Note that the person on your last link, despite professing to be terrified of his students, seems to have been happy enough to publish that article with his real name on it. Note also that he links to a number of other pieces by other academics expressing similar opinions, all also apparently not so terrified as to avoid publishing such opinions with their names attached.

So far as I know, no academic has in fact got into any sort of trouble for expressing opinions like those, or like the (milder) ones expressed in James's article.

People died in the Cultural Revolution. This is not in any useful sense "basically the Cultural Revolution". Nor does it bear anything like the same resemblance to the Cultural Revolution as Louis Napoleon's assumption of power did to his uncle's. Calling someone courageous for daring to say openly that the idea of "safe spaces" may have gone too far is like calling someone courageous for daring to say "Merry Christmas". Can we get a bit of perspective here?