The Peril and Agony of Free Speech

A couple of years ago I was the object of death threats, contract breaches and petty larceny at a university in China, where I was an instructor. I thought the story newsworthy, particularly considering the nature of the university -- it is China's premier institution for training Chinese diplomats, the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing. I wrote a voluminous -- some have said too voluminous -- and highly detailed account of my observations (Inside China's Diplomacy School).

Last month, a feverish denunciation of the work abruptly materialized on the Peking Duck blog. It was written by Joe Bosco, an American journalist I'd never had contact with. "I can assert with authority, and direct sources," his post announced, "that his story is flat-out lunacy and paranoid fabrications."

Bosco was not shy about his personal involvement. He had just spent a year teaching at the same school, he said, and had been treated with "professionalism, warmth and kindness" by the administration. They'd also given him free accommodation and services beyond his contract expiry "because they reward and appreciate good teachers."

I responded to Bosco's post, using considerably more temperate language. But then the entire discussion was promptly deleted by the Peking Duck proprietor, Richard Burger, who turned out to be a friend of Bosco's.

Burger explained his deletion of the discussion to me by email:

Joseph seems to know your story well, and as one of my closest friends I believe him. I can't risk using my site as a platform for the complaints of others unless I sincerely believe in their complaint. In this case, Joseph convinced me that debate on this point would not be productive and could cause unnecessary harm.

This sat quite oddly with Bosco's portrayal of himself on his own blog as a crusader for freedom of speech. I had a new story -- and I wrote Joe Bosco, Blogger.

After a time, my new story triggered a new public onslaught -- this time by Bosco's wife, Ellen Sander, who posted it on her own independent blog:

Wittenberg is insisting that Joseph, despite his highly public and indisputable free speech advocacy, for which he's actually spent time in jail, is a hypocrite.... I emphatically object to this peevish slander. I am mad as hell! This is not a free speech issue. This is about trash disposal.

[http://ellensander.com/2004_09_01_cp_archive.html#109469265998026230]

Sander vigorously denied her husband's involvement in deleting the discussion:

I know this not to be the case! After several e-mail exchanges about Wittenberg and his web site, Richard asked Joseph if he should take Wittenberg's comment down. Joseph told Richard to make the call himself and do whatever he thought best. Richard took it all down. That's the whole story.

But it's not quite the whole story. Sander studiously avoids any reference to Burger's own words, quoted in the story she denounces: "Joseph convinced me that debate on this point would not be productive and could cause unnecessary harm."

But the question of whether the discussion was deleted at Bosco's or Burger's initiative is secondary. Sander entirely neglects the primary offense against free speech principles here: the foul-mouthed attacks that she, Bosco and Burger have waged in their quest to discredit the scrupulously true and honest report I have written of my observations as an instructor at China's diplomacy school.

Emulating her husband, Sander speaks of my disgruntlement, my defamations, my ineptness, my culpability, my contempt, my lengthy documented rant, my fulminating online rant, my revolting diatribe, and (without conscious irony) my slander. But nowhere have she or Bosco questioned the accuracy of even one specific item from the mountain of detailed observations I present to readers.

Bosco's comments have made clear that his relations to the school authorities, his access to Communist Party officials, his regular appearances on Chinese TV, are near and dear to his heart. The man is conflicted. And it's self-evident that he and his proxies are the source of the slanders here. That he does not even pretend to justify his slanders is a measure of his brazenness. His siding with corrupt and secretive Chinese officialdom against a Westerner who has been thoroughly open is a betrayal not only of fundamental American principles. It also betrays idealistic Chinese students and others who somehow admire the U.S. and its people as embodying the spirit and values of open debate.

The slashing attack by the fair-sex component of Joe Bosco's menage immediately produced commentary from the affair's protagonists and others.

The Peking Duck's Richard Burger, responding to Sander's post on her site, termed the situation "heartbreaking" and summoned readers to his own site, where he'd posted an item entitled, A cancer seeking to infect the China blogosphere:

If I could go back in time, I would have ignored an impassioned email I received from someone making complaints against the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing. I fell for it, or at least I found it credible enough to mention it on my site and ask for the comments of others. Bad mistake....

A glance at that "impassioned email" sums up the Duck's level of objectivity:

From: Uriel Wittenberg
To: richardphx@...
Sent: Sunday, August 08, 2004 10:15 AM
Subject: Inside China's Diplomacy University

Hi,

Thought you might be interested in "Inside China's Diplomacy University" -- at http://urielw.com/china2.

Comments welcome.

Cheers,

Uriel

That's the "impassioned email" -- complete and unedited.

Burger's post proceeded in the familiar style of Bosco's allies -- "smear ... enraged child ... insanity ... asshole ... this guy is out there, lying and slandering whoever he crosses" -- and finally delivered this warning to readers:

If anyone approaches you to tell his story on your own blog, all I can say is delete his request and steer very clear. I sure wish I had. (And Uriel, if you comment to this post I promise I will delete it as fast as I can. You're a menace, and many other Chinese bloggers know it.) Sorry for the passion, but people who might get sucked into Uriel's bizarrre universe need to understand what's going on here.

Burger's post also directed readers to the "intelligent response to this nightmare" offered by yet another participant in the "Living in China" community of bloggers -- one who writes under the pen name, "Angry Chinese Blogger" (ACB).

I'd been drawn to ACB's own site on Aug. 19 by an item he'd posted about censorship on Chinese TV. I'd posted a response there referring to the suppression of China information by supposedly free-speech-loving Americans. ACB's new post, appearing on Ellen Sander's site in response to her battle cry, referred to my Aug. 19 comment:

I was sent what at first appeared to be a serious comment about blog censorship, naming a man who supposedly attacked other bloggers for publishing less than favorable articles about his workplace. I admit that I was interested because censorship is a topic that I often write on, but it turned out to be a part of this attack on Mr. Bosco.

This man has a problem with Mr. Bosco and seems intent on roping as many people into it as he can find....

Thank you for telling us of the nature of the pressure exerted on other bloggers. I had images of Mr. Bosco marching around with a lawyer, issuing court notices on unsuspecting bloggers, rather than politely asking Richard of Peking Duck, which I read regularly and greatly admire, to look at what this man had written and asking him to make up his own mind.

But ACB too was using the tactics of distortion (a seemingly universal affliction among Bosco loyalists). My Aug. 19 comment did not suggest that Bosco was "issuing court notices" against anyone. It merely said:

Joe Bosco, prominent blogger in China, persuades fellow blogger to expunge criticisms of the prestigious university where Bosco teaches.

[http://angrychineseblogger.blog-city.com/read/730648.htm]

This accurately reflected Richard Burger's email message to me, explaining why he'd deleted all references to my diplomacy school story from Peking Duck:

Joseph convinced me that debate on this point would not be productive and could cause unnecessary harm.

Sander's post was also noticed by Simon World ("East meets Westerner"), a blog whose proprietor consumes prodigious quantities of blogmatter to produce a daily digest packed with links.

Simon has developed insight into how information propagates via the internet. His Guide to Blogging includes rules that almost seem tailor-made for this affair:

30. Just like in life, extremism beats moderation and emotion beats logic. If you want reasoned discourse prepare to dwell in oblivion. If you want invective and ill-considered responses, watch the hits come in.

36. Logic and reason are for the weak. Knee-jerk and off-the-cuff reactions are for the blogger.

Simon's Sept. 9 digest captured the spirit of Sander's "this is not a free speech issue ... this is about trash disposal" post with one line -- "Someone for all Chinese bloggers to be wary of" -- and provided a link to Sander's full text.

After writing yesterday's section of this article ("The Peril and Agony of Free Speech"), I posted a portion of it in response to the new posts which had prompted it -- on Peking Duck, Ellen Sander's blog, and Simon World. A few hours later I returned to each for a look.

Burger appeared to have eradicated my response from his Peking Duck within 15 minutes, substituting in its place a message to me:

Uriel, don't bother posting again here, please. I have three people in three countries poised to delete any damaging comments, like the last one. Thanks.

Before long he had second thoughts and deleted his own comment too, replacing it with a new message (with the identical timestamp):

Uriel, ... a word of caring and compassionate advice: Get a life. Do you really think years from now that you'll look back at this and be proud of what you're doing? ... What's going on? Don't you have any idea what it looks like to adults? (Those are rhetorical questions; if you reply, I have no choice but to delete.)

A short time later, Joe Bosco himself visited Peking Duck to join in the lamentations (see below).

Ellen Sander's site restricted comments to 1000 characters, so I'd merely posted: "My response at http://urielw.com/bosco1.htm ."

I'd seen how scrupulously Sander avoided providing links to my site, so I was initially puzzled to see my comment left untouched. But the delay apparently reflected only shortfalls in Sander's technical know-how rather than a newfound tolerance for balance. A few hours more, and my comment was zapped. In fact, all comments on Sander's entire site were vaporized -- and my web browser reported "Errors on page." In the urgency of her panic to shield visitors from my unfiltered views, Sander had crippled her site.

Simon World showed itself more willing than Bosco partisans to expose readers to the dangers of my universe, and my post there persists.

Back on Peking Duck, Richard Burger's new post was gathering supportive comments. ACB had reappeared with a new warning that "this man [Uriel] is quite capable of using impassioned speeches and emotive language to drag people in, and he can be quite convincing until you actually look at the lengths that he has gone to, to defame Mr. Bosco."

This sympathy had drawn a new contribution from Joe Bosco himself, who underlined the distinction between suppressing information (which would be unthinkable to him) and his "wish not to help [Wittenberg's] cause in defaming China, Chinese college students--particularly female students--and a fine Chinese university," in the course of offering additional thoughts:

ACB,

Thank you. I second Richard: You are indeed a class act. While there are a couple of political and historical priorities you and I have disagreed on politely, your intellectual integrity is always present and remarkable.

This whole affair has been most unpleasant and personally troublesome--coming from a man I know not at all....

Everyone at CFAU is trying to forget this man and talk only of his malignant presence there with pain and sadness. He, of course, is discussed at the first orientation meeting for new foreign professors since all of them read his diatribe in their Google research before accepting a position on the faculty. The school administrators know this and address it rationally, without rancor, and only briefly unless more direct questions are asked....

As on Sander's site, readers could find no link anywhere in the discussion to the writings at my site that were actually the subject of discussion. Just for fun I decided to see what would happen if I contributed a new comment:

This maniac is severelly unbalanced and should be exposedd for what he is. I wanted to see his slanders and tell the world what a malicious liarr he is but couldn't find the fool's website. Does anyone know the URL??

I used a pseudonym, of course --"Jonny". But that wasn't enough to fool Burger and his international team of "poised" monitors. The naive Jonny's contribution was zapped within minutes.