My Take | Speak your mind – if you dare
- The protests in Hong Kong are the subject of debate around the world but as one American professor found, you are on a hiding to nothing
It’s hard to say anything publicly about the protests without being heckled or harassed these days. It’s not just in Hong Kong but in Australia, Canada and the United States, where there are substantial numbers of students from the city and the mainland.
That has been the experience this month of Edward Steinfeld – a China specialist and director of the Thomas J. Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University – who offered a politically neutral analysis of the background to the protests at a lecture, according to the Brown Daily Herald.
There have been many reported incidents of confrontation between mainland and Hong Kong students overseas in the Western news media. However, the narrative almost always portrays Hong Kong people involved as civil and reasonable and mainlanders as nationalistic hotheads and blowhards.
It’s rather different if you read the newspapers or news sites of the colleges and universities, where far more nuanced discussions and debates are reported.
Rather than offering support for the protesters, as Western political correctness requires these days, Steinfeld didn’t take sides, and so was taken to task and denounced as a communist stooge in the pay of the Chinese government.
