Bulletin No. 1, 2014

56   Chinese University Bulletin No. 1, 2014 Human Rights Lawyer on Press Freedom Geof frey Rober t son QC, world - renowned human rights lawyer, spoke as a guest of the Research Centre for Human Values on 28 February 2014, urging the government to protect press freedom, which he said is a ‘most important sinew of a free society’. The lawyer, who has represented Julian Assange and former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, delivered a lecture titled ‘State Secrecy: Manning, Assange and Snowden’ to a full capacity audience at the CUHK Faculty of Law Graduate Centre in Central. During the two-hour event, Robertson noted that Hong Kong ‘desperately lacks’ a Freedom of Information Law, which is something ‘any civilized and quasi-democratic society must have’. Malmqvist on Tang Poetry The first Jao Tsung-I Visiting Professor Public Lecture was held on 3 March 2014. Prof. Nils Göran David Malmqvist, a leading Swedish sinologist and a member of the selection committee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, was invited to deliver a lecture entitled ‘On Popular Poetry of the Tang Period’. Professor Malmqvist began his lecture by discussing a Tang dynasty manuscript discovered in 1969, the Shieryue santaici , ( santaici on the 12 months) which could probably be the first six- syllable lüshi (regulated verse) in the history of Chinese literature. Through the Jao Tsung-I Visiting Professorship Scheme, a world-class scholar on Chinese cultural research is invited for academic research and scholarly exchange at the Institute of Chinese Studies of CUHK every year. Intellectual Cross- Currents