New Delhi: Chinese police Monday detained a 57-year-old law professor and essayist, Xu Zhangrun, who has openly criticised President Xi Jinping through his writings.
Xu was held from his home located on the outskirts of the country’s capital, Beijing.
The police told his wife that Xu was detained for visiting prostitutes in Chengdu city, although his family, friends and colleagues alleged this is an attempt to restrict him from writing political essays.
According to reports by New York Times and Aljazeera, Xu’s friends said his home was surrounded by 20 policemen when he was arrested and his computer was also seized.
Xu has published several essays criticising President Xi and the Communisty Party of China.
On 21 May, he wrote an essay for China Heritage, titled ‘China as a Lone Ship on the Vast Ocean of World Civilisation’ where he accused Xi of attempting to bring the Cultural Revolution back to China.
On 10 February this year, Xu wrote a piece published on ChinaFile, titled ‘Viral Alarm: When Fury Overcomes Fear’ in which he criticised Xi for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic that broke out in Wuhan.
“The bureaucratic and governance system of China that is now fully on display is one that values the mediocre, the dilatory, and the timid… A similar political malaise infects every province and the rot goes right up to Beijing,” he wrote.
“Indeed, this may well even be the last thing I write,” he wrote in the essay.
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Who is Xu Zhangrun?
Xu was born in 1962 in a rural town in Anhui province, which is considered to be one of the poorest regions in the country.
He has a Master’s degree in law from a Chinese university and a PhD from the University of Melbourne. His PhD thesis was based on Confucian ideals and how they relate to Chinese law.
Xu has taught constitutional law at the prestigious Tsinghua University, Beijing, for over 20 years, specialising in legal philosophy and constitutional theories. He has researched and published various books in the areas of criminology and Chinese legal thought.
According to a Washington Post report, the Tsinghua University said it was “not clear” about Xu’s situation.
In 2016, he penned a series of essays that provided an outlook on Chinese modern history and the Communist Party of China’s political blunders.
Xu gained wider attention after publishing an essay in 2018 in which he denounced Xi’s hard-line politics without naming him.
In 2019, he was demoted from his position at Tsinghua for his political writings. Before that, he was suspended by the university and placed under “investigation”. Earlier this year, he was put under house arrest with no access to the internet.
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