A professor in Guizhou Province, southwestern China, was fired by his university because he published “politically incorrect views” online.
The decision was announced via a statement from the Guizhou University president’s office on Aug. 15, which stated that Professor Yang Shaozheng “often spoke of content irrelevant to the class.”
Yang, 49, is a well-known economist and taught economics at the university for 11 years.
He told Radio Free Asia (RFA) on August 17 that he was very surprised to learn he was expelled by the school. He said that he did not violate any school rules and was planning to appeal the school’s decision.
The so-called “politically incorrect views” is suspected to be his outspoken views about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), specifically an article about the Chinese economy that he published on the website of NTD, The Epoch Times’ sister media, last year.
In an article published on Nov. 23, 2017, Yang explained that taxes and government revenue, Beijing pays the salaries of about 20 million full-time party members and non-party members, costing an estimated 20 trillion yuan ($2.91 trillion) each year. But the huge financial burden could cause the Chinese economy to collapse.
Yang estimated that every Chinese would have to spend an average of 15,000 yuan ($$) just for paying public employees’ salaries.
Prior to that, Yang had been suspended from teaching since Nov. 10, 2017 without any warning. Guizhou police had taken him away for questioning and warned him to “shut up” during the 19th National Congress—an important political meeting for the Party elite, an especially sensitive time for Beijing.
The Aug. 17 RFA report said that Gong Shengli, an independent economist in China, also agreed with Yang’s view.
Gong, an expert member of International Strategic Research Network of China and a special researcher at the Economic and Trade Research Association of China, said that countries like China, where the party and government are raised by the nation’s finances, still exist in are only the remaining communist nations of the world: North Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam.
Political commentator Gao Tianyun told the Chinese-language Epoch Times on Aug. 18 that it was obvious that Yang’s comments touched the Chinese regime’s sore point, which prompted the university to drive him out of campus.
