A federal judge in Boston dismissed a Cambridge man’s lawsuit against the Harvard University Press on Wednesday for publishing a book he said libeled former Chinese head of state Deng Xiaoping, dead for nearly three decades.
Xianwen Liu sued in Cambridge District Court early in July over Ezra Vogel’s 2011 book “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China.”
After buying a copy in May, he found what he considered a “grave error” in the text that he said constituted libel: In a description of a meeting Deng attended in 1989, Liu felt Vogel’s description portrayed him as a bad leader in a way that was not consistent with descriptions by other historians of contemporary China. He found this especially problematic because of the book’s popularity: the Chinese translation has sold more than a million copies.
Letting the “error” continuing to remain in print would harm the reputation of Vogel and Harvard University, Liu said. But he got no response when trying to contact the university – so he filed a lawsuit.
Liu’s initial complaint said that his First and 14th Amendment rights had been violated by the Harvard University Press not issuing a correction. Noting the constitutional issues, Harvard asked that the case be transferred to federal court, but also that it be dismissed due to lack of standing. The court agreed.
A plaintiff must prove he has suffered actual injury, Judge Richard Stearns wrote, and Liu did not. Stearns also said that “he offers no basis to assert a third-party claim on behalf of Deng Xiaoping.”
Because libel protects reputation, which is useful mostly for people who are alive to benefit from an untainted one, it is rare for a libel case win concerning how people perceive the dead. Deng died in 1997. Vogel died in 2020.
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