Queen’s University law professor Alvin Cheung became a prophetic voice about the spread of authoritarian law in his hometown of Hong Kong.Supplied
Alvin Y.H. Cheung was a bookish Hong Kong teen heady with the ideas of John Locke and John Stuart Mill, when he was first swept into the thrill of citizen power. On July 1, 2003, he joined a half-million citizens who slogged through a clammy summer rainstorm, demanding that the government axe a bill that would have outlawed speech or writing deemed subversive or treasonous. Stunned by the show of unity, certain that voters would dislodge pro-China lawmakers from office, the government backed down in weeks.
Instead of becoming a street activist, Dr. Cheung became a barrister and prophetic voice about the spread of authoritarian law in his hometown, a subject he shared while teaching at Queen’s University’s Faculty of Law in Kingston. As Hong Kong people pushed China for more political power, the young academic warned fellow citizens that Beijing’s frequent and cunning legal encroachments made democratic prospects dim. Hong Kong, he warned in 2017, was becoming a “dual state,” with rights for some, and restrictions on rivals and critics. Three years later, Beijing proved him prescient. The 2020 National Security Law imposed on the territory amid the pandemic created a raft of serious crimes that targeted critics, silenced public dissent and killed the dream of many that Hong Kong would one day inspire democracy in China.
Dr. Cheung died on July 29 at Kingston General Hospital at the age of 38. According to his widow, Alyssa King, his death was a suicide.
Beijing’s response to a massive sit-in for democratic elections in 2014 – an event that local and national governments declared illegal before it began – convinced him that Beijing was dismantling his hometown’s vaunted legal rights. With choice words, deftly jabbed, he tallied the evidence: Hong Kong unleashed often petty criminal charges against democracy activists, both conservative and radical, and pestered parties and politicians with excessive bureaucratic demands. Soon, the legislature unseated elected lawmakers, parroting Beijing’s criticisms that their sworn oaths had been illegal.
Dr. Cheung told journalists and his many social-media followers that the Chinese and Hong Kong governments had essentially weaponized law to degrade civil rights and undermine the city’s autonomy. Hong Kong’s tactics were not new, but borrowed from oppressive regimes in Hungary, Venezuela and South Africa and beyond. “It was not necessary for the Chinese government to formally change the constitution of Hong Kong. It wasn’t even necessary to change very many laws. Rather, state repressions could take place within the framework of the legal order. This was a huge insight [of his],” said Samuel Issacharoff, the Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law at New York University and Dr. Cheung’s dissertation adviser. Governments had moved past tanks in the streets and sprawling detention camps. The new autocrats, Dr. Cheung noted, drowned rivals with quotidian, bureaucratic abuse. “Alvin was a self-conscious voice of the next generation of scholars who looked at this.”
Dr. Cheung was not content to express his concerns only to fellow lawyers and academics. With his dry, even caustic wit – he once denounced Beijing’s intervention in a Hong Kong ruling as a political “temper tantrum” – Dr. Cheung advised his social-media followers that the freedoms bequeathed by the British colonial government were vanishing because they were granted and denied at the regime’s whim. Hong Kong, he wrote, was becoming a dual state, seizing on German lawyer Ernst Fraenkel’s analysis of Nazi-era Germany.
Dr. Cheung was savaged by anonymous pro-China critics online. Mostly, he was frustrated that China watchers and foreign finance wizards seemed unconcerned by the destruction of a city where, he wrote as an undergraduate, residents had a constitutional and human-rights case for democracy.
“He was continuously raising the alarm, ‘Occupy [the 2014 protest] is not a one off, the repression is likely to get worse,’ ” remembered Dr. King, an assistant law professor at Queen’s. “There is a lot of resistance to the idea.” By then, President Xi Jinping had denounced Western-style democracy as a danger. “Alvin [saw] this as a problem and [that there would] be more massive retaliation coming.”
He was born Alvin Cheung Yu Hin on June 5, 1986, in Hong Kong, two years after Margaret Thatcher and the British government agreed to relinquish the land it had seized from China during the 19th-century Opium Wars. Like many middle-class parents then, David M. Cheung, an accountant, and Minnie F.M. Pun Cheung, a schoolteacher, worried about the changes that Chinese rule might bring to the British Crown colony. The family moved to Canada, settling in Scarborough, Ont., where young Alvin began school. On June 4, 1989, the boy crouched behind the family’s sofa as they watched live coverage of the Chinese army’s massacre near Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
After Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1997, the family, by then Canadian citizens, saw no reason to stay away. They returned to Hong Kong and settled in the New Territories, a sprawling suburban area. Young Alvin’s father died of cancer when the boy was a preteen.
In 2003, the mother and son lived near the Prince of Wales Hospital, an epicentre of the SARS pandemic after the infection spread from mainland China and killed about 300 people in Hong Kong.
“It was a turning point in mistrusting the central government,” Dr. King says. The Chinese Communist Party had tried to convince Hong Kong people that it would maintain the city’s stability and capitalize on its postwar economic might. Instead, China’s early refusal to disclose the rampaging illness fed distrust in Hong Kong people and fanned the 2003 protest.
Intellectually adventurous and a fierce debater, he was keen on philosophy, but his mother insisted that her only child choose a practical career. He received a Prince Philip scholarship and graduated with a law degree from Cambridge in 2007. He was smitten with legal scholar Yash Ghai, who raised concerns about Hong Kong’s 1997 constitution. Dr. Cheung’s published thesis argued that Beijing repeatedly violated its treaty with Britain by denying democratic elections for Hong Kong’s leader.
After he obtained his professional certificate in law from the University of Hong Kong, he was admitted to the bar in 2009. Months later, he joined the chambers of Sir Oswald Cheung (no relation), a prestigious law practice where some members were outspoken fighters for democratic change.
Dr. Cheung met his future wife while she was a judicial intern at Hong Kong’s Court of Appeal. With his nimbus of premature silver hair (greyed in his teens), a chambers-rich vocabulary, spoken with a posh British accent that, he admitted was plumped to woo dates, he dazzled her with his dry wit and deep analysis of Hong Kong politics. The two married in Brooklyn in 2013 and lived in New York and New Haven, Conn., while pursuing their doctorates in law – she at Yale, he at New York University. Besides his wife, Dr. Cheung leaves their two young children, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Ga-lai Stimson Cheung and Margaret Ga-ngok Caldwell Cheung; and his mother, who remains in Hong Kong.
In the United States, Dr. Cheung became an affiliated scholar, and then researcher, at the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at NYU, working closely with Jerome A. Cohen, the organization’s former director. Later, Dr. Cheung was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in Montreal.
”To me, he was one of the greatest scholars about Hong Kong politics and law,” said Teng Biao, a Chinese human-rights lawyer and Hauser Human Rights Scholar at Hunter College, the City University of New York. The pair met at NYU. Dr. Cheung, he said, understood that, “In the eyes of Beijing, Hong Kong becomes a threat to the one-party system. And freedom is contagious.” The influence of Hong Kong’s media, books and local NGO members who trained mainland residents rattled the state’s sense of control. “That’s why Beijing wanted to firmly destroy Hong Kong’s civil society, to maintain the Communist Party monopoly.”
Diagnosed with depression in 2013, Dr. Cheung worked with doctors to control his symptoms. After a bout with COVID-19 earlier this year, he struggled.
He was withering about city leaders and spineless bureaucrats – quislings, he called them – who helped degrade their own constitutional protections. Dr. Cheung took little pleasure in his role as the Cassandra of Hong Kong who predicted its subjugation. As he rued in his dissertation, “Abusive Legalism,” finished days before the national security restrictions took hold, when new authoritarians bury select citizens under rules and petty ordinances, they gaslight those who presume that law preserves equity and fairness.
“The manipulation of ordinary law has the potential to affect the everyday lives of more citizens, and therefore be more effective as a means of repression,” he writes. “Such manipulation can also serve to obfuscate the very act of repression.” In time, everyone is “at the mercy of the State.”
In terms of Hong Kong, “He definitely was pretty pessimistic about the near future. But in the long term, Xi Jinping is not going to last,” Dr. King said. The couple talked about civil rights in South Africa. “They didn’t know they were going to win, they didn’t know how they were going to win. … Ultimately what is going to make the difference in Hong Kong is Hong Kong people.”
If you are having thoughts of suicide or worried about someone you know, the Suicide Crisis Helpline is available across Canada 24 hours a day. Call or text 9-8-8 toll-free, anytime, for support in English or French. (For medical emergencies, call 9-1-1.)
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Editor’s note: This article has been updated to remove an incorrect date referring to when Alvin Cheung met his future wife.