Another Tsinghua University law professor, Xu Zhangrun, was detained in 2020 after writing an essay in which he condemned Mr Xi for stifling public debate that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had previously tolerated.  

Mr Xu is now free, a former colleague told The Telegraph, but he does not speak publicly anymore.

Another academic who criticized Beijing’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic was arrested and charged with subversion of the state, while a professor was forced to flee to the US after being expelled from the CCP for likening Mr Xi to a “mafia boss” during a lecture that was recorded and leaked.

Just like during the Cultural Revolution, people are once again being encouraged to inform on anyone who says “unpatriotic” things. Students who are party members even receive cash payments and other rewards for filing reports on their teachers to their superiors.

“The number of so-called ‘student spies’ has increased,” said Willy Lam, an adjunct professor of China studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “The scale of surveillance is much tighter than two-three years ago.”

The sense of academics being watched at all times is compounded by the massive increase in technological surveillance in classrooms, many of which now have both video and audio recording equipment that feeds data directly to education authorities.

The Shanghai journalism teacher that Ms Li stood up for is just one example. Song Gengyi was caught and fired after a video was posted online by a student in which she encouraged them to conduct more rigorous study into China’s official death count – 300,000 – for the 1937 Nanjing massacre by the Japanese Army.

The result is that the space for free expression and speech in intellectual circles has shrunk significantly over the past decade, according to Wu Qiang, a former political science lecturer at the prestigious Tsinghua University who was fired in 2015 after researching Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement.  

“For people like [Ms Lao] and us, we know at this moment there’s almost no space for us to speak,” said Mr Wu. “We have no opportunity to do our work for public service. We have no space to publish our books or articles on the internet.”

Perhaps the worst part is the effect on the next generation, who will not be exposed to any sort of critical thought or debate, added Mr Wu: “There is no hope for them. They are the sons and daughters of Xi Jinping.”