Scholars Feel the Chill of Crackdown

The recent release of three jailed Chinese-born scholars with strong ties to the United States removed a barrier to improved Sino-American ties, but their ordeal has so traumatized the international academic community that research on China could be crippled for years, analysts believe.

All three spent months in jail before being convicted of spying.

Beijing’s crackdown has been focused mainly on ethnic Chinese academics who live and work outside mainland China, but the impact of the arrests extends beyond them.

“I’m afraid,” admitted a Hong Kong-based U.S. scholar, who once was happy to be quoted by name but who now talks only anonymously. “The chill is on, and mainland[-born] colleagues feel it much worse than we do. I haven’t gone back.”

Noted Law Yuk-kai, director of the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor: “Some academics have already toned down their work and adapted to life.”

A Western diplomat in Beijing said the U.S., Canadian and Australian embassies received calls from worried academics asking whether conditions are safe for serious research in China.

The likely cost of the convictions: Americans and other outsiders will have less understanding about one of the most complex, opaque, yet crucial cultures on Earth. For U.S. policymakers, accurate knowledge of past events is vital as they struggle to build a workable relationship with China.

“American policy toward China will get better when Americans understand China better,” summed up Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, a Sinologist at Georgetown University in Washington.

With their strong understanding of Chinese society, fluency in the language and family connections in mainland China, these Chinese-born scholars’ work forms much of the cutting edge of knowledge available in the West.

“Their work provides insights that we wouldn’t otherwise have,” said Warren Cohen, a China specialist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

The three recently released scholars were arrested apparently because of their research into official Communist Party attitudes toward Taiwan. Beijing considers Taiwan a part of China, and tensions between the two have been especially high during the last two years, fueled by U.S. arms sales to the island and veiled talk in Taipei political circles of independence.

Li Shaomin, a U.S. citizen on the faculty of City University of Hong Kong, and Gao Zhan, a permanent U.S. resident and sociologist at American University in Washington, reportedly were cooperating on a Taiwan-related project. The third academic, U.S. resident Qin Guangguang, a former visiting professor at the University of Michigan, was also said to be working with Taiwan material.

All were held without charge for several months before being convicted in swift trials last month that were closed to the public. But with Beijing’s political hierarchy interested in improved relations with the United States, they were released just before Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s visit to China last weekend.

Scholars without direct ties to the U.S. have been less fortunate.

Oxford-educated academic Xu Zerong, a Hong Kong resident who published a highly regarded social science journal that frequently contained material considered too sensitive for mainland publication, was held in October amid accusations of espionage and remains in custody. He has not been formally charged.

And Qu Wei, a Chinese propaganda functionary who allegedly gave Gao copies of published articles and speeches on Taiwan by Communist Party officials, is serving a 13-year jail term.

One Chinese-born U.S. citizen and two permanent U.S. residents remain in custody in China. U.S. consular officials in Guangzhou confirmed Wednesday that American academic Wu Jianmin, who once taught at the Communist Party’s central school in Beijing, was formally arrested in May on accusations of spying. Businessman Liu Yaping was jailed in connection with a commercial dispute, and New York-based medical professional Teng Chunyan was sentenced to three years for spying and leaking state secrets related to China’s suppression of the Falun Gong spiritual movement.

Many nations, including thriving democracies such as the United States, Britain and Japan, routinely restrict access to sensitive government documents.

The problem in China, academics say, is that there are no clear rules. Virtually anything--even documents easily available in local bookstores--can arbitrarily be declared sensitive intelligence material by the authorities. Taking even seemingly innocuous material out of China also can bring trouble.

Cohen pointed to the case of Rebiya Kadeer, a businesswoman in China’s remote western Xinjiang province, who was given an eight-year jail sentence for “passing intelligence to people outside China’s borders.” Her crime: sending local newspaper clippings about ethnic tensions in the region to her husband in the United States.

Conversely, many government-produced books and documents labeled “for internal use” are sold publicly and are routinely used by foreign-based researchers.

“It’s very difficult for academics to know whether the research they are doing is sensitive or not,” said Mak Hoi Wah, an assistant professor of applied social studies at City University of Hong Kong, who had organized a petition among the territory’s academics in Li’s behalf. “The charge of spying is made too easily. China has to spell out its policies.”

Another complicating factor is that Taiwan-based organizations support much of the outside academic research undertaken in China.

“Any scholar of Chinese background who comes into China to acquire documents knows there’s a danger, particularly if they are dealing with something like Taiwan or the Falun Gong,” Tucker said. “But do you just say, ‘OK, we won’t try to find out about these things?’ As a Western scholar, I don’t think one should be so easily deterred.”

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Times special correspondent Anthony Kuhn contributed to this report.