By Jerome A. Cohen
Although Professor Xu Zhangrun, a leading and outspoken scholar of Chinese law, society, politics and history, was released after six days of detention by Beijing police, he’s now been dismissed from Tsinghua University and any public office. I wish Xu hadn’t returned from Japan and perhaps now he does too. His next move? One option is to go on occasionally publishing in China or, more likely, abroad and get locked up much more seriously like Xu Zhiyong and so many other able, outspoken reformers. Another is to try to keep silent, do serious research and contemplation to the extent extensive “non-release release” restrictions permit, and wait for a better day. The third is to leave the country at least for the immediate IF he and his family are allowed to do so. Will the Party let him go?
Former Chinese law professor Teng Biao, whose academic career followed a similar downward political spiral and who was three times actually kidnapped by PRC police in China, happened to be in Hong Kong with one of his children when the Party’s final blow landed on his career in the country. But it took his wife and their older child a year to escape and only after a harrowing 26-day trip from Beijing to Boston, including a secret motorcycle rescue via Southeast Asia.
Xu Zhangrun