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.