Who is Benny Tai? Some say sacked University of Hong Kong academic is a separatist, others hail him as fighter for greater democracy
- Since co-founding 2014 Occupy movement, legal scholar has been no stranger to controversy in city’s increasingly polarised political landscape
- He has vowed to continue his advocacy and teachings despite being removed from his associate professor post
Is Benny Tai a deeply religious and committed campaigner for greater democracy or an anti-government separatist who has misled young minds as a legal academic at the University of Hong Kong?
Allies said Tai, a Christian, had always been an optimistic person, touting how he raised proposals for activism often deemed impossible, but that somehow always came through in the end, even going beyond expectations.
Benny Tai to challenge Hong Kong leader over university sacking
Tai was born in Hong Kong in 1964 and graduated from Diocesan Boys’ School in 1981. He graduated from the HKU law school in 1987. Tai started teaching at its law faculty from 1990 and was associate dean between 2000 and 2008.
During his university days, Tai was a student representative on the now-defunct Basic Law Consultative Committee, a role that had probably shaped his political path.
I used to be just a university academic living in my comfort zone
“I was Martin’s assistant and his fight for democracy impressed me,” Tai said in an interview in 2014, referring to the Democrats’ founding chairman and opposition heavyweight Martin Lee Chu-ming.
Tai was perhaps best remembered for his role in the “Occupy Central with Love and Peace” civil disobedience movement, which he co-founded with fellow moderate pan-democrats Chan Kin-man, a Chinese University sociology professor, and Reverend Chu Yiu-ming, a Baptist minister.
Tai first hatched his idea for a democracy push in 2013. The plan, to organise a series of deliberations on how Hong Kong should achieve universal suffrage, followed by a possible mass sit-in in the city’s central business district, pulled together disparate pan-democrats and refreshed tired calls for greater democracy.
Critics dismissed it as a pipe dream, but the scholar meant business.
Out of the ‘comfort zone’
Tai said in a 2014 interview: “I used to be just a university academic living in my comfort zone, spending my spare time sending my children to school and going home for dinner.” That was when he decided to end his years of political inaction.
Occupy Central was meant to be a mass, non-violent campaign on October 1, 2014, in response to a Beijing ruling on August 31. The central government stipulated that should Hong Kong elect its chief executive by popular ballot in 2017, it must choose from two or three candidates endorsed by a 1,200-member committee likely to be dominated by Beijing loyalists and business elites.
The Occupy protests were brought forward by several days following student-led demonstrations outside government headquarters in Tamar.
The protests dragged on, with student activists taking the lead and continuing their stand-off with authorities. It ended after 79 days during which some parts of the city were brought to a standstill, with protesters’ calls stonewalled by Beijing.
Tai claimed however, that the political culture in Hong Kong had undergone a “qualitative change”. Since then, he has increasingly courted controversy, with the pro-Beijing camp loathing him for “misleading young people to break the law”.
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Five years on, protesters return to the main site of the 2014 Occupy Central movement
In 2016, Tai began devising the so-called tactical voting plan Thundergo, calling on the public to vote strategically in the Legislative Council polls that year. His team launched a smartphone programme to collect voter preferences, coming up with a list of “recommended candidates” hours before the elections closed. Voters were advised to back those deemed likely to be in the fight for the last seat.
But the plan did not pan out in at least two constituencies and was blamed for contributing to the defeat of several pan-democrats, including Labour Party stalwart Lee Cheuk-yan, who was not chosen under the scheme.
In 2018, Tai found himself at the centre of yet another political storm after his remarks at an event, organised by a pro-independence organisation in Taipei, were widely reported with pro-Beijing media in Hong Kong heaping scorn on the academic.
Video footage of the seminar showed Tai saying that following the end of “dictatorship”, the country’s various ethnic groups could exercise their right to self-determination and decide how they could link up with each other.
“We could consider going independent, being part of a federal system or a confederation system similar to that of the European Union,” he said at the time.
If someone likes to make some absurd comments, we can’t stop them from doing so
The Hong Kong government said it was “shocked” that a university legal scholar had said the city could consider becoming an independent state. Beijing’s two agencies in charge of Hong Kong affairs – the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office and the central government’s liaison office in the city – also strongly accused Tai of “attempting to split the country and violating the Chinese constitution”.
HKU governing council chairman Arthur Li Kwok-cheung weighed in at the time, saying Tai’s views were his own and did not represent those of the university. “If someone likes to make some absurd comments, we can’t stop them from doing so,” Li added.
Tai rejected criticisms of his actions as a “Cultural Revolution-style denouncement”, and said his comments were only an “imagination of the future”.
Legal woes and accusations of foreign collusion
In April last year, the law caught up with Tai when he was sentenced to 16 months in prison over offences related to the Occupy movement. Tai, Chan Kin-man and Reverend Chu Yiu-ming were found guilty of one count of conspiracy to cause public nuisance. Tai and Chan were also convicted of one count of inciting others to commit the same offence. The three were acquitted of one count of inciting others to incite, and Chu was also cleared of one count of incitement.
Despite facing more jail time and a swirl of criticism, Tai pressed on with plans for the opposition camp to gain a bigger say in governance.
Last year, he raised the idea of strategic voting again in the lead-up to the district council elections. Code-named “Project Storm”, Tai called for the pan-democratic bloc to field candidates in every constituency to win as many seats as possible. He said that could compel Beijing to restart Hong Kong’s stalled political reforms.
Banking on public anger at the government after the extradition bill saga and months-long civil unrest, the opposition rolled to a resounding victory, taking control of 17 of the 18 district councils.
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Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing camp reeling after crushing defeat in district council elections
The landslide win has given the camp a confidence boost as it seeks to win a historic majority in Legco at the coming polls, and break its previous record of securing 29 of 70 seats.
Riding on this momentum, Tai spearheaded and coordinated the recent opposition’s primary to whittle down candidates for the Legco elections.
In a piece titled “Ten steps of real collateral damage” published in April, Tai predicted what would happen in 2021 and 2022 if opposition lawmakers became the majority in Legco – they would vote down the government’s funding requests, ultimately triggering the dissolution of the legislature and the resignation of the chief executive. That would be followed by Beijing declaring a state of emergency in Hong Kong, heightened protests and eventually sanctions by foreign countries on the central government.
The plan was strongly criticised in May by a spokesman for Beijing’s liaison office in Hong Kong, who said that by advocating such action, the opposition camp was “pushing Hong Kong to a bottomless abyss”.
But Tai and his allies pressed on with the primary, intending to draw some 170,000 people to cast their ballots at makeshift polling stations, amid strong condemnation from both city and state governments. Officials had warned the polls could violate the newly imposed national security law.
The campaign infuriated Beijing which slammed it as an exercise in illegal manipulation of the electoral process, and in breach of the national security law, as well as the Basic Law, the city’s mini-constitution.
Tai was accused of being an agent working for foreign forces.
Beijing accuses Occupy leader of breaking national security law with primary poll
Hours after the decision, Beijing’s liaison office in the city said in a statement it supported the dismissal as an act that punished “evil” and upheld justice.
“Tai has used the sacred position of an educational institution to ... promote illegal [activities] which had misled and poisoned a group of young people,” a spokesman said.
But in a response on his social media page, Tai said his dismissal showed that academic staff in Hong Kong were no longer protected by their institutions.
“The decision to terminate my appointment was made not by the University of Hong Kong but by an authority beyond the university through its agents,” he wrote.
“It marks the end of academic freedom in Hong Kong ... Academic institutions in Hong Kong cannot protect their members from internal and outside interferences.”
Tai added he would continue his research and teachings. He plans to use one to two years to complete a book on the rule of law.
“To be sure, I will continue my fight ... If we do not give up, we will see the day of the rebirth of Hong Kong’s rule of law,” he said.
