Tiananmen@35: Human Rights in China, From Tiananmen to Hong Kong

Location: Reiss 112 - Auditorium (Reiss Science Building, Georgetown University Main Campus); RSVP Required, as space is limited.

Rowena He 何曉清is author of Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China and a three-time recipient of Harvard University’s Certificate of Teaching Excellence. Her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the National Humanities Center, and the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas Austin. Her op-eds have appeared in the Washington Post, Nation, Guardian, Globe and Mail, and Wall Street Journal. She was designated among the Top 100 Chinese Public Intellectuals 2016. She was recently banned from Hong Kong to return to her position as an Associate Professor of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Sophie Richardson is a longtime activist and scholar of Chinese politics, human rights, and foreign policy. From 2006 to 2023, she served as the China Director at Human Rights Watch, where she oversaw the organization’s research and advocacy. She has published extensively on human rights, and testified to the Canadian Parliament, European Parliament, and the United States Senate and House of Representatives. Dr. Richardson is the author of China, Cambodia, and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (Columbia University Press, Dec. 2009), an in-depth examination of China's foreign policy since 1954's Geneva Conference, including rare interviews with Chinese policy makers. She speaks Mandarin, and received her doctorate from the University of Virginia and her BA from Oberlin College. Her current research focuses on the global implications of democracies’ weak responses to increasingly repressive Chinese governments, and she is advising several China-focused human rights organizations.

This event is co-sponsored by the Georgetown Institute for Global History and the Asian Studies Program. Accommodation requests related to a disability should be made to GUHistory@Georgetown.edu. A good faith effort will be made to fulfill requests.