the academic community in the context of the internationalisation of the UK HE sector John Heathershaw , John Chalcraft , Andrew Chubb, Andreas Fulda, Chris Hughes, Katarzyna Kaczmarska, Terence Karran, Corinne Lennox, Eva Pils, Tena Prelec , Kelli Rudolph, Sophia Woodman f and Yeşim Yaprak Yıldız Department of Politics, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK; Department of Government, London School of Economics, London, UK; Department of Politics, Philosophy & Religion, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK; School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK; Department of International Relations, London School of Economics, London, UK; School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK; School of Education, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK; Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, London, UK; The Dickinson Poon School of Law, King’s College London, London, UK; Department of Politics & International Relations, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; Department of Classical & Archaeological Studies, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK; Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths University of London, London, UK

Academic citizenship has long been recognised as a core aspect of belonging to institutions of scholarship and teaching. According to the normative conception adopted here, academic citizenship encompasses engagement with and service to society. It is an inherently cosmopolitan and liberal-democratic idea, because its point is the promotion of the free exchange of academic ideas in the service of society, regardless of national borders. Yet, while a cosmopolitan conception of academic citizenship is broadly speaking compatible with the laws and politics of liberal democracies bound to safeguard academic freedom, it is in tension with authoritarian political-legal orders, such as that of the People's Republic of China, which has in certain contexts transformed citizenship into an instrument of repression and population control. The paper is divided into three parts. We begin by developing a cosmopolitan conception of academic citizenship that allows us to analyse and assess the connection between membership of the academic community and academic freedom. We juxtapose the cosmopolitan conception of academic citizenship with marketised and authoritarian conceptions of academic citizenship (1). We then discuss the ways in which the Chinese government's authoritarian advance impacts academic freedom abroad, arguing that a prevalent, reductionist, marketised conception of academic citizenship renders academic institutions particularly vulnerable (2). Finally, we critically assess state and non-state actor responses to these challenges (3). We argue that a cosmopolitan understanding of academic citizenship requires a fundamental rethinking of the existing mechanisms and initiatives to protect and promote academic freedom in China and beyond.

In this article, we examine the controversial national security law enacted by the People’s Republic of China for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in June 2020 and consider how this law interacts with two constitutional struggles that Hong Kong has experienced since its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. The first of these is a struggle over preserving rule of law principles protected in Hong Kong’s regional constitution, the Hong Kong Basic Law and international treaty obligations. The second is a struggle for democratisation, pursuant to constitutional commitments in the Basic Law. We argue that the national security law severely damages Hong Kong’s much-vaunted rule of law, as well as its ability to govern itself as a (relatively) liberal-democratic enclave within China. It muffles contestation over rule of law and democratic principles through facilitating rule by fear as a key modality of governance. The national security law expands the state’s coercive powers, and has the capacity to intimidate well beyond the letter of its provisions by creating rules and mechanisms to suspend legal protections altogether. Its provisions serve to reinscribe political discourse that has long been mainstream in Hong Kong as deviant. But at least as much as the NSL’s actual provisions, it is the loss of judicial scrutiny and the possibility of being transitioned into the Mainland legal system that operationalise rule by fear.

The history of China’s human rights lawyers has been characterised by rifts and schisms. Whereas in the reform and opening era, human rights defenders diverged on the extent to which their advocacy challenged the Party-State, the system’s deep hostility to the very idea of universal human rights, and its willingness to persecute the defenders of such positions, is no longer in doubt. But today’s schisms among human rights lawyers also reflect our era’s global human rights backlash. China’s Human Rights Lawyers Rifts and Schisms in an Era of Global Human Rights Backlash Gao Zhisheng in 2015. PC: RFA,org.

Autocratic control of civil society, including academia, can be extended to democratic societies and institutions in ways that pose threats to liberal-democratic values, such as academic freedom, for example through mechanisms and practices that lead to academic self-censorship. Engaging critically with the literature on 'sharp power' and 'authoritarian influencing' addressing this phenomenon, this paper argues that democratic actors who, without sharing the repressive goals of autocracies, contribute to their success in settings of international collaboration and exchange can become structurally complicit with such wrongs. Recognizing the risk of complicity is a necessary first step towards addressing the political responsibilities resulting from it.

The forced eviction campaign in the wake of a fire in Daxing District in Beijing in November 2017 provides some evidence signalling a shift from a technocratic-utilitarian model to a more assertive, image-conscious and totalist model of spatial control and population governance. Yet, although it was not possible for anyone to mount effective legal or political resistance to the campaign, protests in its wake suggest that faced with even harsher forms of control, citizens might solidarize in novel ways, articulating their legal rights and shared political identity as Chinese citizens across social barriers.

This paper offers a critical and historical analysis of the transformation of citizenship in China in a way that challenges both legal orientalism and the overall discourse on Chinese “characteristics” and “exceptionalism”. It aims to uncover how citizenship has been transformed “structurally” (Solinger 1999) as well as through “acts of citizenship” (Jakimow 2012). The paper will therefore not only look at how the One-Party State defines citizenship, uses it as an instrument of repression and population control, but also how citizens themselves can contribute to a new narrative on citizenship and driver of contestation in China. The paper will argue that the transformation of citizenship has contributed to the reinforcement of the fragmented and transnational nature of Chinese citizenship.

Sikkink offers some clear and much-needed correctives to narratives of international human rights law as western imposition. Despite these great merits, the value of her assessment that 'overall, there is less violence and fewer human rights violations in the world than there were in the past' is questionable, especially when we consider that making the harms resulting from human rights violations visible is harder in closed than in open societies, and that the world is currently experiencing a wave of autocratisation. It is all the more important for human rights defenders to remember that hope does not require evidence to be sustained.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsMaking China Strong: The Role of Nationalism in Chinese Thinking on Democracy and Human Rights, by Robert Weatherley. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. x+216 pp. £57.50 (cloth and eBook).Eva PilsEva PilsKing’s College London Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The China Journal Volume 81January 2019 Published on behalf of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/700386 Views: 96Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

This chapter discusses the Chinese authorities’ changing human rights rhetoric and practices around human rights, with a focus on the post-Mao era’s discourse of ‘human rights with Chinese characteristics’. It argues that an influential view, according to which human rights are politically neutral, has accommodated this discourse and muted human rights-based criticism of the Chinese political system and its systemic obstacles to better human rights protection. On this basis, it calls for a re-politicization of our understanding of human rights.