Only former Chinese leader Deng Xiaopeng could sue Harvard for libeling him, but he can't, since he's dead, judge rules

A federal judge today threw out a lawsuit against Harvard University by a Cambridge man who charged a book published by the school's press libeled the Chinese dictator, who died in 1997.

Xianwen Liu had originally sued Harvard pro se over the book, by an author who is also dead, in Cambridge District Court. Earlier this month, Harvard had the case "removed" to federal court because Liu was claiming a description in the book of a meeting Deng may or may not have attended violated Liu's First and Fourteenth Amendment rights, which are the subject of federal-court jurisdiction.

Only, as US District Court Judge Richard Stearns ruled today, in an order he posted as an attachment to the case docket, rather than a full-blown written decision, federal law requires a person to show "standing" or proof they have "suffered an injury in fact--an invasion of a legally protected interest which is (a) concrete and particularized; and (b) actual or imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical."

Liu, he noted, is not Deng and did not offer any proof he was specifically injured by the allegedly offending book section or that Deng had authorized him to act on his behalf.

He has not alleged that he suffered any concrete, actual injury, and he offers no basis to assert a third-party claim on behalf of Deng Xiaoping. The case accordingly must be dismissed.

In his original complaint, Liu charged that author and Harvard sociology professor Ezra Vogel made a "Grave Error" that was so grave Harvard needed to correct it immediately, not just because it allegedly libeled Deng but because it could harm Vogel - who died in 2020 - and even Harvard itself.

As a book customer, I think that I have the right given by the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution to ask the publisher or the author to correct a Grave Error.

At issue, at least for Liu, is a section in Vogel's 2013 book, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Note: If you click the link and buy the book, UHub gets a cut), which describes what Liu calls "the so-called Zuhai meeting" - a meeting Vogel described in the city of Zhuhai in 1992 at which Deng, who had officially retired as premier, helped solidify support for the economic reforms he had put in place after Mao's death.

Liu's 48-page complaint contains a detailed description of how Vogel got it all wrong and suggests the meeting never actually happened or if it did, that Deng might not have even attended it and that such a libel just cannot stand.

Liu's complete complaint (2.4M PDF).