Hot Potatoes

NYU Drops Chinese Human Rights Defender for Pro-life Stance

Posted on | July 10, 2013 

By Susan Yoshihara, Ph.D.
Turtle Bay and Beyond

The Daily Beast reports that supporters of the blind human rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng are accusing New York University (NYU) of booting the activist unfairly due to his pro-life and pro-family views. Those views along with criticism of the Chinese regime’s one-child per family policy and the US State Department, which only begrudgingly allowed him to escape China and work at NYU, may complicate the opening NYU’s new Shanghai campus.

The school thwarted his receiving a Congressional Gold Medal and even blocked his testimony before a Congressional hearing, they charge, through ever-present minders which the school has assigned to Chen since he escaped China.
 NYU denies it all and says that pro-life and pro-family supporters like Rep. Chris Smith are leading Chen astray, dragging him into anti-China, anti-State Department politics. They say this will make it harder for him to return to China and secure the release of his family, including a nephew who is being tortured after his arrest subsequent to Chen’s departure.

Chen must vacate his NYU dorm by 15 July and apparently has a book deal and some funding from a “wealthy democratic donor,” according to the Daily Beast. 

The case is a vivid depiction of the disarray and deepening divisiveness in human rights over just the last 20 years. Once a cause celebre of both right and left, political human rights dissidents, and civil and political human rights in general, are now viewed as competitors to ever-new and more controversial social “rights” such as abortion.

Regardless of what NYU or the US State Department think of pro-life and pro-family advocates who support Chen, his contention that forced abortions are human rights violations remains and remains uncontroverted