Dui Hua Opens New Office in Hong Kong

Dui Hua is pleased to announce the recent opening of a branch office in Hong Kong, which will complement and expand on work done from the foundation’s office in San Francisco. The main goal of establishing the Hong Kong office is to increase our capacity to conduct research, programs, and development activities connected with China and Asia as a whole. The office is funded by Dui Hua’s Special Program/Development Fund (SPDF), established in 2005 to support new directions for human rights exchanges and organizational development.

With its location, the Hong Kong office has potential to help strengthen ties between Dui Hua and Chinese criminal justice officials, who increasingly visit the Special Administrative Region, and allows the foundation to build links with NGOs, journalists, and foreign diplomats in Hong Kong. The office is already proving its value in the area of research, since Dui Hua staff is able to make frequent use of Hong Kong’s libraries—still the best repository of materials of interest to the foundation—while researching other collections related to China’s criminal law on a regular basis.

Program and Research Officer Scott Berkland is based in the Hong Kong office, where he works with Dui Hua’s newest staff member, Flora Lee, who joined the foundation in July 2007 as a research and administrative assistant. Before coming to Dui Hua, Flora earned a Master of Public Administration with a concentration in Environmental Science and Policy from Columbia University. She completed her undergraduate studies at Oberlin College, where she studied for a B.A. in Environmental Studies. In Hong Kong, Flora assists with a range of administrative tasks and conducts research, especially for the foundation’s “mass incident” database.