DR XU ZERONG (DAVID TSUI) - MEDIA COVERAGE

FROM: The Guardian Weekly, London, 14 March 2002

International News

Beijing slams jail door on academic who revealed too much

Inside Asia -- John Gittings

Only 10% of the Chinese population still alive today can remember the Korean war, yet government documents from the period, 50 years ago, are still a deadly secret. That at least was the conclusion of a Shenzhen court which in January sentenced Xu Zerong, a Chinese academic with a doctorate from Oxford, to 10 years in jail for his research.

A letter from the Chinese ambassador in London, Ma Zhengang, to Sir Marrack Goulding, Warden of St Antony's College where Xu gained his PhD in 1999, sets out the official position with unusual clarity. Xu had been given the sentence because "in 1992 Xu illegally obtained state confidential materials and took photos and made photocopies of those materials and sent them to sources outside China . . . That constitutes crimes of endangering China's security and he deserves 10 years' imprisonment for this violation according to China's law." He was given a further three years on a separate charge involving the "illegal publication" of books and periodicals, apparently unconnected with his research.

Xu was held for 18 months before his trial and was not allowed visitors or correspondence. We do not know how he defended himself against the charges or how the court proceedings were conducted. But the main charge against Xu is based upon research he had conducted eight years previously in China into a historical episode which at the time was 40 years in the past. Steve Tsang, head of St Antony's Asian Studies Centre, notes that, according to regulations issued by the Chinese State Secrets Office in 1990, the maximum period of classification for "exceptionally secret" documents is 30 years "unless specifically laid down".

A letter appealing to President Jiang Zemin, organised by St Antony's, has been signed by more than 300 scholars around the world. Apart from the injustice done to Xu and his family, the case raises a serious question about academic freedom and the rule of law in China. His story illustrates the pitfalls of trying to operate in a climate where China has "opened up" but retains its core system of unaccountable rules.

Xu (known at Oxford by his anglicised name David Tsui) was born in 1954 into a family that loyally supported the Chinese Communist party. His father became a colonel in the People's Liberation Army. The young Xu travelled with Red Guards in 1966 from his home province in the south to attend one of the mass rallies in Beijing addressed by Mao Zedong. After the Cultural Revolution, he graduated from Shanghai's Fudan University and won a scholarship to Harvard. He then began work on cold war politics, choosing the subject of Chinese intervention in the Korean war.

Though operating in a Western academic context, Xu adopted characteristically Chinese means to pursue his research in China. In 1992, during the research trip which has led to his 10-year sentence, he used his father's army contacts to gain access to senior military figures now in retirement. Xu wrote openly - perhaps naively - about this in an article published in the Journal of Contemporary Asia (JCA) in 1999. "These connections, called guanxi in Chinese, played an important role in relaxing the people interviewed and made them more likely to speak the truth. Without these guanxi, they would have asked me to show them permits issued by their working units' foreign affairs office . . . or would simply have refused to meet with me."

He retailed, again unwisely, some fascinating snippets from his interviews. One old general - a former favourite of Mao - reminisced about Sino-British military tension over Hong Kong at the start of the Cultural Revolution. Another told him how he was opposed to China acquiring an aircraft carrier. His research provided new detail - since confirmed by former Soviet archives - of talks between Mao, Stalin and the North Korean leader, Kim Il-sung, in the run-up to the Korean war, but there are no sensational revelations. In the JCA article he rebutted suggestions, potentially damaging to China, that Mao entered into a secret defence agreement with Kim Il-sung before the North invaded the South.

So how did Xu offend to such an extent that, a year after he returned to China to lecture at Guangzhou's Zhongshan University, he was arrested and held incommunicado before receiving a heavy sentence? One possibility is that in carrying out these interviews - then writing them up indiscreetly - he may have trod on someone's toes and stored up trouble for the future.

Some Hong Kong reports suggest his real offence lay in other articles he wrote and in other people's books that he helped to publish. If so, a file against him may have been conveniently on hand to be activated. The second charge against Xu may be relevant here. It accused him of dealing in "book authorisation numbers" (a valuable commodity in China where nothing can be published without such a number) and making money by the "illegal publication of more than 60,000 books [presumably copies] and periodicals". Many Chinese publishers buy numbers in this way, although it is illegal. Authors do so too to get their books published. At any rate it only resulted in a three-year sentence - consecutive to the 10-year sentence.

Xu is said to be included on both the United States and British lists of cases that have been raised as matters of concern with the Chinese government. Continued pressure may result with luck in his early release, as has happened in other cases before. Whatever the outcome, his story is a reminder that China's path to reform can still be very rocky for anyone who trips up.

The Guardian Weekly 14-3-2002, page 6

copyright © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2002