China bans poet from traveling to US conference

By Charles Hutzler | Associated Press | via UNCENSORED Yahoo! News
March 25, 2010

A pixie-ish literature professor is the latest person to run afoul of China's government, denied permission to travel to a prominent academic conference in the United States this week.

Cui Weiping had her Chinese passport, U.S. visa and airplane ticket to Philadelphia in hand when, she said, officials at the Beijing Film Academy where she works called her in Sunday and told her to cancel the trip. Though they gave reasons for the denial -- she has classes to teach, her conference panel was not related to her academic discipline -- those were excuses, she said.

The unstated reason, she said: last year's commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement and her recent outraged Twitter posts at the jailing of a peaceful political activist. "Really, they want to punish me," Cui said Thursday sitting in an artsy coffee shop in the university district.

"They're afraid, one, of what I might say abroad," she said, "and two, they want to pressure me."

In the uproar over Google's tussle with Chinese Internet censorship, Cui's case is a reminder that the authoritarian government often resorts to more blunt ways to restrict the flow of ideas.

Cui is hardly a firebrand. Small, bookish and 54, she prefers her literary and film criticism, her translations of the works of people like Czech dissident-turned-president Vaclav Havel, rather than political campaigning.

Nor is she the only person to see her freedom of movement curtailed. Travel bans have a rich tradition in China. The emperors prohibited ordinary Chinese off-and-on from leaving for several centuries. More recently, writer and outspoken government critic Liao Yiwu was taken off a plane in the southwestern city of Chengdu last month on his way to Germany for Europe's largest literary festival; it was the 13th time he was blocked.

Ai Xiaoming, a feminist literary critic who has made pointed documentaries on AIDS and one village's attempts to oust corrupt officials, found out she was under a five-year ban when she went to renew her passport in December and couldn't. A police official looked up her name in a database and told her "you've been prohibited from going abroad," she said.

"To use a Chinese phrase, it's very shady. They won't notify you directly, and only when you try to do something do you find you're being punished," said Ai, a professor in the southern city of Guangzhou. "There's no way to seek redress. No process. It's a punishment outside the law."

Cui too has been told not to travel to the U.S. twice before, once in 2006 for a conference on the radical Maoist Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and last year for an event organized by a Chinese emigre who produced a documentary on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

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