Leading Hong Kong university denies gutting China studies centre long favoured by overseas scholars
- Chinese University is digitising and moving the institution’s archives to the main library, which management says is needed to preserve the ageing materials
- But some scholars fear the overhaul is aimed at lowering the profile of the centre, which has fallen into the cross hairs of pro-Beijing media
A leading Hong Kong university has denied that folding its centre for China studies into the main library amounts to gutting the nearly 60-year-old institution.
The move to digitise and put online the centre’s vast archive of ageing newspapers, books and video documentaries, some of which were critical of the nation’s government and covered politically sensitive events, would instead open the collection to a wider audience, the management at Chinese University said on Tuesday.
The Universities Service Centre for China Studies, or USC, was established in 1963 by one of the most respected China scholars in the West, Jerome Cohen, a law professor at New York University and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. It became part of Chinese University in 1988, and takes up two floors of the Tin Ka Ping Building.
Over the years, the USC has grown into a prominent gathering point for experts studying the nation’s modern history. Ezra Vogel, an academic giant in the field of China studies at Harvard University and who helped launch the centre, visited the USC in January, just before his death this month at age 90.
Cohen and other academics have questioned whether the digitisation drive is aimed at restricting access to the centre’s collection, but according to Provost Professor Alan Chan Kam-leung, the transfer to the main library was needed to better preserve the materials.