Outspoken Chinese law professor,
government critic, silenced
By Gerry Shih
BEIJING — One of the Chinese
government’s most vocal critics is finally falling silent.
He Weifang told The Associated
Press Friday that he would no longer publish on social media after authorities
repeatedly shut down his personal blog, his Weibo microblog and two WeChat
accounts.
He, a famed law professor at
elite Peking University and key defender of imprisoned Chinese Nobel Peace
Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, is the latest public intellectual to throw in the
towel in President Xi Jinping’s China. Over the past half-decade, freedom of
speech and other civil liberties have been rolled back while a radical movement
devoted to the People’s Republic’s authoritarian founder Mao Zedong has
flourished.
“I feel utterly helpless,” He
said by telephone. “It’s as if I’m not allowed to make a single sound.”
He attracted a massive following
in Chinese intellectual circles over the past decade for his prolific writings
on everything from social ills to architecture, but especially for his languid
but trenchant essays on rule of law and politics. By his own count, He boasted
20 million readers at his peak. When his Weibo account was frozen in March, it
had roughly 1.9 million followers.
Over the past five years,
however, He has come under relentless attack online from defenders of the
ruling Communist Party and even more extreme Maoists who’ve held public
demonstrations denouncing He’s liberal views, which are considered “rightist”
on China’s political spectrum. His speaking engagements dried up three years
ago after the Global Times, a party-run newspaper with a leftist bent, reported
critically on a lecture he delivered to retired party cadres in southern China,
essentially ruling him out of the lecture circuit.
“In the last 40 years, freedom of
speech for intellectuals has never been constricted as severely as it is now,”
He said. “It makes you outraged.”
Other prominent liberals have
been systematically silenced since Xi ascended to power in 2012, ushering in a
deep-seated suspicion of liberal Western values and thought. The Unirule
Institute of Economics, a liberal think tank headed by the well-known,
free-market economist Mao Yushi, was shuttered in January. And elderly editors
at a liberal historical journal that examined Chinese history were pushed out
last year.
“He is one of the most
influential public intellectuals — a spokesman for liberalism,” said Teng Biao,
a visiting scholar at New York University who practiced and taught law in
Beijing before leaving for the U.S. in 2014. “Scholars with an independent
spirit or the courage to criticize will never have a good end.”
He has long been a thorn in the
Communist Party’s side and participated in sensitive campaigns, such as the
pro-democracy manifesto movement in 2008 that resulted in a brief quasi-exile
from his prestigious Beijing university. But until recently, the government has
allowed him a degree of freedom to write.
For years, He singled out the
lack of judicial independence as a fundamental fault in China’s political
system. In January he took aim at China’s top judge, Zhou Qiang, after Zhou
dismissed an American-style separation of powers and independent courts as
“mistaken Western concepts.”
He spoke out again months later,
in March, after China passed a law forbidding the criticism of Communist Party
heroes. That essay was the one that seemed to finally land him in trouble
irrevocably, He said.
As his decision to stop writing
spread among China’s intellectual and dissident circles in recent days, some
have urged He to take his writing to Facebook and Twitter, two services that
are inaccessible in mainland China without the use of special VPN software —
but also beyond the reach of Communist Party censors.
He said he has considered that
option but decided against publishing on any platform that would not be
accessible to the majority of Chinese readers.
“In my mind, whenever I have
written, I have always imagined writing for the audience that lives on this
land,” he said.