After denying a visa extension, Hong Kong University fires a professor who was researching the Tiananmen crackdown

A lecturer studying China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown was sacked by a Hong Kong institution when the city refused to extend her visa. A Rowena According to the history department’s website, he was an assistant professor of history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and wrote a book on Tiananmen exiles in 2014.

Until recently, the only location in China where people could publicly mourn the lives lost on June 4, 1989—the day the government sent soldiers to put down protests in Beijing demanding democratic reform—was Hong Kong. However, as China strengthened its hold, remembrance in the former British colony was forced underground, with the city banning yearly Tiananmen vigils as of 2020. He gave AFP his word that the rumors that she had been “terminated with immediate effect” were true.

The “employment of non-permanent residents is conditional upon the possession of a valid visa,” according to a CUHK official. The spokesman said, “The Immigration Department makes judgments about visas; the institution has no control over such choices and is not informed of the specifics of any given instance.

A request for comment was not immediately answered by Hong Kong’s Immigration Department. The scholar allegedly applied for a visa extension when she started working at CUHK in 2019. She taught at Harvard University before earning her PhD from the University of Toronto. According to the University of Texas at Austin website, she was born and raised in China and is presently employed there as a research fellow.

Talking about the Tiananmen crackdown is very sensitive to China’s communist government, and remembering the victims—roughly 1,000 people, according to some estimates—has long been outlawed on the country’s mainland. In 2020, after months of massive and sometimes deadly demonstrations for democracy in the financial center, Beijing enforced a comprehensive national security legislation on Hong Kong.

Since then, monuments commemorating the incident have been taken down from university campuses, and several of the organizers of the yearly Tiananmen vigil have been detained by the local authorities.