Hong Kong gets to grips with security law’s ‘invisible red line’/Print headline: Hong Kong tries to toe invisible line

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Sub-headline: "Academics are ‘groping along blindly’ in a fierce debate over whether certain phrases or subjects are still legal"

Interviewed by Joyce Lau on dwindling academic and intellectual freedom in Hong Kong one year after intrudtion of the National Security Law.

“The NSL has basically brought Hong Kong into line with a situation that mainland [Chinese] academics and students have known for decades: academic and intellectual censorship as the norm – the difference being that mainland [Chinese] have learned to navigate the whimsical nature of the system, while their counterparts in Hong Kong have not,” said Gregory Lee, founding professor of Chinese studies at the University of St Andrews, who previously held senior positions at Hong Kong universities.

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Professor Lee, referencing the recent arrests of publishers of books that try to explain Hong Kong’s democracy movement to children, said Hong Kong was “well beyond red lines – you’re somewhere between Nineteen Eighty-four and Alice in Wonderland”.

“Rather, you are retrospectively circumscribed by a circle of ‘wrongdoing’ whose very nature is unknown to you until the moment you find yourself encircled. No amount of close reading of the NSL can prepare you for that,” he said.