U.S.-Asia Law Institute

Hidden Transcripts: Reflections from a Hong Kong Campus 

Thursday, March 2, 2023

12:30 PM - 2:00 PM Eastern Time

Vanderbilt Hall, Room 201

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This event will NOT be recorded or live-streamed. Attendance is open to all members of the public.

About the event
The massive protests that roiled Hong Kong in 2019 and their political aftermath comprised both complex political and social phenomena and intense personal narratives. Rowena He, an associate professor of history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, will reflect on the events of 2019-2022 using narrative accounts drawn from her interactions with Hong Kong and mainland Chinese students in the territory. Connecting the personal with the social, the political, and the historical, she will unpack the nuances, contradictions, and challenges posed by an unprecedented social movement and its ongoing impacts.  

About the speaker

Rowena He

Rowena He, an associate professor of history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is currently a Luce East Asia fellow at the National Humanities Center (2022-23).  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. She has been a fellow at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the National Humanities Center. Professor He speaks and publishes widely beyond the academy. She has testified before a US Congressional hearing and delivered lectures for the US State Department and the Canadian International Council. Her op-eds have appeared in the Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, and The Wall Street Journal. She received the Harvard University Certificate of Teaching Excellence for three consecutive years, and the CUHK Faculty of Arts Outstanding Teaching Award 2020 and 2021. Born and raised in China, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.

About the moderator

Katherine Wilhelm

Katherine Wilhelm is executive director of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute, an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, and editor of the institute’s online essay series, USALI Perspectives. She is an expert on China’s legal system, public interest law organizations, and civil society. She joined USALI in August 2019 after returning from nearly three decades of residence in Asia, where she split her career between law and journalism. Most recently she was the legal program officer at the Ford Foundation’s China office, where she funded Chinese legal advocacy NGOs and university-based legal research and education programs. Before that, she directed the Beijing office of Yale Law School’s China Law Center, which implements law reform projects in partnership with government, academia and civil society. Ms. Wilhelm also practiced corporate law in the Beijing office of a leading US law firm. Before beginning her career in law, she was a journalist. She reported for The Associated Press from Beijing, Hong Kong, and Hanoi, and for the Far Eastern Economic Review from Hong Kong and Shanghai. Her work has been published in leading newspapers around the world. She was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 1996-97. She holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School, a master’s degree in East Asian studies from Harvard University, a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, and a bachelor’s degree in history from Niagara University.