Readit NewsIt’s not even clear this professor is in government custody. It sounds like he may have gotten wind of the investigation and escaped.
Hong being influenced by American Christian missionaries is odd, but there is much precedence for rebel leaders who took on dynasties to be of millenarian, even foreign beliefs. Throughout Chinese history, the White Lotus society, with millenarian Buddhist beliefs, had challenged the Qing and the Yuan (the Ming founder was a member). The Yellow Turbans of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms fame were Daoist esoterics. Manichaean rebels fought the Song. I think a lot of times it’s just that religious cultists had the necessary social structures in place to launch rebellions, and the cohesion to continue the fight as opposed to scattered peasant revolts. The history of Chinese dynastic shifts is replete with secret societies. The Taiping were noteworthy not only because they were Christian-influenced, but because it was an act of such an organization being created in real-time, out in the open.
The modern Chinese government’s suppression of Falun Gong makes sense from this perspective.
It's interesting to see that people are now arguing in favor of public shaming and peer pressure as ways to control behavior, and lamenting that these are now harder to implement at scale. A generation ago the internet was seen as a way to escape pressure for conformity.
If you close that pipeline, you'll lose those students, and then you have to find more funding, because international students usually subsidize local students.