as a US government-funded). 2) 9-11 and the “Global War on Terror” frame. (The book project was conceived and largely drafted before 9-11. But the US war in Afghanistan and opening of bases in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan raised Chinese fears of US “encirclement.” 3) Opportunism of a few Chinese scholars (a copy of the manuscript in draft form made its way to security organs in China, and was internally translated and distributed to relevant units “for rebuttal” . Starr provided the draft manuscript (without consulting the contributors) to an unnamed Chinese scholar in China. It is possible that this scholar passed the manuscript on to authorities. We have heard from several separate Chinese sources that one Chinese scholar brought the book to the attention of the security services and denounced it as “separatist.”
The Bloomberg story leaves the impression that I received a visa because of a letter I wrote the Chinese ambassador, while other affected scholars who did not write such a letter do not receive visas. This is wrong. In the fall of 2006, I wrote a two-page letter which simply explained the situation, making many of the same points I make here...I pointed out that the book posed no threat to China, and pressed the importance of untrammeled academic exchange between our two countries. Since we had been accused of being Xinjiang separatists, I also wrote that I did not advocate a separate Uyghur or any other kind of state in Xinjiang. This may have been something they wanted me to say, but since it accurately reflects my views, not to mention the public position of every country internationally and even the stated position of mainstream Uyghur advocacy groups in exile, it is hardly a self-criticism, confession, or retraction...I did indeed receive a visa in 2007 after this letter and the lobbying of the NCUSCR. But in 2008 and 2009 I was again refused visas.
Once we were blacklisted, it became bureaucratically difficult to lift the ban — and indeed, we are still on what might be called a gray-list — even after many in Chinese officialdom apparently recognized that it was a bad idea to exclude us. The Bloomberg piece accurately reflects my and other contributors’ frustration at the weak responses by our own universities.
Should Chinese studies scholars be careful about what they write? We know how the Starr book got to Chinese authorities’ attention, and this suggests that no one in China’s security services is tasked with trolling through US academic writing looking for western scholars to ban. And while some Chinese academics are closely associated with the state and do write official reports about our work, the vast majority are not interested in sticking it to US scholars...Thus my advice to my colleagues outside of China is, speaking purely practically, to go ahead and publish in English in normal academic publications without concern about visas. What you write may be too much for publishers in China, and thus cannot be translated and published there — but those editors will make that calculation. I know of no other example besides the Starr book, with its peculiar circumstances, where Chinese authorities have denied visas to western academics because of what they published in English academic venues.
Other Views on Being Blacklisted by China
Gordon G. Chang, the author of "The Coming Collapse of China” and a columnist at Forbes.com, said, “At this moment, American universities are no match for China’s Communist Party. If they operate campuses in China or even maintain exchanges with their counterpart Chinese institutions, Beijing will exert pressure on them. Academic freedom, which does not exist in China, will suffer in America.
Unfortunately, everything is considered “political” in China because the party has followed Mao Zedong’s famous instruction to put politics “in command.” Of course, China has abandoned Mao’s totalitarianism, but it has also gone beyond the more open days sponsored by his successors, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin. The China of Hu Jintao, the current leader, has been marked by a multiyear crackdown affecting virtually every aspect of society. Under Hu, the Communist Party has shown greater determination to control discourse about China, both inside and outside the country. So it is no surprise it has denied visas to scholars, limited their access to materials, and exacted what are essentially loyalty pledges.
Dru C. Gladney, a professor of anthropology at Pomona College, wrote, “There have been numerous scholars who have been denied entry to many countries. The reasons for these restrictions or blacklists are often highly complex and sometimes impossible to explain. The Chinese government's decision to impose and then sometimes reverse a decision will perhaps never be fully understood. As one high-ranking Chinese scholar-official said to me: “It takes a certain amount of power to put one on such a list, but much greater power to take one off it.” Clearly, this is not simply a matter of academic freedom. It speaks to much larger issues in the shifting, complex dynamic of U.S.-China relations.
None of the "Xinjiang 13" scholars have ever been given any explanation as to why our group was singled out. There are many authors of works much more critical of China -- on a range of topics such as Xinjiang, Tibet, Taiwan, human rights, the repression of artists and activists -- who have been able to travel to China with relative impunity. The unpredictable mixture of personal relationships, political connections and shifting context that led to our visa denials may perhaps never be fully accounted for.
Image Sources:
Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London, Yomiuri Shimbun, The Guardian, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.
Last updated August 2022