Hong Kong university sacks Tiananmen scholar after visa denied

A Hong Kong university has fired a professor who researches China's bloody 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown after the city denied her a visa extension.

Rowena He was an associate professor of history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and authored a 2014 book on Tiananmen exiles, according to the website of the school's history department.

Hong Kong used to be the only place on Chinese soil where people could openly mourn those who died on June 4, 1989, when the government sent troops to crush demonstrations in Beijing calling for political change.

But commemoration in the former British colony has been driven underground as China tightened its grip, with the city outlawing annual Tiananmen vigils since 2020.

He confirmed to AFP that reports saying she was "terminated with immediate effect" were accurate.

A CUHK spokesperson said the "employment of non-permanent residents is conditional upon the possession of a valid visa."

"Visa decisions are a matter for the Immigration Department and the university is unable to influence visa outcomes, and nor is it aware of the circumstances of individual cases," the spokesperson added.

Hong Kong's Immigration Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The scholar took up her position at CUHK in 2019 and was reportedly seeking a visa extension.

He received her PhD from the University of Toronto and formerly taught at Harvard University. She currently has a research post at the University of Texas at Austin, according to the university website which said she was born and raised in China.

Discussion of the Tiananmen crackdown is highly sensitive to China's communist leadership, and commemoration of those killed -- by some estimates, more than 1,000 -- has long been forbidden on the mainland.

Beijing in 2020 imposed a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong after the finance hub saw months of huge and sometimes violent democracy protests.

Since then, city authorities have arrested some organisers of the annual Tiananmen vigil, while sculptures marking the event have been removed from university campuses.