Timing is everything. As I explain in my book Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech, the overlap in 2020 of the Zoomification of society due to COVID-19 restrictions with the passage of Hong Kong's national security law created a speech and privacy nightmare for higher education.
On June 30, 2020, Beijing enforced the national security law in Hong Kong, targeting alleged acts of separatism, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign countries. It was a vaguely-worded legislative weapon handed to authorities to crush the city's vibrant democracy and protest movements. But it did even more than that. The law was also explicitly written to apply to acts committed "outside the region by a person who is not a permanent resident of the region."
