More and more officials are being punished for illicit reading as the Communist Party of China (CPC) tightens its grip on the personal lives of cadres, increasing its policing of ideological purity amid growing domestic challenges, reported the straitstimes.com Oct 24. Also, a growing number of scholars have been targeted in recent years as the CPC under General Secretary and state President Xi Jinping tightens its grip on academia, noted the ft.com Oct 23.

Reading or possessing “banned books” or illegal publications with content that “undermined the party’s solidarity and unity” are some of the accusations increasingly pinned on disgraced party cadres by party anti-graft agencies, said the straitstimes.com report.

At least 15 party cadres have been accused of illicit reading or possessing forbidden materials so far in 2024, up from around eight in 2023. The development followed the CPC’s revision in 2024 of regulations on disciplinary actions, imposing significantly harsher penalties for party cadres found privately viewing illicit materials.

All such accusations have resulted in the officials’ expulsion from the CPC, which effectively ended their political careers, the report said.

“The nation is now facing mounting economic challenges, and the leadership is doing its best to minimise negative news and voices and promote the positive ones,” Associate Professor Lai Hongyi, from the University of Nottingham’s School of Politics and International Relations, has said.

In some cases, it may lead to criminal investigations, as in the case of Zhu Congjiu, former vice-governor of the eastern province of Zhejiang. In Nov 2023, he was accused of bringing illegal publications into China and reading them over a long period of time, among other crimes. He eventually pleaded guilty to bribery charges in court in Sep 2024, with the verdict still pending, the report noted.

Bookstore owners have also been punished despite stocking only government approved publications.

For example, despite never carrying “banned books” and selling only state-approved ones, Yu Miao, the owner of Jifeng Bookstore in Shanghai, was punished on various pretexts after hosting public discussions on topics such as exploring life and death through philosophy and religion, which were deemed inappropriate or sensitive by the authorities.

He was made to pay a fine after he placed religion-related pamphlets next to the cashier which customers could take for free. He was again fined on another occasion for a newsletter celebrating the bookstore’s 20th anniversary.

What the CPC considers as illegal publications remains vague as it does not publish any list of “banned books” and investigators do not name the publications said to be found in the possession of disgraced Chinese officials, the report said.

Mr Neil Thomas, a fellow on Chinese politics at the US-based Asia Society Policy Institute’s Centre for China Analysis, has said China’s economic difficulties mean President Xi is increasingly sensitive to the political threat of alternative visions for the country’s governance.

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President Xi has also tightened the CPC’s grip on the country’s academia. Its crackdown has targeted Chinese intellectuals, overseas as well as those working within the country, muzzling public discussion of not only traditionally sensitive topics such as politics and international relations, but also China’s struggling economy, noted the ft.com report.

Mainland Chinese academics have “long been of suspicion to the Chinese Communist Party”, Sophie Richardson, a visiting scholar at Stanford University and former China director at Human Rights Watch, has said. The situation has become “significantly worse” under China’s current leadership, whose reaction to discussions of difficult topics had become “less predictable”, she has added.

“That has enormous implications for the lives of intellectuals and scholars and scientists and the quality of the work they can do,” she has said.

Some academics have disappeared from public view, apparently detained by authorities on undisclosed charges, while others have been dismissed by their employers, had their social media accounts cancelled or suffered other forms of administrative and legal punishment, the report said.

One of the most serious recent cases was that of Zhu Hengpeng, a deputy director of the Institute of Economics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a government think-tank that advises Xi’s cabinet. He was detained this year for comments made on WeChat. Mr Zhu’s case was first reported by The Wall Street Journal last month and he has refused to respond to a request for comment.

Likewise, during China’s annual parliamentary session this year in March, Wu Qiang, an outspoken former political science lecturer at Tsinghua University in Beijing, was placed under house arrest. Mr Wu, whose politically sensitive research included work on the 2014 pro-democracy Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, had his contract terminated in 2015 after he failed a performance review, the report said.

Also, Fan Yuntao, professor of international relations and politics at Asia University in Japan vanished last year while returning to his native Shanghai. Likewise, in March, Japan’s Kobe Gakuin University said it did not know the whereabouts of Hu Shiyun, a literature and linguistics professor, who also disappeared on a trip to China last year.

Many academics within China have met similar fates, including Rahile Dawut, a scholar of ethnic Uyghur folklore and traditions in China’s north-western Xinjiang region, went missing in 2017, the report noted.

Source: TibetanReview