Scholar Held by Beijing Is in Limbo

Liu Yingli struggles for composure as she admits that she’s mystified by her husband’s fate.

But then, so is everyone else.

Liu’s husband, Li Shaomin, 44, is a respected Chinese American scholar with a resume that includes six books, a doctorate from Princeton, a teaching post at City University of Hong Kong and groundbreaking research on mainland China’s reform process.

But on the night of Feb. 25, during what his wife called a routine trip to mainland China, the associate professor known for his sharp mind and quick wit was detained by Chinese authorities. Nearly three months later, Li, a U.S. citizen, was charged with espionage.

Today he reportedly sits in the State Security Detention Center in Beijing, held without access either to family or to legal representation, his fate in apparent limbo, linked in part to the sudden downward spiral of U.S.-China relations. On Wednesday, Liu reported that Beijing authorities had formally rejected a request to grant Li legal help on grounds that the affair was a state secret.

Li is the latest in a string of academics of Chinese origins with links to the West who have been detained in China amid vague, unsubstantiated accusations. The crackdown by Communist authorities has baffled China watchers, but its effect on fellow academics has already been chilling.

In a small seventh-floor office in the business department where she and her husband teach, Liu looks up at drawings on the wall from her 9-year-old daughter, Diana, and talks quietly of pain that has dominated her life during the last three months.

“I can only pray to God at this moment,” she said. “The [U.S.] government says it is going to press for due process, but how can this happen if my husband is denied legal representation?”

Some observers see the crackdown as a simple campaign of intimidation against China scholars. If so, it has been effective.

Liu said one City University professor just this month canceled a research project in Taiwan out of fear of being branded a spy. And she said she had heard indirectly of a U.S.-based Chinese scholar who canceled a planned summer visit to China because he feared possible arrest. Few of Li’s faculty colleagues wanted to talk with a visiting reporter, and when one did, he requested anonymity.

“You can see the impact, the damage being done,” Liu said. “People come to me and say they support me, but they are too afraid to sign a petition. I say I understand. I don’t blame them.”

Although 104 scholars from several Hong Kong universities this month signed an open letter to Chinese President Jiang Zemin on Li’s behalf, signatures were scarce among those either holding Chinese passports or dependent on access to the mainland for their academic work.

“Coming out is not easy,” said Mak Hoi Wah, the City University social scientist who organized the signature campaign. “China is right next door, and [faculty members] could be worried about whether they could still get into China.”

Liu noted that stoking fear is one of Beijing’s goals.

Other have their own theories:

* Some, including respected Hong Kong human rights advocate Frank Lu, speculate that the crackdown may have political origins, as institutions jockey for position in advance of next year’s 16th Communist Party Congress and expected leadership change within the Beijing hierarchy.

Proponents of this theory, for example, believe that Li’s arrest might be part of an effort to embarrass the state’s propaganda arm, which co-sponsored a high-profile speech that Li delivered in Beijing last year on China’s Internet development. The speech was aired nationally on state-controlled television.

* Song Yongyi, a librarian at Pennsylvania’s Dickinson College who was detained for nearly six months in 1999 on accusations of stealing 700 pounds of state secrets--which turned out to be 700 books he’d bought in public bookstores for the library--argued recently in the Wall Street Journal that he and those now held were de facto hostages. He predicted that those now being detained would be released “one day when the Chinese government needs them as bargaining chips to trade for something it wants from the U.S. or other Western nations”.

* Paul Harris, who heads the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor, sees it as part of a larger hardening of attitudes that includes the jailing of errant Internet users, the banning of the Falun Gong spiritual movement and a confrontational stance after last month’s spy plane incident with the United States.

“It’s all part of a general crackdown that . . . reflects an increased insecurity on the part of the government,” he said.

Some speculate that Li stood out because he had written about Taiwan--which Beijing considers a rogue territory--and had books published there, and because he also criticized mainland policies in his work.

Born in Beijing and a graduate of the prestigious Beijing University, Li certainly pulled no punches in his critical looks at the development of China’s economy. His doctoral dissertation characterized China’s “one-child” policy as excessive and presented statistical models to show that spacing of childbearing would allow multiple-child families yet produce no major additional population growth.

While at Princeton, Li also published an article titled “What China Can Learn From Taiwan.” Further, Li’s father was a former senior provincial-level party official who was jailed for 10 months in the early 1990s for sympathizing with the pro-democracy movement that culminated with the June 1989 protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

But his frequent contacts with the mainland resumed upon his return to the region five years ago--contacts that resulted in last year’s Beijing speech.

“I would say he was critical, but critical for the good of Chinese society,” Liu said.

Liu sees pressure from Washington as her trump card in the struggle to win her husband’s release. She believes that Harry Wu, an American human rights activist who was detained in 1995, won his freedom only because of intense pressure from the Clinton administration; she hopes that the Bush White House can do the same now.

“I need more help from the [U.S.] government,” she said. “Yes, they are helping. They’ve been very concerned, but we need more.

“The only way out for my husband is pressure. People mean well, but after two weeks they start to forget. We can’t let that happen.”