China Detentions Raise Red Flag Among Scholars

On a family trip to China in February, an American kid named Andrew Xue was arrested by state security agents. Separated from his parents, who also were seized, Andrew was held in an institution for 26 days. He is 5 years old.

“For the whole 26 days, we had no contact--nothing,” says his father, computer engineer Xue Donghua, who, like his wife, was born in China but is a permanent U.S. resident. “He was crying. He couldn’t sleep. It was terrible.”

As a way of sending a message, it seemed over the top--even for the Beijing regime.

But the detention of Andrew and his father, together with the arrest and filing of spying charges against his mother, American University researcher Gao Zhan, has done what many experts think it was intended to do: send an almost paralyzing message of fear to scholars and other researchers who work in China, especially those of Chinese descent.

As U.S. and Chinese officials met in Beijing on Wednesday to discuss the midair collision of a Chinese fighter jet and a U.S. spy plane, the cases of Gao and several other academics, including Li Shaomin, who is an American citizen, and Oxford-trained Hong Kong resident Xu Zerong, cast a little-noticed but unsettling shadow over U.S.-Chinese relations.

“I think that [government officials] are attempting to put the fear of God into researchers of Chinese ancestry,” Harvard political scientist Roderick MacFarquhar said Wednesday. Beijing’s goal, he believes, is “to diminish research that could be embarrassing” to its leadership during a period of political uncertainty.

And, although the issue of the academic detainees is not directly on the table at the current U.S.-Chinese talks, it has begun to attract attention in Congress, especially among conservatives, who are already inclined to get tough with Beijing on issues ranging from trade to arms sales to Taiwan.

Moreover, the arrests of Gao and others have engendered both anxiety and an almost unprecedented determination to speak out among scholars and other China watchers worldwide.

“My own feeling is that you’ve got to jump up and down on these issues,” said MacFarquhar, one of nearly 400 international scholars who united this week to send a protest letter to Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

“Scholarly relations have been in the forefront of the process of improving relations between China and the rest of the world,” the letter said.

“It is therefore with dismay that we view the deterioration of the climate for academic exchange and research, as demonstrated by the detention of scholars who have returned to China merely to conduct research and engage in other scholarly activities.”

Such displays of unity are rare among China specialists, especially on a global basis. In the past, many have preferred to focus on their own research projects and avoid taking public positions that might jeopardize their relations with Chinese officials.

Now, says Boston University historian Merle Goldman, scholars have concluded that only vociferous public protest will compel Chinese officials to back off. “Until we make enough noise to undermine their image in the outside world, they won’t respond,” Goldman, who also signed the letter, said in an interview Wednesday.

“The last thing they want is to be cast among the pariah nations,” Goldman said, in part because that would jeopardize China’s bid for acceptance in the global economic community and its hopes of hosting the 2008 Olympics.

Even as they protest, however, scholars acknowledge that the detention of colleagues during visits to China is having a stifling effect on research.

In e-mail and private conversations around the world, researchers say, their colleagues are revising travel plans and pulling back from planned activities in China that might offend the government.

“I think that is the aim, and I think it will do that,” MacFarquhar said. “I am certainly warning my graduate students that if they are going to China this summer, they should be very careful what they do. And some kinds of things--research on politically sensitive topics such as popular unrest and religious tensions--shouldn’t be done at all.”

The apprehension is intensified by uncertainty about just what may move China’s state security apparatus to take action.

“It’s unnerving,” said Mark Selden, a professor of history and sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. “No one knows what the rules are--where the edge is that you can’t go over.”

In the cases of Gao, Li and Xu, as well as others that have attracted less attention, the detainees were taken into custody in China and held--often for weeks or months--without any formal charges being filed.

Nor is there any obvious common pattern among those being held. Their research interests are diverse, seemingly unrelated and not always directly political.

Gao, for example, is known for her work on women’s issues, a topic not normally considered sensitive. But she has also been involved with an organization called the Chinese Overseas Political Science Assn., which has ties to Taiwan, according to Goldman.

And Taiwan does fall into the category of sensitive subjects for Beijing.

Li Shaomin is a specialist in business management and has a reputation for not being involved in political issues. He is, however, the son of a once-prominent reformer, Li Honglin, who was an outspoken critic of the government during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

Li Shaomin was arrested in February. Born in China, he earned a PhD from Princeton, is married to another naturalized U.S. citizen, Liu Yingli, and teaches at Hong Kong City University.

U.S. consular officials have visited Li in prison, but the exact nature of the charges against him remains unclear.

Detainee Has Been Missing for Months

The third detainee now in the spotlight, Xu Zerong, disappeared as long ago as last summer. He is believed to have been arrested while teaching in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.

Xu is known as a specialist in military affairs and the Korean War, both extremely sensitive areas of inquiry.

Many specialists see the current crackdown on visiting scholars as part of a larger attempt by Chinese officials to strengthen their grip on power in a period of changing leadership and uncertainty.

Researchers of Chinese origin are considered especially vulnerable to government action because they are less conspicuous and arouse less suspicion than foreigners when gathering information inside China.

Uneasy Ties With Visiting Researchers

Other experts note that Beijing’s relationship with visiting researchers has always been uneasy, dating back at least to the 1960s.

“This has been sensitive work over many years,” Selden, who also signed this week’s protest letter, said. “But China began to realize that if it wanted to send tens of thousands of its people overseas to study physics and chemistry and economics--the really hard stuff--the quid pro quo was tolerating exchanges” with foreign scholars.

“But it was always the case that researchers in the social sciences were difficult for them to tolerate.”

The present crackdown, some believe, is a sign that today’s researchers were getting too close in sensitive areas.

Meantime, Andrew Xue, who was born in the United States and is an American citizen, waits for his mother, uncomprehending.

“He’s missing his mother every day, asking where she is,” the boy’s father says. “We can’t tell him too much--just that she’s still in China and we’re trying to bring her back.”

Xue, who, like his wife, was on the verge of becoming a U.S. citizen when the family traveled to China, is grateful for the efforts of Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), who has introduced legislation to grant Gao citizenship.

But he has no idea when he may see his wife again. “I want my wife to come back tomorrow--or this afternoon,” he said in an interview Wednesday. “But all we can do is push the [U.S.] government to put on more pressure.”

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