Journalism professor Jiao Guobiao, who last year wrote a blistering critique of the Propaganda Bureau, has been fired from Beijing University, while he is in the U.S. In an interview with the Hong Kong magazine Yazhou Zhoukan, Jiao said:
Last year, after Declaration of the Campaign against The Central Propaganda Department was circulated, the school cancelled my classes and stopped me from advising graduate students. At that time, there was not much that I could do for they can do whatever they want. But they were still trying to sanction me. Back in the days of the anti-rightist campaign, you are classified as rightist; if you refuse to accept the designation, you must leave your job voluntarily. I am not going to the Classical Text Research Center and I won’t resign. But if they want to say that I ‘left my post on my own,’ then I don’t know what I can do. I want to be a scholar at a university, whether it is in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan or Japan, and conduct research on China or Asia. No matter how hard my future will be, I want to use what I went through to show that the intellectual policies of the past few decades are bankrupt. And that will the case no matter how hard life will be.
ESWN has also translated part of an open letter Jiao sent to authorities before he departed China in early March.
