"The academic community has not forgotten Dr. Xu, and will not let the Chinese government forget his case," said Saman Zia-Zarifi, academic freedom director for Human Rights Watch. "He has already languished in jail for more than two years for doing the kind of research that in other countries would get distinguished awards."
Xu was detained on June 24, 2000, and sentenced in January 2002 on two separate charges. He received a 10-year term for "illegally providing state secrets," for copying and sending historical material dating from the 1950's about the Korean War to researchers outside China. He received an additional three-year sentence on charges that his Hong Kong-based scholarly publishing business published literature banned in the Chinese mainland.
The highly respected Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor has suggested that Xu's severe sentence stemmed from his criticism of Chinese foreign policy. In an article published in a Chinese-language scholarly journal, Xu argued that China had supported revolutionary movements outside its borders and thus could not reject the United States' criticism of China's human rights policy as interference in China's sovereign affairs.
In February 2002, some 340 academics, journalists and business people from around the world who work in or on China signed an open letter requesting the Chinese government to release Xu. Four other scholars detained in China at roughly the same time as Xu were released and expelled after strong protests by the academic community as well as by various governments, including the United States. Those four scholars were citizens or permanent residents of the United States, while Xu is a Chinese national and resident of Hong Kong. He taught at Guangzhou University after completing his graduate studies at Oxford University in England along with a stint at Harvard University.
"The Chinese government should understand that concerns about academic freedom in China are not limited to scholars personally linked to the United States. Respect for freedom of expression, especially in the case of scholars, is a key part of China's international human rights obligations," Zia-Zarifi said.
The Human Rights Watch Academic Freedom Committee includes co-chairs Yolanda Moses, President of the American Association for Higher Education, Lisa Anderson, Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and Jonathan F. Fanton, former president of the New School for Social Research in New York. The committee membership includes current and past presidents of Harvard University, Columbia University and over a dozen other universities in the United States, as well as internationally prominent academics such as Lord Ralf Dahrendorf of St. Antony's College at Oxford, Krzysztof Michalski of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Ariel Dorfman of Duke University, and Fang Lizhi of the University of Arizona.
