HONG KONG — Prominent Hong Kong academic Hui Po-keung was about to board a plane for Europe last month when police arrested him on charges linked to the city’s Beijing-imposed security law.
He was the latest in a growing list of scholars feeling the squeeze from a political clampdown that critics say is destroying academic freedom at Hong Kong’s top-rated universities — and putting their international reputation at risk.
Some teachers have been fired or seen their contracts ended without warning. Others are making the tough choice to quit over worries that sensitive research topics could make them targets under the legislation, which squashed the city’s pro-democracy movement and criminalized dissent, according to academics who mostly spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Ching Kwan Lee learned the hard way what happens to academics who cross an ever-expanding red line.
In mid-2020, the professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology warned about the looming security law in an op-ed for a U.S. newspaper, and later told an academic forum that Hong Kong was a “global city.”
“Many people from around the world come to Hong Kong,” she said. “So I think it helps to think of Hong Kong not as a Chinese city. We don’t belong to China — we belong to the world.”
Ching’s comments drew a stream of vitriol from Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing media outlets, and she left the university after her contract ended the following year. Some believe that was no coincidence.
Departing academics “feel like they’re in imminent danger of being arrested over a potential violation of the security law,” said one local university lecturer, who asked not to be named. “Ching’s reasons for quitting are clear.”
The departures come as Beijing ramps up a crackdown following mass anti-government demonstrations in 2019 that sparked clashes between protesters and police.
The sweeping security bill was enacted in mid-2020, leading to the arrest of hundreds on charges ranging from subversion to foreign collusion, while critical media outlets were shuttered.
There are no reliable numbers on how many academics have left or are considering leaving Hong Kong universities because of the city’s shifting politics.
But observers have said the numbers appear to be rising at a time when Hong Kong’s still-strict COVID-19 measures, including a mandatory hotel quarantine for visitors, are a disincentive for many to take up work in the city.
Japanese professor Keiji Fukuda, a former head of the University of Hong Kong’s public health department and a critic of the government’s pandemic policies, left for the U.S. after his contract was not renewed at the end of last year.
“I don’t see the strategic value of not retaining somebody like me,” said Fukuda, a leading expert on infectious diseases, in an interview with the local newspaper Ming Pao. “Given the current social conditions, pandemic restrictions and national security law, Hong Kong University will have a hard time hiring international talent.”
The financial hub boasts internationally recognized schools and has long drawn scholars who are global leaders in their field, including the University of Hong Kong (HKU), which took the 21st spot in the most recent QS World University Rankings. That put 111-year-old HKU just behind Cornell University and ahead of New York’s Columbia University.
But those global ties are at risk, academics said, as more professors leave while an increasing number of spots are filled by scholars and students from mainland China.
The proportion of mainland professors at city universities has jumped to nearly 25% of the total in the most recent academic year, from 19.6% just a few years ago, while international staff members slipped modestly to 28.5% in the same time frame.
Hong Kong universities have cut ties with some student unions over their pro-democracy activities. Late last year HKU pulled down the Pillar of Shame, a sculpture paying tribute to the victims of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 — a taboo subject in mainland China. It had stood at the university for nearly a quarter of a century.
A student protester is chased by riot police after skirmishes at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in November 2019. Thousands were arrested as the financial hub was gripped by a series of anti-government demonstrations.
© Reuters
Meanwhile, the schools have been expanding their presence across the border, with six of the city’s eight public universities setting up satellite campuses in the Greater Bay Area, an urban conglomeration that includes a string of southern Chinese cities such as Guangzhou and factory hub Shenzhen.
“It’s pretty clear that Hong Kong universities have lost a lot of attraction for not even critical, but just international, scholars,” said Lokman Tsui, a former assistant professor of journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who now lives in the Netherlands.
Tsui left after the university rejected his bid for tenure. While the reasons were not made clear, he said that other colleagues have had similar experiences since the security law was adopted in mid-2020.
“I had a colleague who left Hong Kong because of the changing environment,” he said. “This is a professor who used to do research on China. And it’s basically impossible at this point to do research on China anymore, so he left Hong Kong. What we’ve seen in the last few years is a worsening climate for academic freedom.”
Singapore is an alternate destination for some, while sociology professor Chan kin-ma left the city to teach in Taiwan as a visiting scholar.
Chan, a co-founder of the 2014 Occupy Central protests, which shut down Hong Kong’s downtown, previously told a Taiwanese outlet that the security law was a threat to personal freedom and that Hong Kong felt like a “big prison.”
“Many people (in academia) have gone to Taiwan because they think it has a better political and social atmosphere than Hong Kong,” said the lecturer. “Hong Kong’s most important role was to be a window to the West. There was a fusion of East and West. … If there are only Chinese standards, then it will be no different from a mainland city.”
Hui’s arrest at the airport in May was not directly linked to his academic work, but rather his participation in a fund that paid for protesters’ medical and legal bills during demonstrations in 2019.
But scholars are bracing for changes that would make their curriculum more “patriotic” — a trend well underway at Hong Kong’s secondary schools, highlighted by a recent crop of textbooks that claim the city was never a British colony at all, but rather an occupied territory reclaimed by China.
Researching the public’s appetite for Hong Kong’s independence is at least one topic that already appears to be off the table. No major research institutes have published surveys on the touchy subject since September 2020.
In February, the pro-Beijing newspaper Ta Kung Pao published a series of articles attacking the University Grants Committee — the government’s adviser on education funding — for allowing money to be earmarked for research on Hong Kong’s sovereignty movement.
The paper also accused it of allowing foreigners, not Chinese, to dominate the funding committee.
“Hong Kong gradually has to choose between China and the international community,” the lecturer said. “It’s suffocating.”
