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China Bars Noted Scholar From Planned Trip to U.S.

BEIJING — A prominent Chinese scholar and film critic who was scheduled to speak at an academic conference in the United States this week said Friday that she had been barred from leaving China as punishment for her commentary on human rights and free speech.

The scholar, Cui Weiping, 54, a poet and professor at the Beijing Film Academy, said that she had planned to lecture at Harvard and attend a conference sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies in Philadelphia, but that the director of her school called this week to say she had been forbidden to travel.

“I was told I had classes to teach and that the lecture I was giving was not my specialty, but those were just excuses,” said Ms. Cui, who was to have left on Wednesday. “The real reason is that they want to put pressure on me, and they want to punish me.”

Communicating through her superiors at the film academy, she said “they” — an unseen entity she described as “the authorities” — had repeatedly rebuked her for perceived sins: posting social criticism on her blog; sponsoring a seminar on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests; and sending out Twitter messages about the jailing of Liu Xiaobo, a writer who was convicted of subversion last year for demanding increased liberties.

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Cui Weiping planned to lecture at Harvard and attend a conference sponsored by an Asian studies group in Philadelphia.Credit...Cui Weiping, via Associated Press

“These things made them unhappy,” she said, “and now they are going to make me unhappy.”

Chinese officials have long used travel restrictions to punish those who have strayed across the murky line of public nonconformity. This month, Liao Yiwu, a writer and a tireless critic of the governing Communist Party, was removed from a plane as he was on his way to a literary festival in Germany.

Other scholars and writers, including Tsering Woeser, a Tibetan essayist, have repeatedly been denied passports.

Ms. Cui said she had been punished before for her writings. Academic officials canceled five guest lectures she was scheduled to give over the past year at schools around China. Last year, during the 20th anniversary of the crackdown in Tiananmen Square, two carloads of police officers spent several days parked outside her Beijing apartment, she said.

“Until now, I didn’t want to talk about these incidents,” she said, “but now that they are limiting my academic freedom, I have to speak out.”

Calls to the administrative offices of the film academy were not answered on Friday.

Ms. Cui said the travel restrictions would not affect her work — if anything, she said, they would only embolden her. “It really doesn’t make sense to do this; in fact, it’s stupid,” she said of the travel ban. “Everyone at the conference knows I’ve been forbidden from attending,” she said, adding, “This is just hurting China’s national image.”

Zhang Jing contributed research.

Zhang Jing contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: China Bars Noted Scholar From Planned Trip to U.S.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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