Opinion | Worrying silence as academic freedom comes under threat at University of Hong Kong

Two weeks ago, Vice-President Li Yuanchao made an enigmatic remark in the wake of Occupy Central. He told a group of returned overseas Chinese in Beijing that the organisers of the protest movement had failed. Then he asserted: "The really interesting part of the show is yet to come."

A deputy head of Beijing's Central Coordination Group for Hong Kong and Macau Affairs, Li did not elaborate, but as things have now unfolded, the post-Occupy scenario appears to be one of exacting political revenge on the engineers of the pro-democracy protests.

Universities have been under growing pressure to discipline students and staff members who were active in the movement. Occupy was conceived in a newspaper article by associate professor Benny Tai Yiu-ting, of the University of Hong Kong's Faculty of Law, in January 2013. He has since been condemned and the subject of allegations such as acting as the middleman in a donation to the university's Public Opinion Programme to commission Occupy-related opinion polls.

The smear campaign has now spread to his former boss, Professor Johannes Chan Man-mun, who is considered to be sympathetic to Occupy. He stepped down as the faculty dean and has been tipped as a candidate for the post of pro-vice-chancellor.

Beijing's two major mouthpieces in Hong Kong, Ta Kung Pao and Wen Wei Po, appear determined to scupper his promotion. The papers have done what they are good at, by making a mountain out of a molehill. In this instance, they used the latest university research assessment exercise - pointing to the poorer quality of the HKU law faculty's research compared with that of Chinese University - and accused Chan of excessive political participation, saying that, in effect, he was derelict in leading the faculty.

Wen Wei Po came up with an "exclusive" on the figures even before the report was released. Chan was also challenged for his lack of a doctorate degree. However, one does not always need a doctorate to excel in law. Chan is a senior counsel and has been appointed to a long list of public and statutory bodies. He also served on the Bar Council. His predecessor, Professor Albert Chen Hung-yee, who sits on the Basic Law Committee, does not have a doctorate, either.

Even the university's student writers have not been spared. In his policy address last month, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying lashed out at the editorial team of Undergrad, the official HKU Students' Union magazine, for publishing a cover story titled "Hong Kong people deciding their own fate" and a book titled Hong Kong Nationalism.