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.

Hong Kong Universities Ramp Up Suppression of Dissident Views

By Jerome A. Cohen

This is a helpful report on the Shiu Ka-chun case. Hong Kong Baptist University recently told Shiu, an opposition lawmaker who was involved in the 2014 Occupy Central protests, that it would not renew his lecturing contract, with no reasons given and no opportunity to be heard. I know nothing about Shui but sympathize with his comments about HKBU’s refusal to renew his teaching contract. He described the decision as “political persecution.”

Activists Lee Wing-tat, Chan Kin-man, Benny Tai, Chu Yiu-ming, Tanya Chan and Shiu Ka-chun arrive at the court for sentencing in Hong Kong in April 2019. Reuters

Indeed, no opportunity for him to ask why or present his case? No waiting until the judicial appeals process on his criminal conviction for participating in the Occupy Central movement has run its course? No reasons for HKBU’s decision, even though it is a publicly funded university? The university is hiding behind the shameful excuse that it is remaining silent in order to protect the “privacy” of the harmed teacher, while hiding its reasons from the very person whose privacy is ostensibly being protected. “Privacy” is a pathetic excuse for the public university to hide behind.

Simultaneously, pro-democracy activist Professor Benny Tai was fired today from Hong Kong University by a HKU council vote of 18-2. Note that Nathaniel Lei, an undergraduate representative on the council who spoke out against the decision, pointed out that if Tai wins his appeal, the council decision “may be reviewed.” We should not hold our breath, of course, that the appeal will be successful or that success might lead to reversal of the academic decision. Additionally, how should we interpret the failure of Vice-Chancellor Zhang Xiang to vote? A gesture of opposition to the council action? Or of impartiality or political paralysis? Note the hypocritical discretion of the university council in identifying the matter solely as “a personnel issue concerning a teaching staff member.” What a joke to claim that this is purely an internal matter and that outsiders should respect the university’s autonomy! Cheers for the council’s endorsement of “impartial due process”! And recall the rejection by the council of the nomination of former law Dean Johannes Chan, a great person, for higher university responsibility!

For me these cases are a matter of special interest because of the contrast it presents with my own experience at Harvard during the height of the Vietnam war controversy in America. In 1968, I believe, the TODAY show asked me to debate with Assistant Secretary of State Averell Harriman the right of the US air force to bomb Hanoi hospitals that reportedly were plainly marked with Red Crosses on the roof. Harriman himself and some wealthy Harvard alumni reacted strongly to various university authorities the next day about my criticisms of the US government. However, Harvard President Derek Bok told me to go on doing what I thought was right. He did not abstain!

What’s Next for Xu Zhangrun?

By Jerome A. Cohen

Although Professor Xu Zhangrun, a leading and outspoken scholar of Chinese law, society, politics and history, was released after six days of detention by Beijing police, he’s now been dismissed from Tsinghua University and any public office. I wish Xu hadn’t returned from Japan and perhaps now he does too. His next move? One option is to go on occasionally publishing in China or, more likely, abroad and get locked up much more seriously like Xu Zhiyong and so many other able, outspoken reformers. Another is to try to keep silent, do serious research and contemplation to the extent extensive “non-release release” restrictions permit, and wait for a better day. The third is to leave the country at least for the immediate IF he and his family are allowed to do so. Will the Party let him go?

Former Chinese law professor Teng Biao, whose academic career followed a similar downward political spiral and who was three times actually kidnapped by PRC police in China, happened to be in Hong Kong with one of his children when the Party’s final blow landed on his career in the country. But it took his wife and their older child a year to escape and only after a harrowing 26-day trip from Beijing to Boston, including a secret motorcycle rescue via Southeast Asia.

Xu Zhangrun

Our 709 commemoration evokes the memory of the 1957-58 anti-rightist movement

By Jerome A. Cohen

The ongoing suppression of human rights lawyers and legal scholars in China makes me recall the huge attack that was dramatically launched against them in early June 1957 as Mao decided to end the dangerously developing “Hundred Flowers Bloom” Campaign by launching the Anti-Rightist Movement. One of the major targets was law professor YANG Zhaolong, Harvard Law SJD and protégé of former Dean Roscoe Pound, who played a prominent role in Republican China’s legal development and who decided to stay on to help build a post-Liberation legal system. He was often attacked in existing legal publications of the day, detained and punished as an “extreme rightist” and, after his release, again punished severely during the Cultural Revolution as a “counterrevolutionary”. In 1971, Yang was first sentenced to death but, because he was so well-known abroad, this was reduced to life imprisonment. His wife and son also suffered severely. After Mao’s death and Deng’s rise, Deng, who had presided over the horrendous Anti-Rightist Movement as the Party’s Secretary-General, began the process of rehabilitating (平反píngfǎn) many of those who had been most unfairly abused. Yang died in 1979 some time after his release and was posthumously rehabilitated in 1980. In 2017, Fudan University managed to get by the censors a massive volume of Yang’s collected writings, mostly but not entirely from the relatively freer pre-Liberation days, in tribute to him but also as an impressive, implicit signal of the continuing loss to China’s rule of law efforts.

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.

Orwell has arrived: China’s surveillance of social media

China’s cyber monitoring leaves little room for free expression even among small groups.

Eva Dou of the Wall Street Journal has a great report on “Jailed for a Text: China’s Censors Are Spying on Mobile Chat Groups.” It is worthy of a Pulitzer Prize for the insights it gives into contemporary China and its legal system. It illustrates the currently enhanced degree of repression and the impact it has on ordinary citizens. Orwell has arrived. The increasingly smooth integration of China’s cyber monitoring systems, its various police organizations, its “Justice” Ministry, its prosecutors and its judges – no small feat – now leaves little room for free expression even among small groups.

Of course, as Mr. Chen, the protagonist in Eva Dou’s story, discovered, one is really tempting punishment by joking on WeChat about one of the most powerful officials in China, Mr. Meng Jianzhu, who had served as chief of the Ministry of Public Security before becoming czar of the Party’s all-powerful Political-Legal Commission that controls and coordinates all the institutions that comprise the legal system.

This story has so many implications. It shows how many intelligent, ambitious Chinese who have improved their lives under the Communist system have gradually awakened to its methods and costs and come to question and even modestly challenge it. The story also illustrates the fate that many challengers, and the lawyers who are asked to help them, quickly suffer.

Large numbers of Chinese like Mr. Wang are nagged by a sense of injustice that is universal, no matter what Xi Jinping preaches, and become petitioners who find no relief in the system. Many lawyers who have never thought of themselves as human rights advocates nevertheless become drawn into situations that make them feel compelled to vindicate the lawyer’s obligations and then are disbarred and often arbitrarily detained, criminally punished and then eternally harassed after serving their formal jail terms.

Even Mo Shaoping, a lawyer brave enough to have signed Charter 2008, whose prominence as China’s most famous human rights lawyer has allowed him more continuing scope for courageous defense than many other colleagues, has now lost his WeChat account. This is a warning shot across the bow from the Party, which has long restricted his professional activities without risking the domestic and foreign condemnation that his detention would incur.

Of course, if the draft law to formally establish the National Supervisory Commission is enacted next March, it will be even easier for the Party to detain rights activists, including lawyers, without having to violate the country’s laws that are now so blatantly ignored or distorted.

A Conversation With Ai Weiwei

Here are the video and transcript of a conversation I had yesterday at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York with the courageous and outspoken Chinese artist/activist AI Weiwei.

Support silent supporters of the rule of law in China

Human Rights lawyer Teng Biao, Photo credit: May Tse/South China Morning Post

Here is a stimulating op-ed by Chinese law scholar and activist Teng Biao. I hope US funders, public and private, will take it into account. I believe, after giving due regard to Teng Biao’s admonition against funding the oppressors, funders should continue to support those non-Chinese institutions that do not pull their punches in studying and reporting on legal developments in China while also continuing to conduct legal and human rights education of not only Chinese lawyers but also Chinese judges, prosecutors, justice officials and even police.

The point that needs greater recognition here is that hundreds of thousands of legal specialists in China are extremely unhappy with Xi Jinping’s oppressive policies, policies that they feel forced to live with and practice while awaiting a less repressive regime and the renewal of true legal reforms. At a time when they are being ordered to reject universal human rights values, we should not abandon these silent supporters of the rule of law, but should keep up contacts and professional nourishment that will sustain them until a better day dawns.

Years ago, the late Senator Arlen Specter asked me to emphasize this point in a letter to then House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, recalling the importance of foreign funded legal education and training given to officials of the Chiang Kaishek dictatorship in Taiwan and the Park Choon-Hee dictatorship in South Korea. Those efforts paid rich dividends when political circumstances permitted legal liberalization. Indeed, they helped fuel legal officials’ opposition to dictatorship, as occurred when Taiwan prosecutors and judges rebelled against their masters and successfully established their independence of political interference.

The U.S. Congress, other countries and private foundations should also fund basic research on the many complex aspects of the evolving Chinese legal system, not only education and training in China but also efforts to enhance foreign understanding of both contemporary events and the country’s political-legal culture.

In addition, there is a great need to fund the support and activities of the increasing number of Chinese refugee lawyers, law professors and human rights activists who, like Professor Teng, are turning up outside China as a result of the terrible situation they confront in China.

Finally, in fairness to the America Bar Association, we should note that, after long internal debate spawned by external criticisms, it has decided to establish an international human rights award and next week at its annual meeting in San Francisco this new award will be bestowed, in absentia, on another of China’s courageous human rights lawyers, Ms. WANG Yu, who, sadly, is jailed in China and awaiting criminal conviction and a long prison sentence. 

More Questions on the American Bar Association Story: Who in Washington Ordered the ABA’s Book Publishing Unit to Rescind the Offer to Teng Biao?

By Jerome A. Cohen

The report by Isaac Stone Fish in Foreign Policy, “Leaked Email: ABA Cancels Book for Fear of ‘Upsetting the Chinese Government’,” which I wrote about earlier this week here, has finally stimulated the beginnings of an ABA response.

An email from Jen Leung, the Country Director of the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative China Program, on the China Law Listserv makes it clear that the Beijing office of the ABA’s Rule of Law Initiative (ROLI) had no knowledge that some people in Washington headquarters, where ROLI’s central office is located, reportedly influenced the ABA’s book arm to rescind its offer to Teng Biao. The email implies that ROLI’s central office in Washington, which directs its Beijing office and has fought vigorously and successfully to maintain the valuable work its Beijing staff is doing, also was unaware of the ABA’s book offer to Teng.

Presumably this will be confirmed by either the ABA’s internal investigation or further journalistic efforts. Whatever the outcome of that specific inquiry, however, it is clear that, despite the ABA’s belated and pathetic attempt to deny the reason its employee originally gave for its embarrassing change of mind, there is nothing fictional about the Foreign Policy story. What we don’t yet know is who in Washington ordered the book publishing unit to rescind the offer.

To its credit, another wing of the ABA, the ABA Journal, has published three articles reporting on the Chinese Government’s current repression of lawyers, and, under the leadership of the highly respected sociologist of law Terry Halliday, the American Bar Foundation has done important research on the plight of those Chinese lawyers courageous enough to try to defend human rights. So perhaps there are advantages as well as disadvantages to the ABA’s lack of efficiency regarding its China policy!

It will be interesting to see whether this important fuss leads to a debate during the annual meeting of the ABA House of Delegates this summer. Surely some outstanding ABA members would like to take part.

China’s miraculous recent efforts to reform people into “socialist new men”!

Photo: Voice of America, January 2016

Lee Bo, one of the Hong Kong Publishing Five whose disappearances last year have been widely reported, now says he will never publish banned books again.

Let’s try to look at the possible bright side to the PRC’s recent successful attempts to insult our intelligence and challenge our credulity. One of the more idealistic aspects of the Bolshevik Revolution was the honest aspiration of Lenin’s first Minister of Justice to create a new, truly revolutionary system of punishment that would transform criminals into “new socialist men”. Chairman Mao’s first decade in national power prominently featured a similar goal, one that gradually, almost imperceptibly, yielded to the reality that it is easier for governments to kill people than transform them.

But is it now possible that Xi Jinping has outdone his much-admired Helmsman by miraculously transforming, in jig time, the Hong Kong Publishing Five and other alleged offenders who have recently confessed their sins in public, even without being prosecuted, not to mention convicted? By the time we mark the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution next year, will there be further evidence that it has belatedly achieved one of its most ambitious goals?  

Foreign China Specialists and Self-Censorship

By Jerome A. Cohen

Here is an interesting essay by  Jeffrey Wasserstrom – “Why aren’t you banned yet,” a fine example of the complexities most of us puzzle through in trying to remain honest critics. Given my age, reluctance to travel and principal research agenda (my memoirs), I am, as lawyers like to say, an “a fortiori” case of the foreign China specialist who expresses unfettered opinions on the assumption that “it’s now or never”!

I am reminded, however, of the day in Wuhan, about a dozen years ago while taking part in a conference, when that very good Law School’s Party secretary unexpectedly asked me to do an additional speech to the school plus a large group of local lawyers. I said I would if I could choose the topic. The secretary – a dynamic, middle aged woman professor of criminal law whom I did not know well – readily assented, and I chose abolition of “reeducation through labor” (RETL), which I thought was a bold choice that would test my host. Out of deference to the host, whom I did not want to get into trouble, I called for systematic but gradual elimination of RETL rather than its immediate abolition. To my surprise and embarrassment, comments from both the lawyers and students in the audience made it clear that they thought I was being too conservative and that RETL had to go immediately! Of course, although RETL was finally abolished a couple of years ago – at least in name, today’s political climate in Xi Jinping’s China could not be so openly receptive to limiting the arbitrary power of the police to detain, which unfortunately persists.

Wasn’t it TS Eliot who wrote: ”Teach us to care and not to care”? I always wondered what he meant.