Recorded on March 25, 2021.

Ethical Dilemmas of the China Scholar

About the event

This panel will explore the diverse ethical challenges that may arise when teaching and researching about China from outside China. Concerns about ethical field research and censorship pressures are not new but have been heightened by China’s authoritarian turn and recent events in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. Not since the Vietnam War has China scholarship been so politicized. At the same time, visiting students and scholars from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the PRC on Western campuses are increasingly at odds with each other and vulnerable to censorship and doxing on social media. The pandemic has added a new dimension as classroom lectures, and discussions on digital platforms are easily recorded, making professors and students concerned about their remarks being shared beyond the classroom and taken out of context. Many PRC students at Western universities are taking their classes remotely from inside China’s firewall, raising concerns about surveillance and censorship. China scholars are faced with a never-ending series of decisions that could have important implications for their own careers and those of their students. One possibility is that students are deterred from specializing in China, reducing the ranks of expertise at a time when more, not less, knowledge about China is needed.

This event is part of the Timothy A. Gelatt Dialogue on the Rule of Law in East Asia

General Readings

The Academic Freedom and Internationalisation Working Group, Model Code of Conduct for the Protection of Academic Freedom and the Academic Community in the Context of the Internationalisation of the UK Higher Education Sector (draft).

Association for Asian Studies, AAS Statement Regarding Remote Teaching, Online Scholarship, Safety, and Academic Freedom, July 23, 2020.

Matthieu Burnay, Harriet Evans, Perry Keller, Eva Pils, Tim Pringle, Sophia Woodman, Internet access deal allows Chinese government censorship in our UK university (virtual) classrooms, Oct. 31, 2020.

Owen Churchill, Chinese students’ association loses status at Canadian university after protest of Uygur activist’s talk was allegedly coordinated with Chinese consulate, Sept. 26, 2020.

Lucy Craymer, China’s National-Security Law Reaches Into Harvard, Princeton Classrooms, Aug. 19, 2020.

Eric Fish, How strained US-China relations are playing out in American universities, July 4, 2020.

Dimitar D. Gueorguiev, Xiaobo Lü, Kerry Ratigan, Meg Rithmire, Rory Truex, How To Teach China This Fall, Aug. 20, 2020.

Patrick Wintour, Oxford moves to protect students from China's Hong Kong security law, Sept. 28, 2020.

Lin Yang, China-Sensitive Topics at US Universities Draw More Online Harassment, Nov. 20, 2020.

William Yang, National security law adds new risks to higher education in the United States as schools prepare to kickstart the new semester remotely, Aug. 24, 2020.

Panelists

Benjamin L. Liebman is the Robert L. Lieff Professor of Law and director of the Hong Yen Chang Center for Chinese Legal Studies at Columbia Law School. He is also the director of the Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law. His current research focuses on the use of computational tools to study Chinese court judgments, the roles of artificial intelligence and big data in the Chinese legal system, Chinese tort law, Chinese criminal procedure, and the evolution of China’s courts. His recent publications include Ordinary Tort Litigation in China: Law Versus Practical Justice?, in the Journal of Tort Law (2020) and Mass Digitization of Chinese Court Opinions: How to Use Text as Data in the Field of Chinese Law in the Journal of Law and Courts (2020). He co-authored the book “Regulating the Visible Hand: The Institutional Implications of Chinese State Capitalism,” with Curtis J. Milhaupt, Oxford University Press (2015). Prior to joining the Law School’s faculty in 2002, Liebman was an associate in the London and Beijing offices of Sullivan & Cromwell. He also previously served as a law clerk to Justice David Souter and to Judge Sandra Lynch of the First Circuit. He is a graduate of Yale University, the University of Oxford, and Harvard Law School.

Eva Pils is professor of law at King's College London and an affiliated scholar at the US-Asia Law Institute of New York University Law School. She studied law, philosophy, and sinology in Heidelberg, London and Beijing and holds a Ph.D. in law from University College London. Her current research addresses autocratic conceptions and practices of governance, legal and political resistance, and forms of complicity with autocratic wrongs. Her most recent book, Human rights in China: a social practice in the shadows of authoritarianism, was published in 2018. At King's, she teaches courses on human rights; law and society in China; and authoritarianism, populism, and the law. Before joining King’s in 2014, Eva was an associate professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. She has held visiting appointments at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and at Columbia University (New York). She is a member of the Academic Freedom and Internationalisation Working Group and a legal action committee member of the Global Legal Action Network.

Dr. Teng Biao is a human-rights lawyer, currently at the Grove Human Rights Scholar at Hunter College, the City University of New York. Previously, he was a lecturer at the China University of Politics and Law (Beijing), and a visiting scholar at Yale, Harvard, and New York University. Teng’s research focuses on criminal justice, human rights, social movements, and political transition in China. He co-founded two human rights NGOs—the Open Constitution Initiative, and China Against the Death Penalty. He is one of the earliest promoters of the Rights Defense Movement in China and the manifesto Charter 08. Teng has received various international human rights awards including the Human Rights Prize of the French Republic.

Rory Truex is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. His research focuses on Chinese politics and authoritarian systems. His work has been published in top political science journals, including the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, and The China Quarterly, and featured in the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. He is the founder of the Princeton in Asia Summer of Service program, which annually sends Princeton undergraduates to rural China to run an English immersion program for local students. He currently resides in Philadelphia.

Moderator

Andrew J. Nathan is Class of 1919 Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. His teaching and research interests include Chinese politics and foreign policy, the comparative study of political participation and political culture, and human rights. He is engaged in long-term research and writing on Chinese foreign policy and on sources of political legitimacy in Asia, the latter research based on data from the Asian Barometer Survey, a multi-national collaborative survey research project active in eighteen countries in Asia.