"Authoritarians in the Academy": The National Security Law and the Shuttering of Academic Freedom in Hong Kong

Timing is everything. As I explain in my book Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech, the overlap in 2020 of the Zoomification of society due to COVID-19 restrictions with the passage of Hong Kong's national security law created a speech and privacy nightmare for higher education.

On June 30, 2020, Beijing enforced the national security law in Hong Kong, targeting alleged acts of separatism, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign countries. It was a vaguely-worded legislative weapon handed to authorities to crush the city's vibrant democracy and protest movements. But it did even more than that. The law was also explicitly written to apply to acts committed "outside the region by a person who is not a permanent resident of the region."

That means anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time, can violate this law.

For the hundreds of thousands of students moving to and from mainland China or Hong Kong and foreign campuses, to the academics who study the region, and for those with family in the city, it created a cloud of fear. They already had to contend with the possibility of violating the law with even anodyne political statements and facing arrest when stepping foot in the region. But with everything in higher education taking place online during the pandemic's early days, from classroom discussions to political debates among friends, the risk that offending statements could be surveilled and catalogued rose skyrocketed.

And as I document in my book, even American campuses were not immune to the law's shadow.

In today's excerpt from the book, though, I'd like to detail the effects of the laws within Hong Kong's education system itself, as a primer on how swiftly such laws can wholesale silence dissent.

Excerpt

Perhaps most emblematic of the swift changes in Hong Kong after the national security law's passage was the systematic removal of all physical remembrances of the Tiananmen massacre. Off campus, memorials and candlelight vigils were banned, in part under the guise of pandemic-safety gathering limitations, and individuals were arrested on the anniversary of the massacre for small signs of commemoration like carrying flowers or handing out blank pieces of paper.

On campus, administrators quickly set their sights on revered symbols memorializing the killings. The purge began at HKU with Danish artist Jens Galschiøt's "Pillar of Shame," an arresting sculpture of tormented and tortured figures representing those who died that day along with the inscription: "The old cannot kill the young forever." The twenty-six- foot sculpture had stood there for nearly twenty-five years.

In prior years, students would organize an annual cleaning of the statue as an act of remembrance for the dead. That is, until October 2021, when HKU ordered the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, the already disbanded group that organizes Hong Kong's Tiananmen vigils, to remove the statue within a week. HKU alleged that the sculpture's presence posed a "legal risk" to the university and was initially represented in the matter by Chicago-based law firm Mayer Brown, which withdrew from representing the university on this specific legal issue after criticism. Interestingly, this was not Mayer Brown's first foray into art removal efforts. In 2014, the firm represented plaintiffs who unsuccessfully sued to force Glendale, California to take down public art commemorating the "comfort women" forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese army in World War II.

Facing "direct pressure from Beijing's local offices," under the watch of security guards, and out of sight behind plastic curtains, large barriers, and boarded-up windows, HKU ultimately dismantled and removed the statue in the dead of night just a few days before Christmas. It was loaded into a cargo container and taken away by crane. Weeks later, while students were away on break, HKU would cover up another memorial, this time a slogan painted on a campus bridge: "Souls of martyrs shall forever linger despite the brutal massacre; Spark of democracy shall forever glow for the demise of evils."

Galschiøt said the statue's removal was "a disgrace and an abuse" that "shows that Hong Kong has become a brutal place without laws and regulations." It was "grotesque that they use the Western holiday, Christmas, to carry out the destruction of the artwork." Galschiøt asserted that he owned the statue and should be consulted on its removal, but was ignored by HKU.

If you were hoping for an outcry—or at least a response—from the dozens of American universities that partnered with HKU for study abroad and other programs, you would be disappointed. If these universities have any qualms about sending their students to a region where basic forms of expression and protest are increasingly penalized, they have not been vocal about it. Nor did they speak out when HKU announced a proposal to punish students who "bring disrepute," not defined, to the institution—a laughably vague provision that will surely be used to target students whose political persuasions or administrative criticisms prove a little too uncomfortable for skittish university leaders to tolerate.

As with the student union closures, the removal of the HKU Tiananmen memorial set off a domino effect, with two more occurring that week, also before dawn. Chinese University of Hong Kong took down its "Goddess of Democracy" statue, which stood at the campus for over a decade and mirrored one erected by students at Tiananmen Square, and Lingnan University removed artwork that included depictions of the Goddess of Democracy and "Tank Man," the Chinese protester who famously stood in front of a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Lingnan cited "legal and safety risks" and CUHK claimed an "internal assessment" led to the takedown of the "unauthorised statue." A small group of students responded by handing out "missing" flyers asking: "Have you seen her?" The Goddess of Democracy statue at City University of Hong Kong would be next on the chopping block. The office of then‒Chief Executive of HongKong Carrie Lam did not offer any comment in response to questions about whether authorities had any involvement in the campus purge.

"The turning point for me and my family was when they took down the Goddess of Democracy statue on Christmas Eve in the middle of the night. That's when I no longer felt safe," Marie told me when I was able to get back in touch with her months after she had left CUHK. Before the law passed, she and her colleagues "openly talked about anything and everything," but "suddenly, it all stopped" in 2020. "That was the scary part—just things changing overnight—nobody really thought it would be that bad."

Forced forgetting, it seems, is to be the future for Hong Kong. This systematic elimination of the symbols and markers of a legacy of protest is an especially cruel punishment for a city whose identity is so firmly intertwined with it. And as the Tiananmen memorials have vanished from campus, something else has taken its place—mandatory education about the very law that has changed the legal and social landscape of Hong Kong.

In fall 2021, the first wave of mandatory national security education began. At Hong Kong Baptist University, in the presence of photographers and CCTV monitoring, students attended a two-hour lecture and 200-page PowerPoint presentation about the national security law's provisions and punishments, followed by a required multiple-choice test. The test included characters like "Ms. Naughty" and "Mr. Breach," illustrating violators of the law.

At one point, the presentation asked, "Is criticizing the government a crime under the national security law?," and answered, "It depends. If the criticism involves any of the four major crimes under the national security law," then "it may be counted as a crime."

Excerpted from Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech by Sarah McLaughlin. Copyright 2025. Published with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

I'll be back tomorrow with an excerpt detailing how threats to China's critics abroad have infiltrated not just the U.S. but other campuses in other democracies around the world.