Beijing police on Monday detained Xu Zhangrun, a law professor and one of China’s most prominent and scathing critics of the Communist Party’s expanding control, his friends said.
Professor Xu, 57, had long taught at Tsinghua University, a prestigious school in Beijing, but the university banned him from teaching and research in 2019 after he issued a series of essays which, in elegant Chinese, condemned and ridiculed the growing dominance. from the party under Xi Jinping.
Police officers raided Professor Xu’s home in northern Beijing early in the morning, removing a computer and papers, said his friend, Geng Xiaonan, who said he spoke to the academic’s wife and students.
“Neighbors described about 10 police vehicles and two dozen agents who blocked and broke into his home, and took him away,” Ms. Geng, a publishing and film businesswoman, said by phone. The account was corroborated by two other friends who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Xu Zhangrun said that he was mentally prepared to be taken away. He kept a bag of clothes and a toothbrush hanging on his front door so that he was ready for this, “said Ms. Geng. “But it is still a shock when it really happens.”
Professor Xu’s arrest is the latest example of the Chinese government’s expansive campaign to quell dissent. Last week, Beijing imposed a comprehensive national security law to reinforce its control over Hong Kong, a former British colony. Professor Xu’s case could raise fears in Hong Kong that intellectual critics of the Chinese Communist Party in the semi-autonomous territory could also be arrested.
“There is a famous and ancient Chinese saying that a person of extraordinary integrity is a heron that stands out among a flock of chickens,” said Geremie R. Barmé, an Australian sinologist living in New Zealand, who has translated many of the Professor Xu’s essays. telephone. “He writes using a language of deep classical resonance that also refers to some of the best Western writers.”
It was unclear which arm of the police in Beijing took Professor Xu away, and Tsinghua University Law School had no immediate comment. Ms. Geng said that a police officer had told Professor Xu’s wife that he was accused of soliciting prostitutes while visiting Chengdu, a city in southwest China.
“It is the kind of vile slander they use against someone they want to silence,” Geng said.
Professor Xu’s essays have been banned in China, but have been widely circulated on the Internet through private channels. It first attracted widespread attention, and contempt from party advocates, for a 2018 essay denouncing Mr. Xi’s increasingly harsh policy and stifling debate.
“People across the country, including the entire bureaucratic elite, feel once again lost in uncertainty about the direction of the country and about their own personal safety,” Professor Xu wrote in that essay.
Professor Xu continued to write despite warnings from university officials and some colleagues, to stop. This year it has published essays criticizing the Chinese government for delays and cheating in the early months of the coronavirus epidemic.
“The coronavirus epidemic has revealed the rotting core of the Chinese government,” Professor Xu wrote in February. “The nation’s political life is in a state of collapse,” he added, and “the ethical core of the system has become hollow.”
