By October 2019, when the insurrection was at its peak in Hong Kong, most of our universities were either barely functioning or completely closed down. At the University of Hong Kong, for example, the fevered, extremist wing of the insurgency essentially took over the Pok Fu Lam Road campus, shutting down all teaching and normal academic life while going on a destructive rampage (which included wrecking all the vital lifts connecting HKU to its MTR station) that still beggars belief.
Meanwhile, our students from the Chinese mainland were taking exceptional precautions to escape physical harm. They avoided all unnecessary movement around Hong Kong and stopped speaking Putonghua in public spaces, where possible. Eventually, virtually all of them had to flee to safety on the mainland.
Most academics in Hong Kong did not write about these frightening attacks on academic freedom. Some may have been uneasy about the insurrection yet they felt bonded to it and its demands, no matter how violent and destructive it became. Others appeared to revel in the massive challenge to basic constitutional order that was unfolding, somehow cleaving to a belief that Hong Kong may need to be bombed onto the road of everlasting democratic bliss. Many others, frankly, had seen how viciously effective intimidation by these crusading radicals could be — once they had you in their crosshairs.
It is extraordinary to recall this, but HKU got off relatively lightly: Both the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong fared far worse.
It would be gratifying to report that this sustained, horrific assault on all aspects of academic freedom received apt coverage in the dominant Western media outlets, which were watching the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region night and day. Alas, such reporting was taboo. The metanarrative, which stressed heroic democracy activism, ensured that terrifying, awkward facts such as these were either airbrushed from the storyline — or sanitized or buried.
That ingrained resistance to writing on academic freedom in Hong Kong has now evaporated, however. Last month, The Economist ran a story headlined “Unhallowed halls: Academics in Hong Kong suffer curbs on their freedoms”. Of course, there is now no need to besmirch the reputation of sainted protestors: The Economist can point the finger at their new bugaboo, the National Security Law for Hong Kong.
Never mind that it is the NSL which has played such a crucial role in pulling Hong Kong out of the terrible nosedive it was experiencing, propelled by the exploits of the insurgency at its overwhelming worst. This story simply glides past this difficulty and presses on with vivid tales of sinister doings, quoting anonymous sources.
It is true that greater security scrutiny is now more evident in Hong Kong, and academics, among others, must pay attention to this. This is certainly not peculiar to Hong Kong.
In Australia, universities are currently subject to prominently intensified supervision by the security services. A report in the Sydney Morning Herald in March explained how leading Australian universities had ramped up their security service interaction “dramatically” over the previous three years because of a perceived escalating level of interference by China and other foreign governments. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation confirmed, in the same report, that it had 60 engagements with leading Australian universities in 2020. Several universities called for still more help from ASIO and other security agencies. New stringent guidelines for offshore interaction, especially with China, now apply.
Several leading Australian universities feel such a need to badge themselves as wholly patriotic that they are paying handsomely for private risk assessment by a consultancy led by a former journalist who claims to be an expert on the operations of the Communist Party of China. This suggests that these universities consider that their own academic staff cannot be trusted to observe the new guidelines. Scott Burchill from Deakin University in Australia argued in a recent article that “It is not clear whether this is designed to appease Canberra’s increasingly unhinged Sinophobia or to preempt and hopefully ward off further government erosions of academic independence.”
Angela Lehmann, an international education specialist based in Melbourne, explained in another recent article that, for some time, she worked as an assistant professor at Xiamen University, in China. Now back in Australia, Lehmann argued that “Navigating the surveillance mechanisms and culture at a Chinese University is far simpler than navigating the ideological surveillance currently underway in Australia,” adding: “Here in our freedom-loving, free-speaking liberal democracy I find myself more aware that I am self-censoring what I can and I can’t say about China.”
We know from reports which do emerge that the restrictions on academic freedom are also intensifying within other members of the Five Eyes security alliance. In Canada, security personnel are inviting themselves to speak with senior academics. In the United States, the Department of Justice launched the “China Initiative”, which is focused on Chinese academics and students in America. In 2018, the FBI reported that it had over 2,000 active investigations running. Few charges and fewer convictions have emerged, but the level of racially focused academic intimidation is appalling.
Despite this welter of concerning evidence, it is remarkably difficult to find anyone raising headlined concerns in mainstream Western media outlets about the damaging impact of this spy-based influence on academic freedom in Australia and well beyond. Meanwhile, the Hong Kong experience is now speedily analyzed in lurid, film-noir detail.
The Economist argues that, today, “a climate of fear has enveloped (Hong Kong’s) campuses”. In fact, that truly happened in 2019. Mind you, the story does confirm that an intense form of Sinophobic fever continues to envelop the publication.
The author is a visiting professor in the Faculty of Law at Hong Kong University.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.