The free cultural environment in Hong Kong is deteriorating rapidly, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong has recently decided to close down the Chinese Studies Service Center, breaking it up and reorganizing it into a library and other departments.
The Chinese Studies Service Center, which is affectionately known to contemporary researchers of Chinese history as the “Mecca” of Chinese studies, may not be well known to the average Hong Kong citizen. The Center’s vast collection of original historical materials and documents is a sacred place for any scholar of contemporary Chinese history.
“The Center for Chinese Studies was formerly known as the University Service Center, founded in 1963 by renowned American scholars Gao-Yi Fu (author of “The Age of Deng Xiaoping”) and Jie-Rong Kong.
The Center has the world’s richest collection of original materials and documents from different periods of China’s Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Leap Forward and Famine, and the Cultural Revolution. The center enjoys high academic status at home and abroad, and can be considered one of the signboards of CUHK. Why did it suddenly close down when it was operating normally for a good reason? What heavenly rule did it break? CUHK has not given a reasonable account of the matter.
The Center’s collection of materials is a whole, a complete system. To study the Cultural Revolution, one needs to understand the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine before the Cultural Revolution, one needs to go back to the Anti-Rightist Movement, and there is a coherent, cause-and-effect relationship between different periods of Chinese history, a historical lineage of the decades of Communist rule in China.
The Center has an experienced staff, its own international network and a large collection of materials, and a generally recognized academic status. The purpose is to bury the historical truth forever.
This should not be done voluntarily by CUHK, and it would be detrimental to CUHK’s reputation. Recently, Xi Jinping asked the whole party to study the history of the Party and to establish a correct view of Party history, not to forget the ancestors and to be presumptuous. “The collection of materials and services provided by the China Research Service Center are precisely related to a large number of contemporary historical truths. If there are original archives, there is truth, and if there is truth in Party history, it will not look so good, and it will promote a less than “correct” view of Party history.
The Chinese University was founded by Qian Mu and other sages, and the fall of CUHK is a symbol of the fall of Hong Kong.
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