'HKU Should Have Done Background Check On Professor'

A member of the University of Hong Kong's governing council, Eric Cheung, said on Wednesday that while he had voted in favour of the appointment of a mainland scholar as one of two new vice presidents at the institution, it was regrettable that a background check on the professor had not been carried out.

Professor Max Shen has denied reports that he is a member of the Chinese Communist Party.

Students staged a sit-in protest as the council met on Tuesday evening to vote on the appointment, with sources saying 21 members backed Shen for the post, while one voted against the move.

Cheung, a principal law lecturer at the university, told a radio programme that he supported Shen's appointment "out of respect for the selection process".

But he added it was not ideal that no panel was set up to carry out a due diligence check on Shen, and that no women or international scholars were chosen for the roles.

“I thought I couldn’t hold double standards, because the appointment of Johannes Chan [as an HKU vice president] went through all the proper procedures, but the council overturned the decision made after going through those procedures and put in a lot of personal views,” Cheung explained.

“I don’t know if others find that problematic, but I, as an academic, would stick to [the selection result] because the whole selection committee was made up of people from HKU entirely… and no one questioned the selection process until a few days ago.”

Chan, a pro-democracy legal scholar, was denied a vice president position in 2015, with many suspecting the council's refusal to approve the appointment was made out of political reasons.

One of Shen's fellow academics at Tsinghua University, Gong Peng, has been appointed as the other new vice president at HKU.