(An Open Letter from Dr. Wu Qiang to the President of Tsinghua University, April 2024)
To President Li Luming of Tsinghua University:
This is Wu Qiang, a Doctor of Political Science from Germany, formerly a lecturer in the Department of Political Science, School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, and one of the earliest faculty members after the second reconstruction of the Department of Political Science at Tsinghua. After years of litigation with Tsinghua University, I have some things I must say, and I regret that I can only convey them in this way.
Frankly speaking, after being unjustly suspended from my position by the School of Social Sciences in 2015, my work and life haven’t changed much. I continue to research, conduct fieldwork, and offer public commentary. The only change comes from the environment, or rather, in the current political climate, I find that more and more former friends and colleagues no longer dare to identify as intellectuals. While this cannot be entirely blamed on the decline in the public visibility of intellectuals in recent years, this change in social roles may reflect that the intellectual community is increasingly afraid of social responsibility. However, this fear of self-identification is far more terrifying than the literary inquisition, perhaps unprecedented for Chinese scholars and intellectuals in the past two thousand years.
Coincidentally, the Netflix adaptation of The Three-Body Problem, which is deeply loved by Tsinghua’s science and engineering faculty and students, has recently been released, and the opening scene is the mass struggle in front of the main building of Tsinghua in 1966. Historically, the Second Gate was demolished by Tsinghua Red Guards shortly after that, but today it has become a tourist hotspot. After 1977, everything seemed to return to normal, and after 1992, the humanities and social sciences also resumed. The Department of Political Science, which once enjoyed a high reputation during the Nationalist government period, was also rebuilt, and I was fortunate enough to be among them, pioneering the offering of courses on social movements in universities across the country. However, around 2015, a group of humanities, law, and social science teachers were forced to suspend their positions. This wave of suppression of humanities intellectuals has continued to this day. Although the scale and degree of personal persecution may not be as severe as the ‘Cultural Revolution,’ when intellectuals were criticized, sent down, and persecuted as ‘stinking intellectuals,’ the nature of it is not much different. Just as The Three-Body Problem, despite its simple reflection on the Cultural Revolution, lacks humanistic and political thinking about society and humanity, believing the latter ultimately belongs to ‘uselessness,’ and reducing rationality to the jungle law of social Darwinism.
I still remember that you were once the leader of the School of Aerospace Engineering at Tsinghua. During your leadership, a student from the School of Aerospace Engineering was forcibly sent to Huilongguan Hospital by the school because he was unable to transfer departments. His parents came to hear the news and, after being refused communication by the counselors and department leaders, eventually found me—a mere elective course teacher—to discuss solutions. I couldn’t help but be surprised by the simple and crude way Tsinghua University treated students internally, and I also felt the trust of this aerospace engineering student in a political science teacher, but I never expected that this simple and crude violence would soon fall upon myself.
- First, in 2014, I was once placed under house arrest by the school when I was preparing to go to Hong Kong for fieldwork on the ‘Occupy Central’ movement;
- Then, in mid-2015, I was suspended from my position by the school, but I did not receive a notice of transfer from the school, nor was I formally informed;
- Until early February 2020, I suddenly received a lawsuit from Tsinghua University, demanding that I move out of the transitional housing and claiming a huge amount of liquidated damages. After inquiring at the school, I obtained the dismissal procedures, confirmed the dismissal, and also began the subsequent litigation against Tsinghua regarding personnel disputes;
- However, in mid-2021, the Haidian Court rejected Tsinghua University’s claim, upholding my housing rights. I stated in court that I was willing to pay the overdue rent and return the housing at any time, as long as Tsinghua’s housing management informed me of the method of paying rent, but the latter had never negotiated with me about paying rent or returning the housing after 2016;
- Even more absurdly, after the COVID-19 pandemic intensified, from mid-2020 to the present, I have been restricted from entering the school, and later I was even put on a so-called blacklist. Even if I made an appointment, my entry by person or car was prohibited, and Tsinghua University actually initiated another housing lawsuit in 2024, demanding that I pay millions of liquidated damages for the years I was unable to live there.
From a legal perspective, Tsinghua University’s actions constitute repeated litigation, and may also constitute false litigation due to the fabrication of new targets, and bears corresponding legal responsibility.
Beyond the law, Tsinghua University’s choice to engage in such protracted litigation, rather than communicate in good faith, can only make me or all those who understand this lawsuit feel how strong the persecution attempt behind the litigation is. I cannot help but ask whether this is manipulated by individual bureaucrats at Tsinghua or the dark forces behind them, and what kind of malice they have to persecute a political scholar who returned from Germany so unscrupulously, attempting to humiliate and punish an intellectual through repeated civil lawsuits?
After all, as a teacher in the Department of Political Science of a first-class comprehensive science and engineering university in China, I am probably the only researcher who insists on the class analysis method, that is, ‘the most politically oriented.’ Although I dare not aspire to be like Max Weber, who claimed that political science could be the locomotive of all disciplines, or the traditional pursuit of Chinese scholars to ‘offer to the emperor,’ my research, unlike the traditional power distribution focused on by my colleagues, focuses on the rights distribution claims of various classes and groups, and conducts psychoanalysis of all classes, including the ‘red engineers’ trained by Tsinghua University.
In fact, from 2015 to the present, under extremely difficult conditions, I have published and published research results and collections on China’s ‘class status of construction workers’ and ‘human rights politics’ in various forms, and have insisted on writing columns and commentaries in international media. Because any honest intellectual knows that China cannot have only one voice, and intellectuals cannot break the silence only at the end of their lives. As a political scholar, one must constantly observe, conduct fieldwork, and comment on politics, and maintain academic sensitivity. This is the basic way for an individual and a nation to maintain political thinking.
For example, it needs to be pointed out that in the latest political climate in China that focuses on anti-medical corruption and anti-university corruption, after I have made great efforts to clear the housing and move out of the household registration, Tsinghua University’s protracted litigation not only has no legal significance, but is also an abuse of power, a contempt for the dignity of teachers, a corruption within the university, a corruption that occurs within the intellectual community, and it openly disregards General Secretary Xi Jinping’s instructions on the ‘Fengqiao experience,’ which is extremely wrong in its political stance, and seriously wastes judicial resources, seriously damages the social reputation of Tsinghua University, and seriously violates the core socialist values.
Of course, if this mistake has its origins, and can even be traced back to the factional struggles within Tsinghua during the Cultural Revolution or the ‘721’ speech on the arduous exploration of the humanities, especially Renmin University, then I can attribute my housing disputes and personnel disputes with Tsinghua to certain historical documents or former presidents. The current leaders of Tsinghua University still have space and time to rationally, peacefully, and consultatively reconsider whether it is necessary to continue this case.
I still love Tsinghua.
In any case, I believe that, as intellectuals, and fortunate enough to welcome the great changes unseen in a century, we should always ask ourselves whether we can be worthy of history.
With respect in the spring of 2024!
Wu Qiang, Ph.D., Respectfully
(Original letter published on)
21.03.2024
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