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Alvin Y.H. Cheung
Alvin Y.H. Cheung is dead, scholar of authoritarianism and the rule of law
Alvin Y.H. Cheung, a faculty member at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario who warned of China’s threat to Hong Kong years before a subsequent crackdown, died July 29 at Kingston General Hospital following a brief illness.
A 2020 doctoral graduate of the New York University School of Law, Mr. Cheung was married to Alyssa King, an assistant professor at Queen’s and expert on comparative civil procedure and courts. The couple and their children lived in Kingston.
A Canadian citizen of Hong Kong descent, Mr. Cheung, 38, was a Hong Kong barrister in 2009 when he noted the insistent and steady encroachments by Beijing on the former British colony, especially through the city’s supposedly independent common law courts. As he studied how authoritarian governments manipulate law to seize and retain power, Mr. Cheung wrote tirelessly about the coming downfall of legal and civil rights in his hometown years before Beijing seized control.
Mr. Cheung was not satisfied just with sharing his concerns among fellow lawyers and academics. With his characteristic, even caustic wit — he once described Beijing’s intervention in a Hong Kong decree as a political “temper tantrum” — Mr. Cheung told journalists and his social media followers that the Chinese and Hong Kong governments had weaponized law to undermine the city’s autonomy and degrade civil rights. In 2014, after Hong Kong residents occupied a highway to demand democratic elections, Mr. Cheung warned that government officials aligned with Beijing were using prosecutions to suppress free speech and imprison critics. Beijing, he wrote, was guilty of “Abusive Legalism.” (“For My Enemies, The Law’” he jibed.)
Five years later, millions of Hong Kong citizens rose up to stop a bill that would have made people in Hong Kong vulnerable to prosecution in China. Mr. Cheung warned that state officials were using threats to manipulate and pressure Hong Kong judges, inviting a cascade of convictions. A year later, when Beijing forced a sweeping national security law onto the territory, degrading many of its esteemed civil rights and sending numerous activists to prison, Mr. Cheung noted with despair that a regime that wanted to consolidate its hold on power needed only to selectively enforce offenses and gaslight the world about its actions to achieve total control. “Only a highly imaginative reading of the NSL would provide any grounds for optimism,” he wrote.
Mr. Cheung took little pleasure in his role as the Cassandra of Hong Kong who predicted its subjugation by China. As he rued in his dissertation, “Abusive Legalism,” authoritarians destroy democracy and undermine human rights by creatively hiding their manipulations under the cover of law. Among his many examples, he pointed to vague criminal charges, selectively targeted, that invite mass censorship and self-censorship. Rather than using dragnets to round up many people, such governments drown the populace in prosaic offenses. Everyone, he wrote, was “at the mercy of the State.”
Born Alvin Cheung Yu Hin on June 5, 1986 in Hong Kong, Mr. Cheung received a Bachelors and Masters in law (as of right) at Cambridge. After professional training at the University of Hong Kong, he worked as a barrister in Sir Oswald Cheung’s Chambers in Hong Kong. He lectured at Hong Kong Baptist University in its Master of Public Administration program. He received his doctorate in law from New York University, where he worked with noted scholar Samuel Issacharoff.
He and Ms. King married in Brooklyn in 2013 and lived in New York City and New Haven Connecticut while pursuing their doctorates in law — she at Yale, he at NYU.
Mr. Cheung was an affiliated scholar, and then researcher, at the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at NYU, working closely with Jerome A. Cohen, the former director. Later, he was a postdoctoral fellow working with Evan Fox-Decent at McGill University in Montreal.
Besides his wife, Mr. Cheung is survived by his two young children, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Ga-lai Stimson Cheung and Margaret Ga-ngok Caldwell Cheung; and his mother, Minnie FM Pun Cheung of Hong Kong. His father, David M. Cheung, predeceased him.
A funeral service will take place on Aug. 7 at 1 pm at the Robert J. Reid & Sons Funeral Home, 309 Johnson St, Kingston, followed by cremation.
In lieu of flowers, the family encourages donations in his name to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (
https://www.eff.org/), Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture (
https://ccvt.org/donation/), and The Rights Practice (
https://www.rights-practice.org/).
A celebration of his life will take place at a later date.