 Yeah, welcome to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. This is 12 o'clock block with doing global connections with Dean Newbauer. Dean Newbauer is an emeritus professor at the University of Hawaii in political science. Has had a long career. There are many jobs there, many lessons, many students, many travels. He's also a special advisor on international education to the East West Center. Welcome to the show, Dean. Nice to have you here. Thanks, Jay. Appreciate it. So we're talking about Hong Kong today. We're talking about, she was troubling things with the new national security law, which has really turned things upside down. And we're talking about the effect of that law and the likely implementation of that law by Beijing in the academic world. So I'd like you, if you don't mind, to describe what is the academic world in Hong Kong. It's got a good reputation. What has it been now famous? How academically prestigious is it? It is a relatively small in scope. They historically, there were eight universities in Hong Kong. The most recent one was the creation of the University of Science and Technology 35 years ago. And it zoomed up from being a newbie to being very prestigious in and of itself. The University of Hong Kong has been, and Hong Kong Baptist University have been well-known universities for a very long time. Lingnan University, which is the one that I've been most associated with, was for many, many years, the only liberal arts college on the island. And it had a place that which was somewhat different from the others, which were focused on typical research missions of the contemporary university. And during the time that I've been associated with over the last 10, 12 years, it has moved from being a liberal arts college to being a university. And so the eight of them had a distinguished career they have been notable over the past decade and a half, no, longer than that, two and a half decades for their attraction of regional students, especially at the graduate level. But the top universities have, as you may know, there's a new ratings game. I say new, it's been really in place for 20 plus years in Asia, invented by Shanghai Jatong University. And the Hong Kong universities, the top two have always figured very high in that. And now throughout Asia, the whole deal is where can you place in the rankings? Because every increment you get in the rankings, you get to go back to your ministry and say, we need more money. So what else is new in higher education, right? Well, go ahead. No, I was gonna say, so just to underscore your point that these are distinguished universities which have had a long career and especially the tie between British English, United Kingdom, higher education in Hong Kong goes back a century. So for the past couple of years, there's been what disturbance in Hong Kong, mostly over the extradition law, as I understand it. And we had the umbrella movement and a lot of the people on the street in those protest demonstrations were from the university. I'm thinking of Hong Kong university, but maybe others too. And it was a young demographic who has been, who have been demonstrating. And I wonder how that has affected or how the university or universities have affected that movement. What is the connection? What is the intersection between the student body, the faculty and those students who have been in the streets? I'm gonna give you a tiny bit of a roundabout answer to illustrate how this played out. I happened by chance to be there in June and I was there on the day that the students at both Hong Kong University of Hong Kong and the University of Science and Technology had their graduations interrupted by the students at the University of Hong Kong at a given moment. They were all assembled in cap and gowns and the typical kind of thing. And at a given moment signal from someone, they stood up and turned their chairs around so that the speakers on the platform were facing the back of their heads. And after about 15 minutes of that, the president of the university simply said, I'm sorry, we can't do this, it's canceled. At the University of Science and Technology that it was played out a little bit differently, but in each of those instances, they then touched off the demonstrations for that week. And that was the week that saw in effect the occupation of the University of Science and Technology. Both of those universities, as you perhaps remember, are physically present at major pathways in and out of the city. Science and Technology is right at the onset of the tunnel that links the new territories to the island. And it had the effect of shutting down the tunnel for the better part of a week. And so people couldn't go to work, et cetera, et cetera. So the direct implication of the students in the demonstrations was and has been significant. Once again, the university that I was at had the least of that. It's located in Chengdu, which is the northern part of the new territories. In the last two nights I was there, there were significant demonstrations in Chengdu, but not at the university. And so what we were seeing during that period and what we had seen in the previous several months is the expansion of the demonstrations away from the universities into public spaces. And of course, as it became more violent in the downtown area of the island, they resulted in significant amounts of physical damage, et cetera, et cetera. By the time I had come and gone over a 10 day period at the airport, the airport had moved from its first initial two occupations by the demonstrators to holding passengers at a distance to the airport so you could in effect only get into the airport after you had gone through a winnowing process. And that happened to public buildings all over the island as it began to shut down and to treat the demonstrators as disruptors of whatever business was going on. And that was certainly true of the universities. So one of the things, and once again when I was there in June and July, one of the things that was much in discussion is to what extent the students are a constitutive part of the demonstrations or not. And you could get all kinds of arguments about that depending on with whom you were having the conversation. What about the faculty, were they supporting this? Were they accepting of it? Did they speak at all about it? Well, and once again, Dean the Outsider, they spoke to me in what I took to be polite but guarded tones. Most of them were very cautious about expressing their views. When I was, and once again, an external faculty from outside, and I was teaching several classes while I was there, the students were very reluctant to talk to me for who knows what kinds of reasons, but perhaps the sense that they were making themselves vulnerable in terms of whatever they would say to me. My closest friends with whom once again in order not to embarrass them, I had guarded conversations were very cagey about it because I think rightfully in terms of what has now happened with this most recent law, they realized that whatever you say at point A can have a lifetime in point B, point C, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the things that I wanted to talk a little bit about today in the whole business of what is academic freedom on the other side of the law is the whole business of who's doing what. So one of the things that we've seen in the demonstration that we've heard in a variety of ways is, yeah, students are a part of that, but they're also professional agitators involved in the demonstrations. And another thing that I've heard much more recently than when I was there a year ago, June, was, you know, it's one thing to have demonstrations, but you have to break up all those buildings, you know. So, you know, at the end of the day, we have to do business. So you get that kind of discourse which comes into the academic freedom discourse. And so part of what I've heard people begin to be mindful of is to what extent do faculty now literally have to guard what comes out of their mouth given the fact that it's taken what a week to set up the local office that was premised a month ago as one of the consequences that might happen, et cetera, et cetera. And well, guess what, it did happen and it took a week. So now the issue is who's out there in the class? To what extent are they legitimate students? To what extent are the informers? Yadda, yadda, yadda. And so if we put another face on that, one that we're familiar from other kinds of contexts, the broad issue becomes can you have a free university in a society which is at least in terms of its basic capacities to a totalitarian? And that's the dilemma that Hong Kong is facing. And I think Hong Kong academics are now trying to figure out just what constitutes academic freedom. On the one hand, it's manifest in the sense that if you're giving a class and you're uttering anti-regime kinds of statements, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that's one thing. But at what point if you are a teaching history or sociology or goodness only knows contemporary biology, at what point are certain kinds of signals being invented, external to the environment, which then become enforceable through this new entity? I was just, prior to coming on, I was just reading a bit on one of my feeds about how the diplomatic corps has been ramped up to be much more aggressive in a variety of diplomats. You mean the PRC's diplomatic corps? Exactly, exactly. I'm sorry. And but now the PRC's diplomatic corps is present in Hong Kong in a way in which the older boundaries are all problematized in a way that I think is not at all extraneous to this conversation. I've been spending a lot of time in the last several years in Australia, in both Melbourne and Sydney. And the last time I was in Sydney, some of my senior colleagues in university began to talk to me about how difficult their life is with the enormous number of Chinese students that they have. And as you may or may not know, some 15 years ago, Australian universities said, in effect, these things cost too much money and we're gonna raise 20% of our bottom line for all of the state universities, meaning the national universities, with international students. And the two honeypots for the international students have been India and China. And originally there were a bunch of instances that you might recall in Melbourne where Indian students were beat up and abused by local populations for any number of reasons. And then in Sydney, more recently, more recently, there have been these instances where, that you might recall, where there was an effort to celebrate the Dalai Lama and 20,000 Chinese demonstrators showed up in effect and that had to be canceled. So... That's not academic freedom, I'm sorry. Exactly, exactly. So putting this in the broadest possible terms, the discourse of what constitutes academic freedom in these situations is changing. And particularly if you look in Australia, rather than in Hong Kong, because it is distinctly separate from China, you get into the old saw about what are you gonna do for money? To what extent are you selling your soul for money? And that becomes a vibrant theme currently in Australian higher education because they're concerned about all the concessions that they may be making as a result of that. In Hong Kong specifically, you now have, to go back to the point I'm starting to make, is you're teaching this class and there are 75 souls sitting out there. How many of them are informers? To what extent is the lecture that you're about to give, I'll put Dean in that situation, then I'll tell you an anecdote if you wish in a minute, why I stopped teaching in China. You say something which in your conventional context is absolutely legitimate and an implication that you never dreamed of gets thrown back in your face. So here's Dean, I had been teaching at a university in Shenzhen which is up in Manchuria, Northeast Armaling University for 10 years. I'd go up there every year or two. And I was up there on this instance because I was asked to give a guest lecture for some celebratory event. So here it is, maybe 250 people in the audience and they aren't just people from the university, they're people from the community and government and whatever, whatever, whatever. And so I was asked to do a presentation and so I put on my academic best clothes and actually a word Tai-Jae and did this presentation which I thought was pretty good. And I finished on time and people were politely receptive, gave me a nice applause, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm going back to pick up my briefcase and this guy comes up to me and two people are chatting with me and he literally, I'm not exaggerating, he literally elbows them out of the way and he sticks his face right here and he starts to lecture me about the fact that I called that thing over there, Taiwan. And he is furious and he's in my face for a good three and a half, four minutes before one of my friends sees what's going on and kind of comes over and issues him out of the way but not before I had agreed to call it a Chinese Taipei. So pretty easy to get off the beaten path and- But isn't your sense, Dean, that in China, in mainland China, there was a time, not too many years ago, say 10, 15 years ago, when a faculty member could give a talk to his class and go outside the normal boundaries that he didn't have to be so contained and constrained and that that has changed. Somewhere along the line it has changed and faculty members are punished if they do go outside the boundaries what the party would like discussed. Has there been a kind of evolution of that in mainland China? Yeah, very much so and you can just follow it regime by regime by regime. So by the time you get to Xi, you not only see all of the mechanisms that we've seen from the outside of creating his own sense of being there and to go back to where we're talking about the beginning, the conversation that Professor Young was involved in when the lecture from last week, when she points out that, his goal is to be the distinguished emperor, not only from the post-Mao period, but forever. So this is all about the new China, the One Belt, One Road, the whole South China Sea. You put all of those elements together and there is an important part of that. And there is a plan and an intention there and so Hong Kong is just a piece of that and what the demonstrations served, if you wanna put that kind of face on it, is they took the original timeline and just said, well, let's throw that out the window, that's not gonna happen. And we're here, folks, and if you don't like it, do something about it and there's something that they'll wanna do about it. Many, and this of course is what the United Kingdom so immediately are gonna take the next plane out. And so, the United Kingdom. Yeah, I mean, it's really a terrible situation for somebody in the faculty. Number one is, it seems to me that she and the Politburo or the Chinese government are blaming the universities for the demonstrations. The demonstrations are not good order and they require good order. This is very troubling, not only because it's happening in Hong Kong, but because that incentivizes people all over China to have demonstrations and then order is threatened and jeopardized which they're not gonna tolerate. So one of the, it seems to me, one of the big elements of his clamp down now on Hong Kong is to make sure that he's got a handle on the people in the universities because they're troublemakers there, whether that's true or not. And he's gonna go after them. And this law will enable him to punish them in draconian fashion, extradition without extradition. You bypass the whole discussion about extradition, just take them back to mainland China and try them in a Chinese court and suck it to them. And that's pretty threatening. And my guess is you only have to do a couple. Yes. So the object lesson there is extraordinary and I would predict exactly what you're saying that precisely that's gonna happen within the next six months or so. And once again, you know, former students that I have who are teaching there, I've been as diplomatic as I could, trying to reach out to them and say, is there any way that we can help you that makes sense? And they're, I think quite reasonable, recently being cherry about what they say in response because nobody has the assurance that their cell phone, their email is secure any longer because that law, as you pointed out in your previous presentation, that law opens up all of those communication channels to legitimate scrutiny by the regime. And let's again, be aware of the fact that what we were talking about 10 days ago, which was the eventual opening in Hong Kong of an agency to effectuate the law took exactly one week, you know? So two days ago, bang, there it is. So now they're on the ground and my sense is, and I simply could be wrong here, but my sense is not very, very few people in Hong Kong expected that it would happen so quickly. And I think they're right now, they must be terrified because you have all these organizations that are seeking democracy organizations that are, you know, they would like to preserve the autonomy to the extent they can the basic law to the extent that they enjoyed that and they're quitting those organizations left and right. They're getting out of those organizations because they know that if they get tagged with those organizations starting, what, July 1st, they're going to be in deep kimchi and they'll be the targets of the, of these new structures that Chinese are building to prosecute anybody who speaks against them or speaks against, you know, the ultimate one country, one system kind of aspiration here. But the other thing is that, you know, you raised the point a minute ago, Dean, about what, you know, what can they do? And it's not so easy, you know, it was very nice of the UK to offer, you know, to take them in. And the problem is that Hong Kong, the Chinese PRC is now requiring exit visas. So it's not as if you can get on a plane and leave and go to the UK. Furthermore, and I really don't know too much about this, but furthermore, there was a, some possibility that the US would take them. But I'm not sure that's playing out. Are you familiar with that? What are the faculty doing? What are the students doing to get away from this juggernaut? Well, and the answer is that the timing has, Abe, Dean is far enough away from that stuff. I'm a retired emeritus professor. And there is perhaps nothing more boring than having an emeritus professor try to tell you what's going on actually in a university because we're literally looking in from the outside. But my guess is that doing all of this in the context of the pandemic is no accident because the Chinese are smart of the regime is smart enough to realize that everybody's paralyzed. I mean, just look at what Britain was five weeks ago and look at what it is today. Look at what, one of the things I'm doing in currently right now is doing an external course in Taiwan. And one of the things that we're talking about are vehicles for dealing with the pandemic and the disruptions of the pandemic. How do you effectuate graduated education, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? You may have seen the thing that was in the paper two days ago, Harvard's decided that they'll have freshmen and sophomores in the fall semester and then they'll have juniors and seniors in the spring semester so that they can facilitate graduation. I mean, give me a break. Here you have one of those conservative institutions in the industry, the planet, higher education and you're asking them to do stuff not in a year but in six weeks that they never dreamed of before. And so trying to figure out how to put the Hong Kong situation in the midst of this is extraordinary. And I'll simply repeat my presumption that I don't think the timing is not holy but necessarily accidental. Yeah, it's a matter of distracting people from one issue with another issue and playing the issues against each other and you know that Xi Jinping is the kind of guy who does that. Totally. But you know, one thing I would like to cover before we close Dean is what is your perception from the trip and from your observation and your reading? What is gonna happen here? We start out with a global center of higher education as business the same thing. And now we have this extraordinary repression. We have the promise of much greater repression and punishment and the loss of democracy and autonomy coming soon, coming faster than you might think. What is gonna happen to academic freedom to these universities, to the faculty, to the students, what's gonna happen? Well, my guess is that and if we had the time we could talk this out on the continuum but the reality is that there'll be a good deal of learning going on in a short period of time by universities who tried this out and then try that out, find out what plays, what doesn't play. I think there'll be some celebrated cases of academic freedom shutdowns, et cetera, et cetera. And my guess is that the obvious will happen. Some of those will be most likely to happen in the social sciences and the humanities where values are so important. But my guess is and we could put this up on the board and see if it really happens. My guess is, excuse me, there'll also be some cases in fields like genetics where issues of academic freedom are given new boundaries and then there's something going on in all of higher education you may have noticed which is the new interfaces between industry and creativity, most of what we see is in the genetics, human frame. But that's going to occur in lots and lots of different areas. And so what I think will happen here is that several test cases will create new boundaries. Well, what about you, Dean? You taught over there, you have relationships over there, you're familiar with the thing from a 50,000 foot level and maybe a lot closer than that. You're gonna go back, do you have concern about going back? I know you mentioned you had concern about teaching in England, China, but what about going back to Hong Kong? How do you see that as an environment in which you would like to participate as a teacher or an advisor or just a fellow who comes around as an emeritus? I'm a co-director of a multi-university project which was at these West Center for many years and then we moved it to Hong Kong three years ago. It's called the Asia-Pacific Higher Education Research Project, AFIRB, and we've been doing annual meetings in Hong Kong with people from all over the planet and I'm having conversations right now with those folks about what's possible, what's desirable, what's prudent. I must say that my view of the situation and my wife's view of the situation are quite different and her view of the situation is you're not going back there. And have you read the part of the law where they can hide you off to mainland China and we'll never see you again, et cetera, et cetera? So all of us are gonna have to make a decision and I think part of where we are sensibly is to say, let's wait and see what that looks like pragmatically and that's why I say you have to see it on a continuum because there's a worst case situation and a best case situation. Yeah, who knows what other global events will intervene these days. There are so many events and they all have global import and impact. Take your pick. Thank you, Dean, Dean Newbauer, University of Hawaii but for many years Emeritus and East West Center as an advisor on international education. Thank you so much, Dean. Thank you, Jake. Nice to see you.