Academic freedom in Hong Kong: we are all Benny Tai|Kevin Carrico
The countries with the largest drops in their academic freedom scores over the past five years include Turkey, Zambia, Colombia, and of course Hong Kong. The fact that one has to think about the legal implications of referring to Hong Kong as a country in the sentence above tells one just about all that one needs to know about the state of freedom of speech and academic freedom there.
While academic freedom in Hong Kong has been in steady decline in recent years, in the eight months since the implementation of the silly National Security Law, an already disconcerting situation has become a full-blown crisis.
In my reading, the removal of Benny Tai from his position at Hong Kong University in July 2020, followed by his arrest in January of 2021 for his thinking and writing, signaled a truly unprecedented shift in the academic environment in Hong Kong that has not been fully appreciated… perhaps understandably, on account of all of the other horrible things that are currently happening.
If we pause to reflect on Tai’s fate, I would propose that there are two ways to read these developments.
The most common way to read this is to say: well, what can one expect? After all, he is Benny Tai of Occupy Central. He took a lot of risks in recent years getting involved in politics. The authorities’ treatment of him, while without a doubt disgraceful, has no real impact on the freedom of other scholars. After all, I’m not Benny Tai.
This narrative appears comforting and reassuring: the only problem is that it is wrong.
To those who peddle this soothing line, I can only ask: once the Chinese Communist Party has established its ability to detain one academic for speech crimes, do you really think that they will stop there? Of course not!
We have all seen that once the Chinese Communist Party has the power to disqualify a legislator, or ban a political party, or arrest someone for “speech crimes,” they are going to continually use and expand that power as they please until it impacts basically everyone.
They do not even have to arrest people: the potential for being arrested in and of itself will be sufficient to enforce an insidious self-censorship.
In this sense, the correct way to read Benny Tai’s fate is not to declare “after all, I’m not Benny Tai,” but rather to recognize that when it comes to academic freedom, we are all Benny Tai: the freedoms that we enjoy are only ever as strong as the freedoms enjoyed by those who push boundaries. And those who push boundaries are, as we can all see, currently sitting indefinitely in a prison cell.
Those boundaries are also, we must note, closing in and thus in greater need of pushback than ever. Earlier this month Education Secretary Kevin Yeung told the Legislative Council that universities would be required to update their curricula before the start of the next academic year to ensure full compliance with the National Security Law. Yeung furthermore asserted that universities will need to be ready to “prevent and suppress” any activities that violate the National Security Law.
That is going to be a bit of a problem, to put it gently. You see, the National Security Law is actually a horrible piece of legislation (drafted in Beijing, of course) that does not actually tell citizens what is legal or not, but rather raises an endless series of questions and uncertainties.
Is it ok to discuss Hong Kong independence if you are not openly advocating this idea? Can we discuss Taiwan’s history and current reality without having to pretend that China’s claims make sense? Can we discuss human rights in Hong Kong and current sanctions against officials without overstepping the bounds of regime security? Even looking at recent history that we all experienced firsthand, can we discuss the events of 2019 openly and honestly? Or is the only proper way to discuss recent history to form small reading and discussion groups (xiaozu) to adamantly denounce the “hooligans” and praise the Party’s sagacious policy of stability taking precedence over all matters?
At the end of the day, all of these questions boil down to one much more pressing question: can we speak our minds honestly and frankly, or do we need to constantly twist ourselves into compliance with the always arbitrary red lines of a system that, on account of its utter illegitimacy, sees threats to its security in basic openness and honesty?
The problem with the idea of “red lines” in academic freedom, as I have emphasized for years, is that the authorities drawing those red lines will only ever want to expand them ever further.
Insofar as the National Security Law is written in such a way as to render illegal anything that makes the commies uncomfortable, and insofar as there is a genuinely endless selection of topics for research and discussion that will make the commies uncomfortable, the only plausible endpoint for the National Security Law’s impact on academic freedom in Hong Kong is a continual expansion of these red lines, producing a university sector wherein, under the excuse of “complying with the National Security Law,” it only becomes safe to discuss the silly Belt-Road Initiative, the paramount importance of stability, and economic development.
That would not, however, be a university sector: that would be a propaganda sector, of the type that we see in universities in China.
As with all Hong Kong related matters, the city’s universities have the potential to offer the world so much more: if only the central and local governments would, in accordance with their promises, step back and allow them to do so. The current repressive approach is a tragedy not only for one academic, and not even just for a “handful” of academics, but rather for the Hong Kong university sector as a whole, as well as for global knowledge as a whole.
Everyone deserves better.
(Kevin Carrico is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Monash University and the author of the forthcoming Two Systems Two Countries: A Nationalist Guide to Hong Kong)
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