For a while, Calla Wiemer said, she held it close.
“We all hoped that the problem would be resolved quickly,” said Wiemer, who counts four visa denials stamped into her passport. On a couple of other occasions, her application was declined before it even got to a stamp-wielding bureaucrat. In one more case, the U.S. Embassy intervened to ask the Chinese Foreign Ministry if Wiemer would be approved if she applied. The answer was no.
“Now that it’s gone on for all these years, I can’t keep it a secret anymore,” said Wiemer, who just returned to Los Angeles with plans to write a macroeconomics textbook following a series of consecutive one-year contract positions at the National University of Singapore (her contract was not renewed). Wiemer resigned from a tenured associate professor position at the University of Hawaii in 1997, becoming “uprooted academically” she said, and then “the problem with my visa has made it very difficult to land again. Because I’m a career Sinologist and I haven’t been able to get into China for five years now.”
Wiemer is one of a small number of U.S. scholars seemingly “blacklisted” from China for her scholarly output – and, specifically, her contribution to a 2004 book on Xinjiang, China’s northwestern, largely Muslim region and a seat of some separatist sentiment. She said a Chinese translation of Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland (M.E. Sharp) was already circulating, prepublication, at the time of her first visa denial in October 2003.
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