Speaker: Rowena Xiaoqing He (何曉清), Senior Research Fellow, University of Texas Austin; author, Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China

Discussant: Anthony Saich, Daewoo Professor of International Affairs; Director, Rajawali Foundation Institute for Asia, Harvard Kennedy School

This talk is grounded in over two decades of fieldwork on the preservation of historical memory tabooed by the CCP regime. Drawing on contextualized personal accounts, Rowena He will illuminate the unequal contest between state-imposed interpretations of history and independent scholarship on China’s forbidden past, and their implications for nationalism, democratization, and the field of China Studies. Highlighting her extensive interactions with local and mainland Chinese students during Hong Kong’s unprecedented social movement, she illustrates how memory becomes a form of resistance that embodies citizen autonomy and agency. The power of the powerless.

Rowena Xiaoqing He (何曉清) is a China specialist and historian of modern China. She is interested in the nexus of history, memory, and power, and their implications for the relationship between academic freedom and public opinion, human rights and democratization, and youth values and nationalism. Her first book, Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China, was named Top Five Books 2014 by the Asia Society’s China File. The book has been reviewed in the New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New Statesman, Spectator, Christian Science Monitor, China Journal, Human Rights Quarterly, and other international periodicals. Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the National Humanities Center. Dr. He received the Harvard University Certificate of Teaching Excellence for three consecutive years for the Tiananmen courses that she created. She joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2019 and received the Faculty of Arts Outstanding Teaching Award in 2020 and 2021. In 2023, she was denied a Hong Kong work visa to return to her position as an Associate Professor of History. Her op-eds have appeared in the Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, and The Wall Street Journal. She was designated among the Top 100 Chinese Public Intellectuals 2016. Born and raised in China, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.