Political Censorship in British Hong Kong

By Jerome A. Cohen

Michael Ng's new book looks like an important contribution to the study of free speech in Hong Kong under British rule; Mr. Ng's upcoming book talk on October 27th will be an interesting program. I wonder whether the establishment of the Universities Service Center by the Carnegie Corporation in Hong Kong in 1963-4 is mentioned in the book. The Hong Kong Government was very slow to give its approval, Carnegie’s representative was very cautious about finalizing arrangements for fear of offending the Brits and ultimately was sacked for being too ineffective.

The HKG was worried about offending the PRC and suspected that USC was going to be a CIA plant rather than a good faith home for visiting scholars of events in China. Carnegie asked me to take over arrangements for setting up the Center since I was in HK for a year of research, needed a place to work, and was a friend of several higher-ups in the UK administration as well as Lord Lawrence Kadoorie, a leading figure in the business community.

Lucian Pye, also in HK that academic year and already an established China scholar, would have been the obvious choice to lead the Carnegie effort but was deemed too close to the US Government, as he himself agreed. I recall how the seating at a dinner party was arranged so that the HKG’s foreign affairs chief could interrogate me for an evening of apparent sociability. It would be interesting to know whether HKG files reveal any of this.

What Will Become of HKU’s Law School?

By Jerome A. Cohen

Tomorrow’s decision about the sacking of Professor Benny Tai will have significance well beyond the Law School and Hong Kong University. Last April, Professor Tai was convicted on two charges of causing a public nuisance during Occupy Central in 2014. On Tuesday, HKU’s governing council will decide whether he can keep his job as an associate professor of law. HKU’s increasingly distinguished Law School, a bit over fifty years since its belated founding, has been struggling for several years over how to cope with all the pressures inflicted by 1 Country, 2 Systems. The implications of tomorrow’s decision will be profound. Although the university faculty has recommended against sacking, it is widely expected that the governing council, stacked with pro-Beijing political figures, will reject that recommendation. Either way, the ripple effects of the decision will reach much of the entire community, certainly the educational establishment at various levels.

Professor Benny Tai PHOTOGRAPH BY BOBBY YIP/LANDOV

One of the most immediate questions is whether it will affect the forthcoming decision to formally confirm the acting deanship of the exceptional Professor FU Hualing, who has nobly sought to hold the school together for the past two years following its inability to select an outside candidate. Whatever the outcome of tomorrow’s decision, and I am rooting for Professor Tai, I hope it will free the voices of many of the able, multinational law faculty, who until now, for both personal and professional reasons, have tried to remain relatively discreet in the face of doubts and provocations relating to the new National Security Law. Hong Kong needs the benefits of their robust public legal debate.

To Stay or to Go: Hong Kong Academics Face an Uncertain Future

By Jerome A. Cohen

Following the passage of the Hong Kong National Security Law, it was announced that educational materials will be subject to government “guidance,” and some libraries have begun to pull books by pro-democracy activists off the shelves. This bleak turn of events is obviously worrying to the academics living and teaching in Hong Kong and has been the subject of much discussion with some wondering if they should leave, or if it is even more important now that they stay.

These events have made me think of 1949-1950 when many able Chinese returned amid the excitement of creating a new and stronger China. Others returned later, especially during the optimistic 1953-57 period. Some important and talented people were not permitted to leave the US for China for several years after “Liberation,” especially Qian Xuesen, the Cal-Tech rocket scientist who later became famous for his role in PRC nuclear development. Some intellectuals even chose to go back in the 1960s just before the Cultural Revolution broke out. The great Harvard-based scholar Ch’u Tung-tsu, who in 1962 published Local Government in China Under the Ch’ing and who welcomed my interest in China during our brief meeting, had the misfortune to return not long after the book’s publication. I next heard of him when my wife bumped into him and a small group of Shanghai scholars climbing Huang-shan in mid-September 1979. Life would have been pleasanter and more productive for him had he remained at Harvard’s East Asian Research Center. 

My hope is that people stay if possible and continue to teach and research as they have previously done. As an example, before Hong Kong was returned to the PRC in 1997, China News Analysis chose to leave Hong Kong for Taipei, leading to the demise of the publication. Father Ladany, its editor when I was breaking into the field in the ‘60s, was a shrewd observer and critic of the PRC’s efforts to develop a legal system, and it is a shame that the publication left when it did. Of course, we all hope that those foreigners who stay on to teach sensitive subjects like history and law in HK will not suffer the fate of French academics who decided to stay on in Shanghai after “Liberation.” In a long piece that is about to be published and that is already on SSRN, I discuss, among other things, the PRC’s criminal punishment of Dean Andre Bonnichon of the Aurore University Law School in Shanghai. Fortunately, he was ultimately released and later vividly described the long incommunicado detention and coercion that he suffered, which hopefully will not happen to those who wish to stay in Hong Kong. Whatever happens, those on the outside will surely learn from the experiences of those who stay. We must wish them bonne chance! 

My take on The Harvard Crimson’s “The End of the Harvard Century” and The Yale Daily News’s “No Lux or Veritas”

By Jerome A. Cohen

People have been talking about this Harvard Crimson piece, “The End of the Harvard Century”. It is indeed interesting and offers many stimulating insights into a much bigger story. The reporter is impressive for an undergraduate. 

Unfortunately, he fails to mentions the long and mutually beneficial involvement of Harvard Law School with the PRC going back to late 1978 when the PRC State Tax Bureau, after 25 years of deliberation, suddenly decided that it wanted to send young officials to Harvard’s International Tax Program. Professor Bill Alford, who was criticized in the Crimson article, has done a superb job of promoting HLS legal cooperation with China for the past thirty years.

The irony in the Crimson story’s misleading reference to Bill’s role is that Teng Biao would never have had the opportunity for a year at Harvard if Bill had not immediately welcomed him upon learning that Teng wanted to spend the year at the Law School! That’s why Teng didn’t want to mention Bill’s name to the Crimson reporter. The pressure to cancel the meeting obviously came from higher Harvard authorities who have occasionally had difficulty applying the admonition of Chairman Mao to “walk on two legs”, fostering necessary and desirable cooperation with the PRC, despite or because of its Communist oppression, while at the same time allowing full campus freedom to protest that oppression and even supporting such protests in appropriate circumstances, as President Bacow did in Beijing. Not an easy challenge for any of us in the China field who seek cooperation and exchange with a great people who constitute over 20% of the world’s population.

An earlier Yale Daily News story about Yale’s complex relations with the PRC is also worth reading side by side with the Harvard Crimson story. Again, this is a very impressive piece of undergraduate journalism that gives us much to ponder. And again, there is much more to this important story yet to be told, including a fuller version of the fascinating tale of the father and son, Paul and Joseph Tsai, and their connections to Yale and to China/Taiwan. Paul Tsai, a Yale Law contemporary of mine and a very bright Taiwan lawyer from a leading Shanghai legal family, was a bitter ant-Communist who tried to discourage me from studying the Mainland in the 1960s. Joseph, an equally bright graduate of both Yale College and Law School, decided not to join the family law practice in Taipei but to cooperate with Jack Ma in building Alibaba and thus became phenomenally wealthy, a great Yale benefactor and a strong supporter of the PRC. 

I wish the author of the Yale Daily News report, having ably pointed out the credit that Yale’s then President Levin had given himself for bringing Yale as an institution (as distinguished from its many individual and departmental efforts) into cooperation with the PRC, had thrown this back at his successor President Salovey’s administration’s attempts to defend itself against its failure to criticize the PRC’s human rights atrocities by claiming that Yale as an institution always remains neutral. In comparison, Harvard’s President Bacow did better when visiting China. As a colleague pointed out, back in the old days, Yale University “was quick to condemn the country's apartheid regime”—“Neutrality” does not appear to be a justifiable defense, given that precedent as well as moral principles.

China’s continuing attacks on intellectual critics

By Jerome A. Cohen

Today tells the sad tale of two leading democratic figures named XU, each an important figure in China’s legal world and each now confined in different ways in the PRC.

I had hoped that Xu Zhiyong might escape from the PRC via an underground railway, but, having been caught yesterday, he may now be destined for a second long prison term.

Xu Zhangrun, the courageous Tsinghua University law professor, is suffering another form of detention — what is in effect solitary confinement at home, cut off from both his immediate surroundings and the world while nominally not formally detained.

Each recently issued a bold and scathing attack on the repression of the Xi Jinping years. One hopes that amidst the current turmoil their calls for freedoms of expression, democracy and establishment of a constitutional system might have been heard at home as well as abroad before being extinguished by the regime.

Xu Zhiyong in Beijing in 2009. Credit: Greg Baker/Associated Press

Xu Zhangrun (photo: ChinaChange)

Foreign universities and academic freedom in China

By Jerome A. Cohen

This piece by John Fitzgerald, Chinese Scholars Are Calling For Freedom And Autonomy – How Should Western Universities Respond?, is an important and timely appeal to Western universities to take the concrete, useful steps that he suggests.

It is especially urgent for those foreign universities that have major projects in China to commission honest, independent assessments of the current inroads made by Xi Jinping’s ever tightening measures and the implications of these repressive measures for the lives of the Chinese and foreign students, professors and scholars involved.

There have apparently been many disturbing developments that have been too often concealed, minimized or glossed over by relevant foreign academic administrators in the hope of carrying on their missions in parlous times. The foreign universities invested in China—New York University included—should now collaborate in openly sharing their experiences and challenges, join in collectively protesting to PRC authorities as appropriate, and expose the realities of contemporary education in China for world consideration.

This is the only way they can push back against the political corruption of their academic goals and give effective voice to the plight of their silenced Chinese colleagues.

Academic freedom in Hong Kong

By Jerome A. Cohen

Here is an important, thoughtful and balanced essay by Professors Marina Svensson and Eva Pils, Academic Freedom: universities must take a stance or risk becoming complicit with Chinese government interference. I hope that scholars in the free world will take steps to implement this essay’s excellent recommendations. This will require a profound international effort to alert academic colleagues as well as governments, the media and public opinion.

Professor Benny Tai of Hong Kong University Law School

As the cliche goes, a long march must start with a single step, and it seems wise to begin with an effort to protest the criminal punishment of Professor Benny Tai (戴耀廷) of Hong Kong University Law School as well as the current attempt to oust him from the university faculty.

I hope that civil libertarians and human rights advocates in Hong Kong and elsewhere are not too preoccupied with the current Hong Kong extradition crisis to assume this additional burden. We cannot afford compassion fatigue.

Academic freedom in today’s China

By Jerome A. Cohen

Prof. Zhang Qianfan (source: Wiki Commons)

A constitutional law textbook authored by Professor Zhang Qianfan, a renowned Chinese constitutional scholar, has reportedly been pulled from book shops. Professor Zhang is a Peking University (“Beida”) reformer and a great person known to many in foreign, especially American, comparative law circles. He gave a fine talk at NYU Law School’s US-Asia Law Institute a year or two ago. It is very sad to see him and other distinguished Chinese colleagues, and their teaching and books, under attack.

I wonder what happens to the books withdrawn from the public. Will they be burned or thrown in the trash? Will Xi Jinping lock up the Beida law library again as it was in 1979 when Jim Feinerman, the late Tim Gelatt, Ellen Eliasoph and other future notables became the first American exchange students under the “Open Policy”? Will Chinese law professors and students again be cut off from foreign law teachers and lawyers, as I was cut off from them while teaching Chinese officials in 1979-81?

I spent that time in Beijing not as a visiting professor or scholar but as guest of the Beijing City Government, which was desperate to train its officials for joint venture negotiations with potential foreign investors. Yet Chinese law teachers and students were not allowed to get together with me, then the only resident American law teacher in China, even informally and socially. One criminal law professor did succeed in inviting me to give a lecture. I must have muffed the opportunity by talking candidly, since I never heard from him again and don’t know what became of him. By contrast, PRC Party secretaries and mayors invited me to lecture to hundreds of eager business officials all over the Eastern seaboard. Are we going to witness a return to that era?

I was very glad to see that Reuters quoted Professor Zhang Taisu of Yale Law School, my alma mater, in support of Zhang Qianfan, no relative I believe. Taisu, a brilliant economic historian-legal scholar who has just been promoted to full professor, has already begun to make good use of his permanent academic tenure. I am sure that many others of the remarkable cohort of Western academics now in the China law field will also want to be heard.

Cornell, Renmin University and Academic Freedom

By Jerome A. Cohen

Here’s a good article containing Eli Friedman’s thoughtful explanation of what led to the break with his labor colleagues at Renmin University in Beijing. As he predicts, we will see more of these problems as the impact of Xi Jinping’s repression becomes more severe. 

Yet, as Eli recognizes, these are not new problems, only more apparent and numerous in the “new era”. Previous incidents of interrupted Sino-American academic cooperation have often gone unreported. Some were caused by changes in the Party leadership at a given institution or changes in local government policy. The U.S. side would often seek to find some compromise that would save the cooperation. In each case it would be necessary to balance the pros and cons of continuing with the original Chinese partner, and sometimes it was possible to find a better opportunity at another Chinese institution if the tipping point came at the initial place. 

In view of today’s increasing repression, these problems have become more challenging, and Eli has done a public service by ventilating Cornell’s experience and reaction.