China Banning U.S. Professors Elicits Silence From Colleges
By Daniel Golden and Oliver Staley
Aug. 11 (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.
“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,” said Justin Rudelson, a college friend of U.S.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and former senior lecturer
at Dartmouth College, who helped enlist contributors to the book
and co-wrote one chapter.
The sanctions, which the scholars say were imposed by
China’s security services, have hampered careers, personal
relationships and American understanding of a large, mineral-
rich province where China has suppressed separatist stirrings.
Riots and attacks in Xinjiang in July left about 40 people dead.
“People who are engaged in perfectly legitimate scholarly
pursuits can have their careers stymied if not destroyed,” said
Tim Rieser, foreign policy adviser to Senator Patrick Leahy, a
Vermont Democrat who chairs the Senate subcommittee that funds
the U.S. State Department and who took up the cause of the
Xinjiang experts.
‘Lack of Sympathy’
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Xi Yanchun, a
spokeswoman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, didn’t
respond to written questions about the treatment of the authors.
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.”
Almost 40,000 undergraduates from China study at U.S.
universities, the most from any foreign country, according to
the Institute of International Education, a New York-based
nonprofit group. Chinese students typically pay double or triple
the in-state tuition at public universities.
Campuses in China
Restrictions on academic freedom may become an increasing
pitfall as U.S. colleges expand their ties with China, according
to administrators involved in joint programs.
Duke University and New York University plan campuses in
China. The University of Chicago opened a research center in
Beijing in 2010, and Stanford University expects to follow next
year. Excluding those initiatives, 18 foreign universities,
including nine from the U.S., have branch campuses in China and
Hong Kong, up from 14 in 2009 and zero in 2002, according to the
Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, a U.K. research
group. The Chinese government, along with philanthropy and
tuition, will pay for the New York University campus slated to
open in Shanghai in 2013, the school’s president, John Sexton,
said.
More than 60 U.S. colleges since 2004 have accepted tens of
millions of dollars from the Office of Chinese Language Council
International, a government-affiliated body known as the Hanban,
to establish Confucius Institutes for the study of Chinese
language and culture.
Uighur Muslims
Along with Tibet, which also has an independence movement,
Xinjiang is one of China’s most sensitive issues, Rudelson said.
Nicknamed the “Pivot of Asia,” it borders Tibet and seven
countries, five of which are Muslim, including Afghanistan and
Pakistan. About half of its residents are Uighurs, who are
Muslims.
The Chinese government has threatened the Uighurs’ way of
life by encouraging ethnic Chinese to settle in Xinjiang,
Gladney said. Uighurs have responded with bombings of buses and
movie theaters, and attacks such as a July 18 assault on a
police station in which 18 people were killed, according to
official Chinese media. A group of Uighurs in exile said police
fired on peaceful protesters. About 20 more deaths occurred on
July 30-31 from a truck hijacking and a restaurant shoot-out,
for which Chinese authorities blamed Uighur terrorists trained
in Pakistan.
Blacklisted
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 who teaches at the University
of California, 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.
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.
$330,000 Grant
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.”
S. Frederick Starr, the volume’s editor, chairs the Central
Asia-Caucasus Institute at SAIS, which is based in Washington.
Not a Sinologist himself, Starr advised Presidents Ronald Reagan
and George H. W. Bush on Soviet affairs. With Rudelson, deputy
director of the institute from 1999-2001, Starr recruited the
book’s 15 co-authors: 13 Americans, one Israeli, and one Uighur.
‘Pleasant Conversations’
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. Starr and 11
authors were interviewed by phone for this article.
“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.”
On the eve of publication, Chinese authorities put out
their own Xinjiang book, which was 70 pages and “obviously
thrown together hastily,” Starr said. In a show of good faith,
Starr distributed copies of the Chinese book at the publication
party for the SAIS volume, he said.
Scholarly Hodgepodge
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.
Pan said in a telephone interview that he sent his
introduction to Wang Lequan, the Communist Party chief of
Xinjiang Province from 1994 to 2010, and a member of the
Politburo. Wang, who conducted “strike hard” campaigns against
separatists and introduced Mandarin into Uighur-language primary
schools, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
“I don’t really want to say” why the authors were barred,
Pan said. “Maybe because they wrote the book, our government
thinks they are not people that should be welcomed.”
No-Fly List
Some of the authors are legitimate scholars, Pan said.
“I’ll say to our leaders that they are our good friends, it will
be useful to sit down and chat with them,” he said.
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. Cai Chao, an officer
with the airline’s department of corporate culture, declined to
comment on whether the authors were prohibited and said the
document can’t be verified because it lacks “our company’s
formal document number and stamp.”
As the co-authors began applying to return to China, their
visas were denied without explanation. Their editor, Starr,
failed to advocate for them, they said.
‘Coordinated Response’
“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.
Because he didn’t try to go to China, and because he was
inundated with invitations from high-level officials there,
Starr took longer than the authors to recognize the
blacklisting, Starr said. Still, he wrote to the Chinese
ambassador to the U.S., emphasizing that the book wasn’t
political and seeking assurances that the visa denials were
unrelated to it, he said.
Starr now realizes that Chinese diplomats and intellectuals
who admired the book couldn’t control “the completely murky
world of the security folks,” he said.
Weak Case
The School of Advanced International Studies had bigger
priorities than academic freedom, he said.
“My sense is that SAIS itself, let alone Hopkins, was not
prepared to go to the mat on this issue,” said Starr. “There are
a lot of other interests besides this one in China.”
Johns Hopkins, based in Baltimore, and SAIS “stand for the
free exchange of ideas and are proud of their record in general
and in this case in particular,” spokeswoman Felisa Klubes said
in an e-mail.
When two of the book’s authors sought assistance in 2006
from Professor David Lampton, director of SAIS’s China Studies
Program and dean of the faculty, he persuaded the Chinese
embassy to grant a visa to one of them, Klubes said. He didn’t
help the other “because that person made what he felt was a weak
case that the reason for the visa denial had to do with the
book,” she said. She declined to name the two scholars.
Appeals to Colleges
Some co-authors looked to their own colleges. Stanley
Toops, an associate professor of geography at Miami University
in Oxford, Ohio, whose chapters covered Xinjiang’s demography
and water supply, applied for visas at the Chinese embassy in
Washington and three of the five consulates in the U.S., to no
avail, he said.
When he appealed to Jeffrey Herbst, then Miami’s provost,
Herbst advised Toops to call his congressman, Toops said. “We
have a lot of contacts with China,” Toops said. “We don’t want
to mess this connection up.”
“I wasn’t able to offer much assistance” to Toops, Herbst
said. “The Chinese government isn’t that accessible.”
While Herbst -- now president of Colgate University in
Hamilton, New York -- promoted the study of China at Miami, he
said he wasn’t worried that advocating for Toops would hurt the
university’s burgeoning China connections.
Confucius Institute
Miami established a Confucius Institute in 2007. The Hanban
supplied $100,000 in start-up funds, 3,000 volumes of books,
audio-visual and multimedia materials, and one or two language
instructors for whom it pays salaries and expenses, according to
a contract obtained by Bloomberg News through a public records
request. The Hanban has provided a total of $924,785 for the
institute through April 2011, according to Robin Parker, the
university’s general counsel.
Chinese undergraduate enrollment at Miami soared to 434 in
August 2010 from 16 in August 2006, said David Keitges, director
of international education. Non-Ohio residents pay $38,917 a
year in tuition, fees, and room and board, versus $23,745 for
residents, according to Miami’s website.
Rudelson, a graduate of Hanover, New Hampshire-based
Dartmouth -- where he and Geithner studied Chinese and traveled
to Beijing together -- had visited Xinjiang regularly since
1985. When he became a senior lecturer in Chinese at the college
in 2005, one of his duties was to lead Dartmouth’s annual summer
language-study program in China. Because he couldn’t get a visa,
his department colleagues at Dartmouth warned him that he might
be fired, said Rudelson and Rieser, Leahy’s foreign policy aide.
“At the end of the day, Dartmouth’s priority was that the
summer program go forward,” Rieser said.
No Xinjiang Entry
Rudelson appealed to Geithner. Then president of the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York, Geithner alerted his father, Peter
Geithner, Rudelson said. Peter Geithner sits on the board of the
National Committee on United States-China Relations, a New York-
based non-profit group chaired by former U.S. chief trade
negotiator Carla Hills. She raised Rudelson’s case with Chinese
authorities, Rudelson said.
At the same time, Dartmouth “was working as hard as we
could to get Justin back into China,” then-provost Barry Scherr
said in an interview. Scherr arranged a meeting for himself and
Rudelson with Zhou Wenzhong, who was China’s ambassador to the
U.S., when Zhou spoke at Dartmouth’s business school in October
2008. The ambassador advised Rudelson to write to the Chinese
embassy, explaining his role in the Xinjiang project, Rudelson
said. He complied.
“I said, ‘I don’t support Uighur terrorism, I don’t support
that Xinjiang should be an independent country,’” Rudelson said.
Those are his real views, he said.
Brief Respite
Two months later, Rudelson was granted a one-week visa to
Beijing. He returned in 2009 with the language-study program. He
reported his movements daily to the Ministry of State Security,
and wasn’t allowed into Xinjiang, which the program had toured
in prior years. He left Dartmouth July 1 to teach Chinese at the
Dallas-based Hockaday School for girls from pre-kindergarten
through high school.
Like Rudelson, Millward submitted an account of the issues
surrounding the Xinjiang book to the Chinese embassy, including
a statement that he didn’t favor independence for Xinjiang. He
didn’t compromise his views, he said. The Georgetown professor
was then granted a visa.
It proved only a temporary respite. In 2008, Millward and a
colleague at Fudan University in Shanghai planned to collaborate
on a course about the Silk Road. They would lecture in each
other’s classrooms, share material on a computer bulletin board,
and oversee joint student projects.
‘Very Best’
Millward applied for his visa, and didn’t hear back. Then
came a terse e-mail from his Fudan colleague saying that, “due
to circumstances,” Millward wouldn’t be able to teach there.
Instead of pushing back, Georgetown officials told Millward
they would support his next visa application, he said.
“Georgetown didn’t see the problem letting this precedent
stand, and they wouldn’t put anything on the line to help me,”
Millward said.
Georgetown has done its “very best” for Millward and
regrets his visa problems, said Samuel Robfogel, director of
international initiatives in the provost’s office.
The ice is thawing for some of the Xinjiang 13. After extra
screening procedures, Millward returned to China in July and
August 2010 and July 2011, he said.
Shift to Taiwan
Former Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor
Peter Perdue had to shift his research from Beijing to Taiwan in
2007 for a Fulbright fellowship awarded by the State Department
because Chinese officials blocked his entry. The State
Department doesn’t comment on individual cases, said spokeswoman
Sharon Witherell. Now a professor at Yale, Perdue attended an
August 2010 conference in Beijing, he said.
Others see no easing. 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. Goldman
spokesman Stephen Cohen declined to comment on Bovingdon.
Bovingdon again sought a visa for a March 2011 excursion to
Shanghai organized by an Indiana colleague and was rejected.
Unlike co-authors who disowned Xinjiang separatism,
Bovingdon wouldn’t make such concessions, he said.
“My understanding of what they’ve done is essentially self-
criticism, which is the order of the day in China for years:
‘Yes, I regret what I did,’” he said. “I would not have
considered that a palatable way to go back.”
--With assistance from Daryl Loo in Beijing. Editors: Jonathan
Kaufman, Lisa Wolfson