HONG KONG — When Tian Feilong first arrived in Hong Kong as demands for free elections were on the rise, he said he felt sympathetic toward a society that seemed to reflect the liberal political ideas he had studied as a graduate student in Beijing.
“Hong Kong is, after all, China’s Hong Kong,” he said. “It’s up to the Communist Party to clean up this mess.” A number of these scholars, sometimes called “statists,” have worked on policy toward Hong Kong, the sole territory under Chinese rule that has been a stubborn enclave for pro-democracy defiance of Beijing. Their proposals have fed into China’s increasingly uncompromising line, including the security law, which has swiftly curbed protests and political debate.
“They’ve provided the reasoning and justification,” Fu Hualing, a professor of law at the University of Hong Kong, said of China’s new authoritarian scholars. “In a way, it’s the Carl Schmitt moment here.” Dissenting academics are maligned in the party-run news media and risk professional ruin. Xu Zhangrun, a law professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, was detained in July and dismissed from his job after writing a stream of essays condemning the party’s direction under Xi.
China’s authoritarian academics have proposed policies to assimilate ethnic minorities thoroughly. They have defended Xi’s abolition of a term limit on the presidency, opening the way for him to stay in power indefinitely. They have argued that Chinese-style “rule by law” is inseparable from rule by the Communist Party. And more recently they have served as intellectual warriors in Beijing’s efforts to subdue protest in Hong Kong.
But Xi’s government has pushed back, demanding greater influence. The authoritarian scholars, familiar with both Xi’s agenda and Hong Kong law, have distilled those demands into elaborate legal arguments. “They treat Hong Kong as if it were part of the West, and they treat the West as if it were the entire world,” Jiang recently said of Hong Kong’s protesters. “China’s rise has not, as some imagined, drawn Hong Kong society to trust the central authorities.”
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