According to a well-known adage, academic politics are the most vicious of all, because the stakes are so low. However, a bitter battle over an appointment at Hong Kong’s most prestigious university has become the biggest story in town, the subject of passionate debate, candlelight vigils and front-page headlines.
Late on Tuesday, the governing council of the University of Hong Kong (HKU), in a 12-to-eight vote, rejected a search committee’s proposal to appoint a professor and former dean of the university’s law school, Johannes Chan (陳文敏), to a higher post. In another place, such news might have never left the confines of the campus newspaper.
However, supporters of Chan say the vote is the latest sign of the growing influence of China’s authoritarian politics in the vibrant civic life of Hong Kong, where many fear that the territory’s cherished freedoms are being eroded. They say Chan was rejected because of pressure from Beijing.
Illustration: Yusha
The issue has stirred memories of the months-long sit-in protests — over a China-approved plan for Hong Kong’s elections — that shut down major thoroughfares in the territory last year. One of the leaders of those demonstrations, which began a year ago last week, was Benny Tai (戴耀廷), a pro-democracy advocate who was a professor under Chan at the law school.
Chan, who specializes in human rights and constitutional law, is also a member of a pro-democracy group, Hong Kong 2020. He has been strongly criticized by pro-China news outlets in the territory since he became a likely candidate for promotion to the post of pro-vice chancellor.
In January, two Chinese government-owned newspapers criticized the academic record and performance of Chan’s department as being below international standards, charges that Chan rebutted. The newspapers, Ta Kung Pao and Wen Wei Po, used unpublished, leaked documents to support their case.
Chan’s promotion was in the hands of a 22-member committee, on which university employees and students are outnumbered by members from outside the university. Six of its members are appointed by Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying (梁振英), an active supporter of Beijing’s policies toward the territory. At least five members are delegates to the Chinese National People’s Congress or its advisory panel, and as such are obligated to support the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) line at the risk of expulsion.
The possibility that Communist orthodoxy had swayed the decision was not lost on academics specializing on Chinese politics. New York University professor Jerome Cohen said the committee’s decision, which was made behind closed doors, employed the Mao Zedong-era (毛澤東) political tactic of zheng zhi gua shuai (政治掛帥), or ‘‘politics in command,’’ which places the political imperative — in this case, preventing the promotion of a pro-democracy university official — above all else.
“This is very sad news for Hong Kong’s autonomy and freedom,” Cohen said in a statement.
Under a formula called “one country, two systems,” Hong Kong has been allowed to run its own internal affairs and retain its culture of civil liberties — including rule of law and press, academic and assembly freedoms — since its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 after more than 150 years as a British colony.
However, under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), who rose to power in 2012, the Chinese government has been taking a more heavy-handed approach to Hong Kong, emphasizing the “one country” part of that formula. Xi has sought to stamp out ideas that he sees as a threat to the CCP’s more than six-decade monopoly of power, including the influence of values embraced in Hong Kong.
“Xi Jinping is determined to eradicate from China what might be called the ‘seven deadly sins’ of Western values,” Harvard University professor Roderick MacFarquhar, who focuses on Chinese history and politics and is currently in Hong Kong, wrote in an e-mail.
“Hong Kong is a poster child for those values, and the rejection of an HKU committee’s choice for pro-vice chancellor, because the nominee was politically incorrect by Beijing standards, is an example of the ongoing battle to whittle away those ‘sins’ where they are most flagrant,” MacFarquhar wrote.
Fears in Hong Kong over Beijing’s growing influence came to a head last year, after China’s National People’s Congress set down rules for electing the territory’s top official that all but ensured that only candidates approved by Beijing could appear on the ballot. That decision prompted the demonstrations that turned parts of the territory into protest camps for months.
Chan’s supporters held a candlelight vigil at the university on Tuesday night after the results of the vote against his promotion were announced and the news dominated local coverage the next day.
Hong Kong Legislator Ip Kin-yuen (葉建源), a member of one of the university’s alumni associations, said in a video posted on Facebook that it was “the saddest day for Hong Kong University in the past 100 years.”
The council’s deliberations on Tuesday night were confidential, but Billy Fung (馮敬恩), one of its two student representatives, released a summary of the meeting on the Internet within hours of the decision.
According to Fung, committee members strongly criticized Chan, saying he was not qualified for the post, as he did not have a doctorate or sufficient academic publications, lacked integrity and had only advanced as far as he had professionally because he was a “nice guy.”
Council chairman Leong Che-hung (梁智鴻) on Wednesday said that the panel might take action against Fung for his breach of confidentiality.
Speaking with reporters on Wednesday, Chan said that the reasons given by the council members who voted against him, such as his lack of a doctorate, went against the judgment of academics on the committee and made “a mockery of the search process.”
Additional reporting by Alan Wong
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