Tai Recognised as Leading Global Thinker by Foreign Policy

For the past sixth years, Foreign Policy (FP) magazine has been publishing a special issue of 100 leading global thinkers.  In the 2014 special issue (published in November), the thinkers are organised under ten categories: agitators, challengers, innovators, chroniclers, artists, decision-makers, naturals, advocates, healers and moguls.  Benny Tai and Joshua Wong were recognised together under the category of 'challengers' for their activities in Occupy Central or, as captioned by FP, "For making Beijing sweat".  FP records a notable fact that "Tai was once described in the South China Morning Post as 'one of those cuddly professors found on every campus who would talk to anyone interested in their research'".   As with the general reaction to Occupy Central, the media reaction to this recognition has been both positive and negative.  Whatever one might think of Occupy Central, it has certainly been a remarkable example of 'knowledge exchange' which is now a well-established pillar of Hong Kong universities along side research, teaching and service.