Jeffrey Wasserstrom - Hong Kong's Struggle, 2003-2023: A Roundtable
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
Main Malet Street building room 538
This roundtable will feature a mix of journalists and academics in fields ranging from literature and law to history and political science who have written on Hong Kong. The conversation will look back at major protests of the twenty-first century and discuss recent repression and curtailment of press freedom and the rule of law in that former British colony that became a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China in 1997. A twenty-year window is a valuable one to use. Some of the first important demonstrations after the Hong Kong Handover took place in 2003 to protest plans to impose a new security law on the city that many feared would curtail civil liberties, and these succeeded in their goal. In 2023, meanwhile, the local authorities are using both old subversion laws leftover from the time of British rule and the harsh National Security Law Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020 to punish and persecute activists and journalists. Holding the event on 5 June is also symbolically meaningful. It will take place one day after the anniversary of the 4 June massacre of 1989 that crushed the Tiananmen movement, an event that used to be commemorated publicly each year with gatherings in Hong Kong's Victoria Park but no longer can be marked this way without risk of arrest, and on the exact anniversary of the day the iconic Tank Man photograph was taken.
Moderator: Isabel Hilton
Panelists: Edmund Cheng, Jessie Lau, Eva Pils, Michael Tsang, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Ray Yep
Sponsored by Birkbeck College [AND TBD]
Hilton is a contributing editor at Prospect magazine and visiting professor at the Lau Institute, KCL
Cheng is a political scientist at City University of Hong Kong and a visiting fellow at Oxford
Lau is a freelance journalist and an editor with the Nu Voices collective
Pils is a law professor at KCL and a specialist in human rights issues
Tsang teaches literature at Birkbeck College and writes on both Hong Kong and Japanese culture
Wasserstrom teaches history at UC Irvine and is a visiting professor at Birkbeck College
Yep is a political scientist affiliated with the University of Bristol's Hong Kong History Centre
Contact name:
Department of History, Classics and Archaeology