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Rowena He

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Rowena He or He Xiaoqing (Traditional Chinese: 何曉清; Simplified Chinese: 何晓清) is a China specialist and historian of modern Chinese society and politics. The Wall Street Journal called her a "lead scholar on the Tiananmen Movement."[1] Her first book, Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggles for Democracy in China was named Top Five Books 2014 by the Asia Society's China File.[2] 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's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the National Humanities Center, and the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas Austin. [3]

She has taught at Harvard University, Wesley College, Saint Michael's College and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). She received the Harvard University Certificate of Teaching Excellence for three consecutive years for the Tiananmen courses that she created. At CUHK, she received the Faculty of Arts Outstanding Teaching Award in 2020 and 2021. Despite previous attacks from Chinese students for teaching a taboo topic banned by the Beijing government,[4][5][6] she is a believer of engagement and dialogues and eventually won the support of many Chinese students after taking her classes.[7] The attacks from Chinese students motivated her to start working on her second book on history, memory, and student nationalism.[8]

In October 2023, the Financial Times broke the news that Rowena He had been denied a work visa to return to her position as an Associate Professor of History at CUHK.[9] Ming Pao, Hong Kong's major intellectual newspaper, published a front-page story of her being fired despite increasing political pressure.[10] The news was widely reported by international media. Her interview with Simon Shen, former Political Science professor of CUHK, had over 100,000 views overnight. Her interview with the Voice of America gained over 337,000 views. Hong Kong people expressed their support to her long-term perseverance of preserving the historical memory erased by the Beijing government and her dedication to the Hong Kong students during the region's unprecedented social movement that was cracked down by the authorities.[8]

He's op-eds have appeared in the Washington Post,[11] The Nation,[12] The Guardian,[13] The Globe and Mail,[14][15] and the Wall Street Journal.[16][17] She has been a keynote speaker for the Canada Human Rights National Symposium, testified before a US Congressional hearing, and delivered lectures for the US State Department and the Canada International Council. Her scholarly opinions are regularly sought by the ABC (Australia), Al Jazeera, Associate Press, BBC, CBC, CNN, CTV, Financial Times, Globe and Mail,[18] Guardian, Inside Higher Education, Le Monde, NPR,[19][20] NBC, the New York Times,[21] Reuters, Time, Times Higher Education, Wall Street Journal, and other international media outlets. 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. She is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.[22]

Biography

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Born and raised in Guangdong province, He obtained her Bachelor of Arts at South China Normal University. During the Tiananmen Square protest, she was a seventeen-year-old secondary school student and has joined student-organised pro-democracy movements. Because of the oppressing experiences during that time, she decided to find the lost voices in this historical event and specialized in the study of the June 4th event.[4][5]

In 1998 He moved to Canada,[23] where she finished her Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in 2002 and 2008 respectively at the University of Toronto. After her graduate studies, she joined Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University as a Postdoctoral Fellow between 2008 and 2010, working closely with her mentors historian Merle Goldman and political scientist Roderick MacFarquhar.[24] Her first book, Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China, was named one of the Top Five China Books of 2014 by the Asia Society's China File.[3] From 2010 to 2015, she was lecturer at the Faculty of Arts and Science at Harvard and created her award-winning course titled 'Rebels With a Cause: Tiananmen in History and Memory'.[5] During this teaching period, she received teaching awards in three successive years. In 2018, she was selected to be a residential fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey,[24][6] before she took up the position of associate professor at the Department of History in the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2019.[23] In late October 2023, He lost her position at CUHK after having been denied an employment visa to return to Hong Kong from the United States.[23][25]

Writings

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  • Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, April 2014. ISBN 978-113743832-4

References

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  1. ^ Fan, Wenxin. "Hong Kongers to Remember Tiananmen Square Without Mentioning the Massacre". WSJ. Retrieved 2024-03-22.
  2. ^ "Top Five China Books of 2014". ChinaFile. 2014-12-23. Retrieved 2024-03-22.
  3. ^ a b "HE Xiaoqing Rowena | Department of History, The Chinese University of Hong Kong". www.history.cuhk.edu.hk. Retrieved 2020-06-04.
  4. ^ a b cugenews_admin. "【專訪】歷史系教授何曉清：我是一名播種者". UGE News (in Chinese (Taiwan)). Retrieved 2020-06-04.
  5. ^ a b c Siling, Luo (2016-06-21). "Teaching Tiananmen to a New Generation". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2020-06-04.
  6. ^ a b "何曉清：永不遺忘、永不放棄". 美國之音. 4 June 2019. Retrieved 2020-06-04.
  7. ^ 【时事大家谈】2018.3.22 话题：拒绝遗忘六四：专访何晓清教授, 22 March 2018, retrieved 2024-03-22
  8. ^ a b 【突發時空 221】香港中文大學歷史系何曉清副教授：被拒入境、即時解僱，只是歷史長河滄海一粟；掛念中大、很愛香港，深信民主與自由萬世不朽, 31 October 2023, retrieved 2024-03-22
  9. ^ "Hong Kong denies visa to scholar of China's 1989 Tiananmen crackdown". www.ft.com. Retrieved 2024-03-22.
  10. ^ "簽證拒批 六四學者稱「被問資金」 何曉清：遭中大即炒 政府：入境不可構成保安問題 - 20231029 - 要聞". 明報新聞網 - 每日明報 daily news (in Traditional Chinese). Retrieved 2024-03-22.
  11. ^ "Opinion | Still seeking justice for the Tiananmen massacre". Washington Post. 2023-05-20. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved 2024-03-22.
  12. ^ "Rowena He". The Nation. 2019-06-04. Retrieved 2024-03-22.
  13. ^ "Rowena Xiaoqing He | The Guardian". the Guardian. Retrieved 2024-03-22.
  14. ^ "Opinion: Never forget. Never give up: The Tiananmen Movement, 30 years later". The Globe and Mail. 2019-04-19. Retrieved 2024-03-22.
  15. ^ "Tiananmen: a war of memory against forgetting". The Globe and Mail. 2014-06-03. Retrieved 2024-03-22.
  16. ^ He, Rowena. "The Open Wound of Tiananmen". WSJ. Retrieved 2024-03-22.
  17. ^ He, Rowena Xiaoqing. "Rowena Xiaoqing He: Reading Havel in Beijing". WSJ. Retrieved 2024-03-22.
  18. ^ "Canadian scholar of Tiananmen massacre denied visa to continue working in Hong Kong". The Globe and Mail. 2023-10-30. Retrieved 2024-03-22.
  19. ^ Understanding China with Rowena He, 6 April 2023, retrieved 2024-03-22
  20. ^ "She studies 'sensitive topics' in Chinese history. Hong Kong denied her work visa". NPR. November 12, 2023.
  21. ^ "Teaching Tiananmen to a New Generation". The New York Times. June 21, 2016.
  22. ^ Rowena He, Senior Research Fellow, Civitas Institute
  23. ^ a b c Chan, Ho-him (2023-10-28). "Hong Kong denies visa to scholar of China's 1989 Tiananmen crackdown". Retrieved 2023-10-28.
  24. ^ a b "Rowena Xiaoqing He". Institute for Advanced Study. 9 December 2019. Retrieved 2020-06-04.
  25. ^ "Hong Kong denies visa to prominent Tiananmen Square scholar". Al Jazeera. 2023-10-28. Retrieved 2023-10-28.
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