On December 19, 2023, the U.S. Department of the Treasury announced sanctions on three Hong Kong or Hong Kong-Malaysia entities named Dirac Technology HK Limited, Integrated Scientific Microwave Technology and Arta Wave.
According to the department, these companies have been procuring items including antennas, inertial measurement units and servomotors to facilitate the production of unmanned aerial vehicles for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force Self-Sufficiency Jihad Organization. From there, they are believed to find their way to Russia and terrorists in the Middle East.
Other entities operating from Hong Kong are already subject to sanctions, and the city’s financial institutions and industrial groups have been quietly warned by the U.S. before to stem the flow of American technology to Russia as it pursues war in Ukraine, which was reported by Nikkei Asia in July. From United Nations figures, which are almost certainly underestimates, more than 10,000 Ukrainian citizens have lost their lives since the Russian invasion in February 2022.
The new restrictions come as the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that analyzes global conflicts, revealed on December 21 that Hong Kong shipped $528 million of microelectronics to Russia in the first six months of 2023 and has now overtaken even China for export to Putin’s regime of the items, several of which — essential to the war effort — originate with Western firms like Intel and Texas Instruments.
Thus the city adheres to Beijing policy internationally as it does locally, where mainland courts have ominously growing power to extend their authority, and any form of speech or narrative that does not conform to the Chinese Communist Party’s is being systematically eliminated.
As per a draft of the new Civil Service Code released on December 13, public sector employees will soon be “duty-bound to safeguard national security” and “cannot criticize (including online and on social media or by other means) any government policies (particularly those relating to their official duties) or support opposing views of any other party.” They are already required to watch brainwashing videos and face being fired for signing petitions against the deterioration of institutional independence.
While an undesirable erosion of checks and balances, plurality of opinion could still have had some outlet if media freedom was being upheld in Hong Kong. However, as 2023 came to a close, a key report about witness-blocking in the national security trial of Jimmy Lai (黎智英) on sedition and foreign collusion charges abruptly vanished from the newspaper Sing Tao; a media conference was forced online after its venue, which shares connection to the Hong Kong government, suddenly pulled out of a contract for the event; and news broke that Minnie Chan Man Li (陳敏莉), a reporter for the Alibaba Group-owned South China Morning Post and writer for the Apple Daily before its forced closure, has allegedly disappeared since October after visiting Beijing.
Failing to ameliorate concerns for Chan’s well being given China’s notorious abuse of journalists and the lack of direct comment from the reporter herself, the South China Morning Post claimed that Chan was on personal leave handling a “private matter” in the Chinese capital and threatened legal action against Hong Kong Free Press, a fellow local news outlet, for any “misreporting” it may conduct on the matter.
However, it then emerged via Al Jazeera that a second South China Morning Post reporter may have experienced a similar temporary abduction during a visit to mainland China in 2022, while a parallel scandal engulfed the media as an opinion piece it had platformed on the futility of continuing to fight Russia transpired to have been written by a fictional Slovak “expert” named Peter Sojka with a falsified biography and an AI-generated headshot. The second time the South China Morning Post has faced such an allegation, it follows last year’s revelations that the newspaper had squashed an investigation of human rights violations in East Turkestan (Xinjiang).
This kind of dysfunction in the information ecosystem is a phenomenon that China would like to expand further afield. As reported by the Financial Times, it has recruited a far-right politician in Belgium to spread its narrative through the European Union that Hong Kong protests were U.S.-driven, a revelation that follows the exposure of an alleged agent with access to the parliament and Hong Konger circles in the U.K. earlier this year. Mechanisms have also been proposed to condition property leases for consulates and foreign organizations in Hong Kong on whether they meet approval from Beijing’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which thereby attempts to comply fealty to the Middle Kingdom’s worldview.
Other techniques for controlling speech and thought at home and abroad in December 2023 were significantly blunter: the prosecution of an autistic man for booing the Chinese national anthem; the harassment to closure of the independent Mount Zero bookstore; the extension of asset-freezing provisions under the repressive National Security Law; the most recent hauling into solitary confinement of award-winning pro-democracy figure Chow Hang-tung (鄒幸彤), allegedly, this time, for receiving too many letters in prison; the announcement of five more HK$1 million ($130,000) bounties for the capture of overseas activists; the arrests of four people who donated money to anti-establishment figures outside of Hong Kong through crowdfunding platforms; and the appearance of confession videos, another recent Chinese Communist Party import to Hong Kong.
In these videos, which appeared on the website of broadcaster TVB, Tsang Chi-kin (曾志健) and Tong Ying-kit (唐英傑), two relatively famous pro-democracy protestors who are currently in jail, profess to regret their previous anti-government actions. With faces obscured, they chime that “the atmosphere prevailing at the time” was a key factor leading them to call for the liberation of their city from unelected rule.
Implying that Hong Kong’s correctional facilities have a kindly rehabilitative role, seeking to divide the protest movement and suggesting that it was superficial and misguided, the confessional footage could be used to justify future police actions against any person who speaks, writes or posts messages that are deemed to create the “atmosphere” in which opposition to authorities either occurred or could occur.
This was likely one aim in their production, but, almost as soon as the videos were broadcast, they were blown out of the water by Agnes Chow Ting (周庭) and Tony Chung Hon-lam (鍾翰林), two high-profile activists who have escaped Hong Kong following prison sentences. They both described extreme psychological coercion, surveillance and pressure from the city’s police after their release from jail.
Chow was forced to write a repentance letter and frog-marched to Shenzhen to take propaganda photos at Tencent’s headquarters. Chung was denied the right to work without prior consent from authorities, asked to infiltrate activist circles to resolve his resulting financial insecurity and also proposed for a similar PR trip to the mainland.
Their experiences strongly indicate that Tsang and Tong were not speaking volitionally in making their confessions, and they coincide with an explosive expose from the Washington Post that former protest fundraiser Andy Li Yu-hin (李宇軒) underwent terrifying mistreatment to forcibly compel him to testify against media tycoon Jimmy Lai in a show trial that began in Hong Kong on December 18.
Li is anticipated to provide “evidence” that Lai, the former owner of the deeply popular Apple Daily newspaper and a powerful long-term democracy advocate, was a central node in a foreign-orchestrated plot to sow chaos in Hong Kong and bring down its government. Whatever testimony Li presents, however, is somewhat contaminated by his lack of independent legal representation and the Post’s revelations that screams were regularly heard from his cell during interrogations conducted in mainland China.
Lai is anyway beyond hope of a fair judgment due to a procedure that has been described as Stalinesque. Long prior to any kind of verdict and merely the day after the trial began, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was depicting him as a “one of the most notorious anti-China elements bent on destabilizing Hong Kong and a mastermind of the riots that took place in Hong Kong,” somewhat undermining the principle of non-prejudice that one might expect from a genuine exploration of evidence against charge.
Amid the backwardness of such a dictatorial legal pantomime, the validity of Lai’s calls for democratic reform had already been emphatically justified by Hong Kong’s district council elections, which were held on December 10, over a week before he even reached the courtroom.
Then, the electorate was expected to pick its way through a deployment of 10,000 police to choose between “patriotic” candidates who had been pre-filtered for their piety to Beijing doctrine. People were charged or warranted with arrest for appealing for others to boycott the sham vote. Members of the League of Social Democrats were harassed prior to election day and apprehended on their way to protest, having been denied the right to stand. And the veteran activist Koo Sze-yiu (古思堯) was taken away by national security police for planning to demonstrate against the effective disqualification of all pro-democracy candidates.
Yet disruptions notwithstanding, Hong Kongers still managed to make their opinions unambiguously known. Turnout for the election tumbled to a record low of 27.5%, destroying any legitimacy it might have otherwise achieved and comparing disastrously with the 71.2% of 2019, when candidacy was open to all and pro-democracy figures almost swept the board of seats amid a citywide upswelling of dissatisfaction with Chinese Communist Party rule.
Free to speak openly again now that she is on Canadian soil, the aforementioned Agnes Chow, a banned politician herself, was fittingly able to put into words what voters had expressed in action. “Hong Kong citizens do not want to participate in a fake election,” she said. Not for the first time, the last word is hers.
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