What is it about the American Association of Asian Studies annual meeting this year?
Yeah, I know — other than the fact that I SHOULD be there if only to network with Important People in my field, if only so they can keep reminding me that my future employment prospects rank somewhere between “Dinosaur wrangler” and “Tiger Woods’ PR guy.”
Yesterday, Wang Hui, who is in Philadelphia this week as a keynote speaker at the conference, was accused of plagiarism. Today AP is reporting that film professor Cui Weiping has been denied permission to travel to the United States to attend the conference.
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.”
To paraphrase Ian Fleming, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, is there to be a third? A worrying trend to be sure.
Another prominent Chinese academic in limbo…Cui Weiping denied permission to travel to United States http://ow.ly/1r0MG
RT @GraniteStudio: Another prominent Chinese academic in limbo…Cui Weiping denied permission to travel to US http://ow.ly/1r0MG
Oh course, as my Irish fatalist mother always said: bad things happen in threes….