One of the Chinese government’s most vocal critics is finally falling silent. He Weifang told The Associated Press Friday that he would no longer publish on social media after authorities repeatedly shut down his personal blog, his Weibo microblog and two WeChat accounts.
He, a famed law professor at elite Peking University and key defender of imprisoned Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, is the latest public intellectual to throw in the towel in President Xi Jinping’s China. Over the past half-decade, freedom of speech and other civil liberties have been rolled back while a radical movement devoted to the People’s Republic’s authoritarian founder Mao Zedong has flourished. “I feel utterly helpless,” He said by telephone. “It’s as if I’m not allowed to make a single sound.”
He attracted a massive following in Chinese intellectual circles over the past decade for his prolific writings on everything from social ills to architecture, but especially for his languid but trenchant essays on rule of law and politics.
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