Human rights? Over-rated.

From the New York Post:

NYU booting blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng amid Shanghai expansion: sources
By JAMES COVERT

NYU isn’t letting a pesky thing like human rights stand in the way of its expansion in China.

The university has booted a blind Chinese political dissident from its campus under pressure from the Communist government as it builds a coveted branch in Shanghai, sources told The Post.

Chen Guangcheng has been at NYU since May 2012, when he made a dramatic escape from his oppressive homeland with the help of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But school brass has told him to get out by the end of this month, the sources said.

Chen’s presence at the school didn’t sit well with the Chinese bureaucrats who signed off on the permits for NYU’s expansion there, the sources said.

“The big problem is that NYU is very compromised by the fact they are working very closely with the Chinese to establish a university,” according to one New York-based professor familiar with Chen’s situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“That’s their liability,” the source said. “Otherwise, they would be much less constrained on issues like freedom of speech.”

The outspoken Chen — whose many supporters include actor Christian Bale, who tried to visit him in China with a TV crew in 2011 — recently inflamed Chinese authorities again when he agreed to visit its archenemy Taiwan in the coming weeks, a source said.

NYU officials claim that Chen was never meant to stay there long-term and that the politics of the new Shanghai campus had nothing to do with his ouster.

[…]

Read the rest there.

May I say that the Post is my favorite NYC paper?  Remember the Rabat story?

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
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4 Comments

  1. Bob B. says:

    Our government didn’t really want to get Chen out of China. As evasive as Clinton was, she was boxed in a corner and the press forced the issue.
    NYU, et al, are just buckling under for money from China, just like Kissinger and others, too.
    You notice Chen still has not been invited to the morally bankrupt White House? Who owns most of the US debt?

  2. DisturbedMary says:

    Shameful even from the nihilism crowd. NYU never seemed the right fit anyway. Chen is heroically pro-life. As much a misfit in the pro-choice world of NYU as he was in China. Only instead of putting him under house arrest as in China, NYU evicted from the house.

    God go with him.

  3. JonPatrick says:

    Scary to think China now has more in common with US society than American Catholics do. The fact that Chen is as much a misfit at NYU as he was at home indicates this.

  4. Clinton says:

    Bob B., you are exactly right about the White House– Chen Guancheng’s moral uprightness
    only embarrasses this administration. NYU and the White House might mouth platitudes
    about human rights, but they have no use for someone who actually walks the talk.

    Remember how the White House reluctantly received the Dalai Lama in 2010? They hustled
    him out a back door, past piles of trash, in an attempt to keep his visit off China’s radar.
    Just google ‘dalai lama trash’ for photos of that proud moment…

    And who can forget this president’s shunning of Lech Walesa back in 2012? When the White
    House announced that the anti-nazi Polish freedom fighter Jan Karski would posthumously
    receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Polish government asked to send former PM
    and Solidarity leader Lech Walesa to collect the medal in his stead. The White House rejected
    the Polish government’s offer, as the anti-communist, Nobel Peace Prize-winning Walesa
    was “too political”.

    *sigh* This country’s leftists talk a great game about human rights, but it seems to be mostly
    a form of posturing. When it comes to dealing with people who actually are committed
    to human rights, they are embarrassed by them.

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