Teng Biao, China’s exiled human rights defense lawyer-scholar, will discuss how the Chinese regime represses dissent both inside and outside and how to resist this high-tech totalitarianism. Political science professor Victoria Hui is hosting Teng Biao for this lecture.
Teng Biao is an academic lawyer, currently Hauser Human Rights Scholar at Hunter College, and Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. He had been a lecturer at the China University of Politics and Law (Beijing), a visiting scholar at Yale, Harvard, NYU, and the Institute for Advanced Study. Teng’s research focuses on criminal justice, human rights, social movements, and political transition in China. Teng defended cases involving freedom of expression, religious freedom, the death penalty, Tibetans and Uyghurs. He co-founded two human rights NGOs in Beijing – the Open Constitution Initiative, and China Against the Death Penalty, in 2003 and 2010, respectively. He is one of the earliest promoters of the Rights Defense Movement in China and the manifesto Charter 08, for which Dr. Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Teng has received various international human rights awards including the Human Rights Prize of the French Republic (2007) and NED’s Democracy Award (2008). He is completing a book on the human rights movement and political transition in China.