Yesterday's Tiananmen, Today's Hong Kong

Wednesday, September 30, 2020 - 4:30pm
Virtual
Asian Studies Program and the Department of International Relations Efron Speaker Series
 
Yesterday’s Tiananmen, Today’s Hong Kong
Victoria Tin-bor Hui
Associate Professor of Political Science
University of Notre Dame 
 
VIRTUAL EVENT: Join Professors Lee and He - https://lehigh.zoom.us/j/95964075663
 
Hui will narrate Hong Kong’s struggle for freedom and democracy through two protest slogans: from “Today’s Tiananmen, Tomorrow’s Hong Kong” in 1989 to “Today’s Tibet/Xinjiang, Tomorrow’s Hong Kong” in 2020. For three decades, Hong Kong people have struggled for democracy so as to preserve their preexisting freedoms. Chinese leaders, on the other hand, have tried to make Hong Kong safe for the Chinese Communist Party. International observers once believed that all was well in Hong Kong so long as Beijing did not roll out military tanks. This view missed the fact that the Tiananmen crackdown carried sub-military elements, especially outside of the capital city: the use of security agents to beat people to death in the city of Chengdu, the fomentation of “riots,” the narration of “the truth” about security forces and protesters , and the use of patriotic education and censorship to create “Tiananmen amnesia.” These are the same tactics that Beijing has deployed in Hong Kong in 2019-20.  
 
Victoria Tin-bor Hui is Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University and her B.SSc. in Journalism from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Hui studies contentious politics and Hong Kong’s democracy movement. She has testified at Congress and written for Foreign Affairs, the Journal of Democracy, Washington Post’s Monkey Cage, The Diplomat, and other channels. Hui’s core research examines the centrality of war in the formation and transformation of “China” in the long span of history. She has published War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe, “The Emergence and Demise of Nascent Constitutional Rights,” “Cultural Diversity and Coercive Cultural Homogenization in Chinese History,” “Confucian Pacifism or Confucian Confusion?”, “The China Dream: Revival of What Historical Greatness?”, among others.