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

Viral Alarm   The New Yorker magazine has played a not insignificant role in my life. As my interest in traditional Chinese thought and contemporary politics burgeoned in my teenage years, my grandmother, who spent six months annually with ‘the twins’, female cousins she thought of as sisters and who lived in Forest Hills in Queens, introduced me to the cartoons that were, and remain, a feature of that weekly magazine.… Read