Published: June 16, 2013
BEIJING — Chen Guangcheng, the dissident legal advocate whose escape from house arrest to the American Embassy in Beijing last year provoked a diplomatic crisis, said he was being forced to leave New York University over concerns that his activism was harming the university’s relationship with China.
In a statement released Sunday, Mr. Chen said university officials were worried that his outspoken criticism of the Chinese government might threaten academic cooperation. N.Y.U. recently opened a campus in Shanghai, and a number of professors are involved in programs and research projects here that could be harmed if they were denied Chinese visas.
“The work of the Chinese Communists within academic circles in the United States is far greater than what people imagine, and some scholars have no option but to hold themselves back,” Mr. Chen said. “Academic independence and academic freedom in the United States are being greatly threatened by a totalitarian regime.”
The allegation that Mr. Chen was being asked to leave N.Y.U. was first raised on Thursday by The New York Post, but until Sunday, he had remained silent.
The university issued a statement of its own on Sunday, denying Mr. Chen’s claims. “We are very discouraged to learn of Mr. Chen’s statement, which contains a number of speculations about the role of the Chinese government in N.Y.U.’s decision-making that are both false and contradicted by the well-established facts,” John Beckman, a university spokesman, said in the statement. He said the university was “puzzled and saddened” by Mr. Chen’s accusations but that it would continue to help him and his family.
The university insists that Mr. Chen’s law school fellowship was always meant to be for one year, and those who have worked closely with him in recent months said he understood the time limitations of a financial arrangement that even Mr. Chen acknowledged was extremely generous. The fellowship’s end, Mr. Beckman said, “had nothing to do with the Chinese government — all fellowships come to an end.”
Mr. Chen said the school had given him until the end of June to vacate the faculty apartment in Greenwich Village where he and his family have lived since arriving in the United States in May 2012.
A self-taught lawyer who is blind, Mr. Chen, 41, was well known in China for his legal fight against the country’s coercive family-planning policies. After arriving in the United States, he became something of a media sensation, giving interviews and testifying before Congress.
His claims that university officials tried to discourage his activism raise questions about the extent to which American academic institutions are susceptible to pressure from a government that has grown increasingly self-confident and assertive in its dealings with the rest of the world.
That pressure, he said, began to reveal itself less than four months after his escape from the heavily guarded house where he had been confined for 18 months after his release from prison on what legal experts say were trumped-up charges.
In the United States, many colleges have grown increasingly reliant on the tuition from the 194,000 Chinese students who enrolled at American universities last year, a 23 percent increase over the previous year. A number of universities, including Johns Hopkins, Yale and Duke, have programs or satellite campuses in China or are planning them. Mr. Chen’s statement did not include details about how he might have been pressed by N.Y.U., and he declined an interview request on Sunday. But friends said he had been quietly stewing in recent months over what he believed were the university’s efforts to stage-manage his public activism, which included an appearance in April on Capitol Hill to speak about the Chinese government’s persecution of relatives he left behind.
In August, he told friends that N.Y.U. was trying to dissuade him from traveling to Washington to meet members of Congress. As he was returning to New York that day, two N.Y.U. interpreters who were accompanying Mr. Chen refused to allow a reporter from Radio Free Asia to interview him at Union Station. The reporter, Zhang Min, said in an interview that Mr. Chen was so angry that he threatened to remain behind in Washington.
Matt Dorf, a Washington-based media strategist who was there that day and who worked closely with Mr. Chen after his arrival in the United States, offered another view of the incident, saying that one of the translators was eight months pregnant and anxious to catch the train to New York, which the group eventually missed. Writing in an e-mail, Mr. Dorf noted that Mr. Chen had hours earlier spoken to dozens of reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference and he dismissed suggestions that Mr. Chen’s ability to speak to the news media was discouraged by N.Y.U.
Mr. Beckman, the university spokesman, said in the statement on Sunday that N.Y.U. had provided “opportunities for Mr. Chen to pursue his advocacy.”
Bob Fu, president of ChinaAid, a Christian group in Texas, recounted a conversation in which Mr. Chen lamented what he perceived to be the Chinese government’s growing influence in the United States. “He felt a tremendous sadness knowing how academia was kowtowing to the Chinese government,” Mr. Fu said.
But in recent days, other associates of Mr. Chen’s have questioned the notion that N.Y.U. was forcing him to leave. Jerome A. Cohen, a law professor who helped arrange his fellowship and who considers himself a confidant, said the school had been exceedingly generous, providing him with transportation, security and private lessons in law and English. He added that Mr. Chen had at least two enviable job options, including one at Fordham University and another at the Witherspoon Institute, a think tank in Princeton, N.J.
“They have done more than imaginable, but I don’t know how anyone could stay here at N.Y.U. on a continual basis,” Mr. Cohen said Thursday. “No political refugee, not even Albert Einstein, has received better treatment.”
A version of this article appeared in print on June 17, 2013, on page A3 of the New York edition with the headline: China Dissident Says He’s Being Forced From N.Y.U..
