Rowena He

Rowena He or He Xiaoqing (Traditional Chinese: 何曉清; Simplified Chinese: 何晓清) is a China specialist and historian of modern Chinese society and politics. The Wall Street Journal called her as a "lead scholar on the Tiananmen Movement." Her first book, Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggles for Democracy in China was named Top Five Books 2014 by the Asia Society’s China File. The book has been reviewed in the New York Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New Statesman, Spectator, Christian Science Monitor, China Journal, Human Rights Quarterly, and other international periodicals. 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. 

She has taught at Harvard University, Wesley College, Saint Michael’s College and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). She received the Harvard University Certificate of Teaching Excellence for three consecutive years for the Tiananmen courses that she created. At CUHK, she received the Faculty of Arts Outstanding Teaching Award in 2020 and 2021. Despite previous attacks from Chinese students for teaching a taboo topic banned by the Beijing government, she is a strong believer of engagement and dialogues and eventually won the support of many Chinese students after taking her classes. The attacks from Chinese students motivated her to start working on her second book on history, memory, and student nationalism.

In October 2023, the Financial Times broke the news that Rowena He had been denied a work visa to return to her position as an Associate Professor of History at CUHK. Ming Pao, Hong Kong's major intellectual newspaper, published a front page story of her being fired despite increasing political pressure. The news was widely reported by international media. Her interview with Simon Shen, former Political Science professor of CUHK, had over 100,000 views overnight. Hong Kong people expressed their support to her long-term perseverance of preserving the historical memory erased by the Beijing government and her dedication to the Hong Kong students during the region's unprecedented social movement that was cracked down by the authorities.

He's op-eds have appeared in the Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, and the Wall Street Journal. She has been a keynote speaker for the Canada Human Rights National Symposium, testified before a US Congressional hearing, and delivered lectures for the US State Department and the Canada International Council. Her scholarly opinions are regularly sought by the ABC (Australia), Al Jazeera, Associate Press, BBC, CBC, CNN, CTV, Financial Times, Globe and Mail, Guardian, Inside Higher Education, Le Monde, NPR, NBC, the New York Times, Reuters, Time, Times Higher Education, Wall Street Journal, and other international media outlets. She was designated among the Top 100 Chinese Public Intellectuals 2016.

Born and raised in China, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. She is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.

Biography

Born and raised in Guangdong province, He obtained her Bachelor of Arts at South China Normal University. During the Tiananmen Square protest, she was a seventeen-year-old secondary school student and has joined student-organised pro-democracy movements. Because of the oppressing experiences during that time, she decided to find the lost voices in this historical event and specialized in the study of the June 4th event.

In 1998 He moved to Canada, where she finished her Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in 2002 and 2008 respectively at the University of Toronto. After her graduate studies, she joined Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University as a Postdoctoral Fellow between 2008 and 2010, working closely with her mentors historian Merle Goldman and political scientist Roderick MacFarquhar. Her first book, Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China, was named one of the Top Five China Books of 2014 by the Asia Society's China File. From 2010 to 2015, she was Lecturer at the Faculty of Arts and Science at Harvard and created her award-winning course titled 'Rebels With a Cause: Tiananmen in History and Memory'. During this teaching period, she received teaching awards in three successive years. In 2018, she was selected to be a residential fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, before she took up the position of Associate Professor at the Department of History in the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2019. In late October 2023, He lost her position at CUHK after having been denied an employment visa to return to Hong Kong from the United States.

Writings

• Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, April 2014. ISBN 978-113743832-4