As academic freedom fades, it’s time to offer refuge

Hong Kong has long had some of the best universities in Asia, with top-notch researchers never afraid to pursue pressing, cutting-edge questions. Yet today, under the National Security Law forced on the city by Beijing, these academics are facing unprecedented challenges that have forever changed their living and working environment. What can the world do to help?

In thinking through the success of Hong Kong’s universities, there is a long list of strengths that have contributed to this success: generous salaries, reasonable teaching loads and substantial research funding. Yet if we ask what really makes Hong Kong’s universities truly unique, their defining strength is undoubtedly their robust academic freedom. A legacy of the British colonial era, this freedom was largely maintained following the city’s handover to China in 1997 under the rubric of ‘one country, two systems’.

The benefits of such freedom are readily apparent in my field of China-related research, where Hong Kong has long provided a safe haven from the monitoring and censorship that one can only expect in China. The city has also historically accepted scholars like myself who are no longer able to conduct research in China. This pioneering spirit, unbounded by political restrictions, has produced reliably ground-breaking research that is reflected in Hong Kong universities’ strong global reputation and rankings.

This all began to change, however, in the aftermath of the Occupy Central protests of 2014, in which academics and university students played a central role. In a 2018 report for Hong Kong Watch, I highlighted three disconcerting turns in state policy that threatened academic freedom in Hong Kong: (1) removing politically controversial lecturers, (2) stacking university governing councils with pro-regime political appointees, and (3) constructing arbitrary red lines in the discussion of sensitive topics.

Recent trends

Three years later, and just seven months after Beijing’s decision to force an illegitimate National Security Law on Hong Kong, these trends have only accelerated and intensified.

In July, renowned legal scholar and activist Benny Tai, who first proposed the idea of Occupy Central, was removed from his position at the University of Hong Kong’s faculty of law in a clearly politically motivated process, making the once unthinkable prospect of political firings now an undeniable reality.

In October, the appointment of two PRC (People’s Republic of China) academics with Chinese Communist Party links as vice presidents of the University of Hong Kong generated further dismay.

One of the academics, Max Shen, had been listed as a member of Tsinghua University’s Chinese Communist Party Committee, until Hong Kong media enquired about this affiliation: in a not particularly convincing move, Shen’s name suddenly disappeared from the Tsinghua University Party Committee list and his position at Hong Kong University was confirmed soon after.

Yet nowhere are these trends more apparent than in the accelerating construction of arbitrary red lines labelling certain topics as taboo. Discussion of Hong Kong independence, for example, has been labelled a violation of the National Security Law, but there is no way to speak honestly and frankly about political trends in Hong Kong over the past decade without reflecting on the emergence and rapid popularisation of this idea.

Similar obfuscation is apparent in the attempt to silence discussion of the anti-extradition protest movement that forever changed the city in 2019, treating popular protest slogans that the overwhelming majority of the city’s population openly shouted just a few months ago as ‘illegal’ today.

Not all of these developments are direct products of the National Security Law. This, however, is not the point: if we stop analysing the National Security Law as a law, recognising it instead as just another step in an all-encompassing programme of backsliding on rights and freedoms granting the state a blank cheque for repression, we come to recognise a clear truth: the freedoms that made Hong Kong academia great are now disappearing.

Supporting students and researchers

What is left of Hong Kong’s universities today, then, is thousands of scholars and students who came of age in a free learning environment and are now facing an unfree environment that is only likely to become ever more repressive. There may be little that these citizens and indeed the world can do to reverse these trends in the short term, but there is still plenty that the world can do to support these researchers and students.

First, those of us who live beyond the National Security Law need to step up and speak honestly about the situation in Hong Kong: we need to use our freedom and rights to maintain the type of honest and open discussion of sensitive topics that was once commonplace but is now dangerous in Hong Kong.

Far too many analyses of the National Security Law have focused on its extraterritorial implications, even at times reframing the law as a new excuse for global self-censorship. Such navel-gazing analysis neglects those most affected: Hong Kong academics and students.

What we as outsiders should take away from the obliteration of Hong Kong’s freedoms is instead a novel appreciation of our own freedoms and the urgent necessity of using these freedoms to say what can only be said under threat of censure in Hong Kong today.

Second, global universities need to find ways to support Hong Kong academics and students whose lives and careers have been transformed by the sudden shift to dictatorship.

Universities need to develop initiatives similar to the Princeton China Initiative, which welcomed Chinese academics living in exile after the Tiananmen Square Massacre to Princeton, to create a space abroad for Hong Kong researchers whose work puts them at risk at home.

A similarly welcoming approach should be taken for students, encouraging the young intellectuals and activists who have driven political change in Hong Kong in recent years to find safe haven for their education, graduate research and political work overseas.

Hong Kong has provided a rare refuge of academic freedom in Greater China for decades of researchers. As that freedom slips away, it is time for the world to return this favour.

Academic freedom in Hong Kong may be beyond repair, but stepping up, speaking out and offering refuge abroad are not only the right things to do; they will also greatly enrich the global academic community and its understanding of Hong Kong politics and China’s increasingly disconcerting rise.

Kevin Carrico is senior lecturer in Chinese Studies at Monash University, Australia. He is the author of The Great Han: Race, nationalism, and tradition in China today (2017) and Two Systems, Two Countries: A nationalist guide to Hong Kong (forthcoming).