Rowena Xiaoqing He

Rowena X. He (何曉清)is a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institute and a historian of modern China. A specialist of the 1989 Tiananmen Movement and its subsequent Massacre, she is interested in the nexus of history, memory, and power. Her writing, teaching, and public speaking focus on the history of politics and the politics of history, and their implications on public opinion, human rights, nationalism, democratization, and war and peace.  

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 positively reviewed in the New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Spectator, New Statesman, Christian Science Monitor, Human Rights Quarterly, American Diplomacy, and other international periodicals. Her research has been supported by Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the National Humanities Center, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the University of Texas at Austin.

Dr. He’s op-eds have appeared in the Washington Post, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, the Wall Street Journal, and the Nation. She has testified before U.S. Congressional Hearings and delivered lectures for the U.S. State Department and Global Affairs Canada. Her scholarly opinions are regularly sought and she has been interviewed by the ABC (Australia), Associate Press, Asahi Shimbun (Japan), BBC, CBC, Christian Science Monitor, CNN, CTV, Financial Times, Globe and Mail, Guardian, Inside Higher Education, Le Monde (France), NPR, National Geographic, New York Times, Reuters, Time Magazine, Times (London), Times Higher Education, Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets. She was designated among the Top 100 Chinese Public Intellectuals 2016.

Dr. He’s teaching has been featured by the Harvard Magazine, Wellesley News, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. She received the Harvard University Certificate of Teaching Excellence for three consecutive years. She joined the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2019 and received its Faculty of Arts Outstanding Teaching Award in 2020 and 2021. In 2023, the Chinese Communist government in Hong Kong denied the renewal of her work visa, and her position as an Associate Professor of History was terminated “with immediate effect.”

Born and raised in China, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.

Research interests: Modern and contemporary Chinese history, society, and politics; interdisciplinary inquiries into the nexus of history, memory, and power, political socialization, youth values, and social change, and their implications for citizenship, identity, human rights, and democracy; the 1989 Tiananmen Movement and its aftermath; intellectual freedom and censorship; patriotic education and post-’89 student nationalism; Oral history and life history.