MORE FROM HUFFPOST
MORE FROM HUFFPOST
Chen Guangcheng
China has a tendency to make prognosticators look foolish. Still, I'll happily make one prediction for 2014: at least one China story will break that has a fact-is-stranger-than-fiction feel to it.
Chen's rebelliousness, which make him admirable when pitted against a repressive regime, seem to have made the simple end of a fellowship a significant PR liability for a, presumably, well-intended NYU.
Yesterday, as American leaker Edward Snowden made his headline-grabbing flight from Hong Kong to Moscow, the blind Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng left New York to spend time in Taiwan.
If the corporate thinking that places profits over our own humanity has begun to invade the American university system, causing it to bow to pressure from some of the worst human rights violators in our world today in favor of expansion into the Chinese market, it has gone too far.
WHAT'S HAPPENING
WHAT'S HAPPENING
After his James Bond-like escape from house arrest with a broken foot in the dark last spring, blind Chinese lawyer Chen Guangcheng slipped to the U.S. embassy in Beijing -- and special arrangements took him to asylum at NYU Law School. And now Chen is being asked to leave NYU.
The growing preoccupation with trade threatens to sideline the wider issue of how best to promote human rights and democratic reform in China, a country whose political future is set to determine the course of the 21st century.
Chen Guangcheng is the blind civil rights advocate from rural China who escaped house arrest in April 2012 and fled to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. Then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton negotiated his temporary stay in the U.S. to study law at NYU. I interviewed him recently.
