A pixie-ish literature professor is the latest person to run afoul of China’s government, denied permission to travel to a prominent academic conference in the US this week.
Cui Weiping (崔衛平) had her Chinese passport, US visa and airplane ticket to Philadelphia in hand when, she said, officials at the Beijing Film Academy where she works called her on Sunday and told her to cancel the trip. Though they gave reasons for the denial — she has classes to teach, her conference panel was not related to her academic discipline — those were excuses, she said.
The unstated reason — last year’s commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement and her recent outraged Twitter posts at the jailing of a peaceful political activist, she said.
“Really, they want to punish me,” Cui said on Thursday, sitting in a coffee shop in the university district. “They’re afraid, one, of what I might say abroad, and two, they want to pressure me.”
Following the uproar over Google’s tussle with Chinese Internet censorship, Cui’s case is a reminder that the Chinese government often resorts to more blunt ways to restrict the flow of ideas.
Cui is hardly a firebrand. Small, bookish and 54, she prefers her literary and film criticism, her translations of the works of people like Czech dissident-turned-president Vaclav Havel, to political campaigning.
Nor is she the only person to see her freedom of movement curtailed. Writer and outspoken government critic Liao Yiwu (廖亦武) was taken off a plane in the southwestern city of Chengdu last month on his way to Germany for Europe’s largest literary festival; it was the 13th time he was blocked.
Ai Xiaoming (艾曉明), a feminist literary critic who has made pointed documentaries on AIDS and one village’s attempts to oust corrupt officials, only discovered she was subject to a five-year ban when she went to renew her passport in December and couldn’t. A police official looked up her name in a database and told her “you’ve been prohibited from going abroad,” she said.
“To use a Chinese phrase, it’s very shady. They don’t notify you directly, and you only find you’re being punished when you try to do something,” said Ai, a professor in Guangzhou. “There’s no way to seek redress.”
Cui too has been told not to travel to the US twice before, once in 2006 for a conference on the radical Maoist Cultural Revolution and last year for an event organized by a Chinese emigre who produced a documentary on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.
For Cui, the predicament is another marker in her slow evolution into activism. Disturbed by the military’s quelling of the democracy movement in 1989, she only began speaking out about repression in recent years. A recurring theme of her research is retrieving for public memory tragic events governments and societies try to suppress. She said the academic world has begun to feel narrower, hemmed in by government pressure to conform.
“On the surface, we’re supposed to be academics, and we’re not supposed to cross that line,” Cui said. “There are people like me who are concerned with free speech. Rural issues, property prices are not my concern. But free speech is something that directly touches me. It’s sensitive but I cannot avoid it.”
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen (高兟), famous for making provocative satirical sculptures of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東), was tried on Monday over accusations of “defaming national heroes and martyrs,” his wife and a rights group said. Gao, 69, who was detained in 2024 during a visit from the US, faces a maximum three-year prison sentence, said his wife, Zhao Yaliang (趙雅良), and Shane Yi, a researcher at the Chinese Human Rights Defenders group which operates outside the nation. The closed-door, one-day trial took place at Sanhe City People’s Court in Hebei Province neighboring the capital, Beijing, and ended without a
RSS