無辜籲天，穢德彰聞。 *** ‘Mouths Sealed Shut’ 封口 fēng kǒu
‘Speech Forbidden’ 禁言 jìn yán   As we noted in an earlier chapter of Viral Alarm: China Heritage Annual 2020: ‘Silent China and its Enemies is a topic to which we return time and again.… Read

Viral Alarm   The following poem was composed by Li Xueyuan, a calligrapher based in Wuhan, Hubei province. It started circulating online in the early hours of Saturday, the 19th of September, a week after the Beijing police had announced that Geng Xiaonan and her husband Qin Zhen had been taken into custody and were being questioned in relation to what they called ‘illegal business activities’.… Read

Viral Alarm   Professor Xu Zhangrun was detained by police at his apartment in the western suburbs of Beijing on the 6th of July 2020. Accused of having solicited a prostitute during a trip to Sichuan in November 2019, Xu was questioned for six days before being released without charge.… Read

Viral Alarm *** *** In the editorial introduction to ‘Geng Xiaonan, a “Chinese Decembrist”, and Professor Xu Zhangrun’, (China Heritage, 10 September 2020) we quoted Jerome A. Cohen, Faculty Director Emeritus of New York University’s U.S.-Asia… Read

Viral Alarm As Jerome A. Cohen, Faculty Director Emeritus of New York University’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, notes: ‘This week saw the detention in China of Geng Xiaonan, a well-known Beijing publisher and outspoken supporter of the famously harassed former Tsinghua University law professor Xu Zhangrun.… Read

Viral Alarm   The 9th of September 2020 marked the forty-fourth year since the death of Mao Zedong. On the 10th of September, Professor Xu Zhangrun, formerly of Tsinghua University, issued the following statement: Geng Xiaonan 耿瀟男 had been in the international news since early July when, following the detention of Xu Zhangrun by police in Beijing, she had spoken out in his defense.… Read