Hong Kong universities under pressure as academics head for exits

As a political scientist in Hong Kong over the past seven years, Tetsuro Kobayashi found it increasingly difficult to access the public opinion data that played an important role in his research. This year, he decided to leave.

The effects of Beijing’s crackdown on civil liberties in the Chinese territory was one major factor in Kobayashi’s decision to give up his higher Hong Kong salary for a lower-paid position in Tokyo, he said.

“The space for freedom has diminished” in Hong Kong, he said.

Kobayashi is not alone in seeking a more liberal academic environment. Last year, 361 academics left Hong Kong’s eight public universities, a turnover rate of 7.4 per cent and the highest mark in more than two decades, according to official data.

Their decisions “to forfeit the high salary in Hong Kong and move to another country suggests a strong motivation to leave”, said Kobayashi, who left the City University of Hong Kong for Waseda University.

The territory, which boasts a handful of the world’s top-100 ranked universities, has long been an intellectual hub for western academics and a haven for liberal Chinese scholars. But researchers said shrinking academic freedoms and fears of falling foul of a sweeping security law were encouraging some to leave, pointing to a reshaping of the city’s higher education.

“Critically thinking researchers have left,” said Carsten Holz, professor of economics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, leaving junior hires pursuing “apolitical research . . . that they know is politically acceptable”.

Nearly half of the faculty in the social sciences division departed between 2020 and 2022, Holz said. Some took early retirement, while others sought “other job opportunities, including for research that could have endangered one’s safety and wellbeing in Hong Kong”. The result left China studies in the city “toothless”, he said.

Meanwhile, the proportion of mainland Chinese academics at the city’s public universities rose to 35 per cent last year, up from about 24 per cent in 2017, while that of local academics fell from 42 per cent to 33 per cent. The share of international academics remained at about 32-34 per cent.

The most recent official figures show HKUST had a turnover rate of 10 per cent among its more than 500 full-time academic staff in 2021-22, up from 4.5 per cent in the previous year.

“Staff turnover is a natural phenomenon,” Nancy Ip, HKUST president, said at a media event this year, adding that “based on our statistics, there has been a slight rise in the number of academic staff over the past five years”.

But the departure of a number of academics focused on Hong Kong and China since Beijing imposed a far-reaching national security law in 2020 has increasingly shone a spotlight on fears of the erosion of academic freedom in the territory. Many scholars have faced attacks in local state-affiliated media.

Ching Kwan Lee, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, left a position at HKUST in 2021 after she was targeted by state-controlled newspapers over comments made in an online forum the previous year that Hong Kong was a global city that “[doesn’t] belong to China. We belong to the world”.

Lee told the Financial Times that it had become “impossible [to] function and do my work as a scholar, writer and teacher”, particularly under the security law.

Overseas scholars have also been denied visas to Hong Kong, such as US human rights law academic Ryan Thoreson last year. Hong Kong’s immigration department declined to provide data on the number of academics denied visas since 2020.

As some academics exit, Beijing has pushed Hong Kong’s higher education institutions — which long drew scholars and students to the former British colony — to be less critical. The Hong Kong Liaison Office, the Chinese government’s representative in the city, told university heads in February to “cultivate” staff who “love the country”.

In July, pro-Beijing lawmakers in Hong Kong called for the “de-westernisation” of the Research Grants Council, which decides funding priorities for the city’s public universities.

In 2021, HKU’s governing council removed the “Pillar of Shame”, a statue commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, sending shockwaves through the academic community.

The increasing pressure is also diminishing Hong Kong’s longtime role as a perch for foreign academics to study the mainland.

The Universities Service Centre for China Studies, which was founded in 1963 by leading China scholar Jerome Cohen, was in effect folded by its host, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, in 2020 under a restructuring plan that merged its holdings with the main library.

CUHK, which had absorbed the centre in 1988, denied that political considerations were behind the decision, but academics said the move could sacrifice some of the centre’s important functions.

State-affiliated newspapers in Hong Kong had accused the centre in recent years of being susceptible to foreign influence, citing its past US funding and the central involvement of one of its former directors in pro-democracy protests in 2014.

At the same time, researchers’ access to China has become more difficult, according to Willy Lam, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation think-tank, who formerly taught China studies at CUHK.

“The extent to which [academics] can be allowed to, for example, interview officials or read archives in Chinese libraries, such liberties have become more and more restricted,” he said.

The Fulbright programme, long a reliable pipeline for American academics to reach Hong Kong and mainland China, was suspended in 2020 in reaction to the national security law.

The Hong Kong government insisted that academic freedom was “an important social value treasured” by the territory which has “not been altered in any way and remains in full force”.

Kobayashi, whose research includes assessing the impact of repressive governance on support for opposition policies in Hong Kong, said the territory still offered more academic freedom than the mainland.

“However, the situation is fluid,” he said. “Any research, regardless of its nature, runs the risk of being labelled as ‘anti-China’ and becoming a target of attack.”