Tea Leaf Nation runs a piece on the resignation of Chen Hongguo 谌洪果 from Xibei Zhengfa University, quoting his lament on the "narrowing path of academic inquiry".
Getting on for 10 years ago I interviewed a professor of anthropology at Peking University who was keen to stress the limits of expression in his own field. The example he used was that you couldn't talk about any downside to "development" (in the "development studies" sense), because promoting just that was Party policy. You could say what you wanted about things the Party didn't concern itself with, but you didn't get to challenge its decisions.
That a legal professor is feeling the CCP pinch now, rather than years ago, makes sense. Although politics has always been touchy, law and the study thereof has been a boom industry since, oh let's say the 1990s - between 1949 and 1972 only one detective story was officially published in China, because "crime" wasn't a thing, only counter-revolutionary activity, and it wasn't until the 90s that lawyers in China became really numerous. And you can carve out a lifelong career without getting into issues of whether laws are righ or wrong or actually enforced.
Once you start talking about legal reform, though, you're talking about changing things on Party territory. And you still don't get to tell the Party what to do.
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