A global campaign launched by the international academic community in solidarity with Chinese sanctioned scholars garnered more than 1,200 signatures this Friday. It is reported that the campaign is still ongoing and will end on April 14.
According to the statement, the Chinese government announced in March that it had imposed “sanctions” on a number of scholars and their families in the European Union and the United Kingdom, including entry bans, bans on “transactions” with Chinese citizens and institutions, and freezing of their assets in China. These Chinese sanctions include Björn Jerdén (moderator of the China Center at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs), Jo Smith Finley (professor of China studies at Newcastle University), Adrian Zenz (senior fellow in China studies at the Memorial Foundation for the Victims of Communism), and the Berlin-based Meccato Center for China Studies (MCCS). The Chinese government has not provided any information about these measures. The Chinese government did not provide any legal basis for these measures, which are purely in retaliation for their work on China or China-related research, including their research on international crimes and human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
The statement said these Chinese sanctions are the latest escalation in an ongoing process of restricting academic discourse over the past two decades, which has included attempts to use the Communist Party state-controlled media to defame individual non-Chinese scholars or deny them entry into the country, and to persecute scholars and curtail their academic freedom in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region; the most structurally vulnerable victims of academic persecution in China are Chinese scholars. is none other than Chinese scholars. In some cases, domestic Chinese scholars are subjected to extreme harshness for criticizing the government, including disciplinary action, expulsion, disappearance, criminal punishment, and inhumane treatment during imprisonment. These include Chinese scholars who have been forced into exile overseas and scholars who are in China, such as the late Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, Professor Xu Zhangrun, Professor Ilham Tohti, and many others.
The statement emphasizes that the responsibility for these crackdowns on the Chinese side is clear, and that the Chinese government seeks to characterize these sanctions as equivalent to those imposed by the European Union and other countries under the “Magnitsky” human rights accountability law against some Chinese officials for serious human rights violations. While these sanctions against non-Chinese scholars target only a few individuals and institutions, they actually target and affect the entire academic community in the field of Chinese studies, including scholars who study, work in, or with Chinese colleagues, as well as Chinese scholars who interact with the international community. This move to suppress critical thinking in China and beyond is not only detrimental to all exchanges between the academy and Chinese society, but also to the diversity of scholarly discourse within China.
In addition to expressing solidarity with all the persecuted academics, the Joint Submission calls on the Chinese government to withdraw the above-mentioned unreasonable sanctions. The statement emphasizes that the intimidation tactics used by the Chinese authorities to suppress academia will not succeed. Only through the promotion of critical and diverse academic debate can scholarship contribute to the global common good.
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