The Beijing government arrested a law professor at Tsinghua University who published essays criticizing Chinese President Xi Jinping (習 近) in the COVID-1 pandemic and accused him of governing “tyrannically,” his friends said.
Xu Zhangrun (許 章 潤), an out-of-demand critic of the executive in China’s heavily censored educational community, taken from his home in the suburbs of Beijing through more than 20 people, said one of his friends on anonymity condition.
Xu published an essay in February blaming the culture of deception and censorship fostered by Xi for the spread of the novel coronavirus in China.
“The Chinese leadership system is destroying the governance structure,” Xu wrote in the essay published on foreign websites, adding that chaos in hubei Province’s viral epid on reflects systemic upheavals in the Chinese state.
China “is led by a man, but this man is in the dark and reigns tyrannically, without governance technique, he is professional in playing with power and falling into the suffering of the whole country,” Xu wrote.
He also predicted that an ongoing economic slowdown in China would lead to “declining national confidence,” “political and educational outrage, and social atrophy.”
Xu had a pronounced position opposed to the abolition of presidential term limits in 2018 in a net essay.
A friend said a guy claiming to be a cop called Xu’s wife, who lived in a university department, to tell him that Xu had been arrested for allegedly prostitution in Chengdu city, southwest China.
Xu visited Chengdu last winter with one or more liberal Chinese scholars, it is never very transparent if the arrest was applicable with the trip, the friend said, calling the accusation “ridiculous and shameless.”
Last week he was under deceptive arrest, the friend said.
After Tsinghua reportedly banned Xu from training and studying last year, many Tsinghua students, and academics, signed a net petition calling for his reinstatement.
Tsinghua and Beijing’s public security government did not respond to requests for comment.
Freedom of expression in China has been strictly controlled through the Chinese Communist Party, but this control has been stifled under Xi.
A Chinese court last year sentenced “cyberdissident” Huang Qi (黃琦), whose Web site reported on sensitive topics, including human rights, to 12 years in prison for “leaking state secrets.”
The deception for independent talks has been further reduced this year, as Xi’s government has deflected the coronavirus’s guilt.