Brown University Students to Host Senior Chinese Official Implicated in Hong Kong Crackdowns

Students at Brown University this weekend are hosting a senior Chinese official who escalated the suppression of Hong Kong’s protest movement.

The official is CY Leung, the city’s former chief executive, who ordered a crackdown on the 2014 Umbrella movement, escalating the violence used against pro-democracy demonstrators. Leung now serves as a vice chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a massively important political-influence organ within the Chinese political system. He will appear at the Brown China Summit, an annual student-organized conference, via a videoconferencing platform for a panel with former senior U.S. diplomat Chas Freeman.

Leung’s appearance was initially noticed by Hong Kong pro-democracy advocates and pointed out online, such as Jeffrey Ngo, a senior policy and research fellow at the Hong Kong Democracy Council.

“His standing in the Communist Party is unusually high,” Ngo told National Review, adding that Leung’s approach from 2012-2017 reflects Beijing’s hardening stance toward regions like Xinjiang that have been deemed separatist by the party.

“To give him a platform is thus symbolic in more ways than one. It should trouble anyone in American higher education who cares about human rights,” he added.

The Brown China Summit is hosted by a student group under the aegis of the university’s Watson Institute for International Affairs. As in previous iterations of the gathering, the event will include panels with business leaders, academics, and other prominent figures in the U.S.–China relationship.

But unlike in past years, the upcoming summit, which will take place over the weekend, will include the participation of a prominent individual who very vocally supports the CCP’s hard-line policies, previously implemented them, and is now tasked with shaping them.

It’s not clear who extended the invite to Leung, and Brown University’s administration distanced itself from the event.

In a statement to National Review, Brown spokesman Brian Clark emphasized that it was organized by students and that “the university’s administration does not review or approve speaker invitations,” owing to its policy on academic freedom. “Inviting a speaker implies no endorsement by the particular student group, academic unit or faculty or staff host of that speaker’s views or activities,” Clark added, pointing to the university’s role in hosting debates between people with opposing viewpoints.

The Brown China Summit did not respond to National Review’s questions about the decision to invite Leung.

Ngo worries that someone is taking advantage of the situation surrounding the event, which “is ostensibly put together only by students.”

“But it’s difficult to imagine how only they could manage to line up such a high-level Chinese official as [CY Leung] to speak without more powerful brokers pulling strings,” he said. Ngo doubts that Brown’s Watson Institute, and the center’s China Initiative, invited Leung, because that center hosted a 2014 panel on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, and “they’re not malicious in any way.”

“My worry, given the program, is that the summit organizers are using the affiliation to give a political event designed to promote Beijing’s propaganda some academic cover that it doesn’t have,” he said.

The event’s two sponsors are the George H.W. Bush Foundation for U.S.–China Relations and an obscure group called the “China Academy.”

The Bush Foundation in 2019 accepted a $5 million grant from a Chinese-government front group, the China–U.S. Exchange Foundation, or CUSEF, according to Axios. And a 2018 report by the U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission, a U.S. government panel, described the various ways in which CUSEF aims to promote CCP propaganda by coopting U.S. academic institutions through strategically disbursed gifts.

It’s not clear whether the Bush Foundation is supporting the Brown China Summit using funds from the CUSEF grant, or the degree to which it may have played a role in shaping the summit’s programming. The group’s director of communications did not respond to a request for comment.