China’s determination to transform Hong Kong into an ultra-restrictive mini-me that stomps on any perceived or actual challenge to its authority has evolved apace.
Even perhaps the greatest soccer player of all time Lionel Messi released a reconciliation video to explain his controversial no-show against a Hong Kong all-star team last month, emphasizing his “special feelings” for “everyone in China” in a recorded statement that mentioned the motherland far more prominently than the city he has supposedly offended.
Staying in the world of soccer, Hong Kong’s beleaguered esports representatives, often the target for the punitive attentions of the Chinese Communist Party, were withdrawn from a tournament at the eAsian Cup, a parallel event to the physical, eleven-a-side Asian Cup in Qatar, because computers could not display “China” in the team name.
Language has seen tweaks in news-reporting, too: A Nikkei analysis of more than 26,000 editorial articles in Hong Kong’s Chinese-language media ecosystem since 2014 has charted sharp declines of phrases that indicate an identity particular to the city like “Hong Kong people” and the almost total disappearance of terms like “Hong Kong-China conflict” or “Hong Kong-China relations.”
The aim is to eliminate any notion of Hong Kong as a separate jurisdiction and any conception among its people that they are or can be distinct from China. It goes hand-in-hand with the import of Beijing’s surveillance and monitoring culture: On February 11, Hong Kong Commissioner of Police Raymond Siu Chak-yee (蕭澤頤) revealed that facial recognition “may” be deployed to increase national security and that the 2,000 CCTV cameras set to be installed in the city during 2024 are “really, relatively not enough.”
Mainlandization has been tangible elsewhere through February: The law firm Latham & Watkins has cut the automatic access of its Hong Kong team to data outside of Greater China, a reflection of fears as to how it might be used. Baseline harassment of pro-democracy businesses proceeds through almost constant fines for absurd infractions like “toilet stains.” Zeng Yuxuan (曾雨璇), a mainland Chinese student in Hong Kong who was imprisoned in September 2023 for planning to unfurl a banner in commemoration of the Tiananmen Square massacre, remains disappeared and incommunicado after being deported back out of the city last year. And, predictably, activists who have been released from prison are being denied employment opportunities and shunned by landlords, a distinctive feature of Beijing’s playbook at home. Exit bans for such figures seem to be looming, too.
The justice system remains where the line is blurring most furiously: Ignoring the statement on the last day of January 2024 from U.N. special rapporteur Alice Jill Edwards that evidence “may have been obtained by torture or other unlawful treatment,” the sham trial of pro-democracy media magnate Jimmy Lai (黎智英) edged forward with yet more contrived testimony that attempts — and fails — to present running a successful newspaper as if it was a crime.
Lai faces possible life in prison, the term that may de facto have been bestowed on the serial activist Koo Sze-yiu (古思堯). Sentenced to nine months in prison even though he is in his seventies and has terminal cancer, Koo was prosecuted for his intention to protest the absence of opposition candidates in Hong Kong’s district council elections last December by taking a coffin to the Electoral Registration Office. It was daubed with slogans like “one country, two systems to the funeral parlor” and has been deemed seditious. Reported by Radio Free Asia, he responded to his jailing by stating, “I am happy to be a fighter for social justice and a foot soldier of the democratic movement. I hope to be a martyr for democracy and human rights.”
As usual, Hong Kong authorities pressed repressive and discriminatory policies in every way possible. The government is appealing court rulings that force it to extend housing and inheritance rights to same-sex couples and seeking to overturn its previously defeated attempt to outlaw the city’s unofficial anthem “Glory to Hong Kong,” an emblem of the pro-democracy movement.
Secretary for Security Chris Tang Ping-keung (鄧炳強) has meanwhile stated that the current two-year maximum sentence for sedition like the above-mentioned Koo Sze-yiu example should be raised when Hong Kong enacts new national security legislation under Article 23 of its Basic Law later this year. In a statement from 86 civil rights groups around the world carried on the website of Freedom House, the article’s progression has been condemned for its procedural changes that will “dramatically undermine the Hong Kong people’s due process and fair trial rights.”
As per Hong Kong Free Press, Tang cited speech therapists producing books about sheep as reasons why extra punitive cover is required, while his counterpart Secretary for Justice Paul Lam Ting-kwok (林定國) has indicated that arrestee access to lawyers will be curtailed when the article is passed, a move that is highly reminiscent of mainland China’s justice system.
Lam further believes that, when journalists are interviewing overseas pro-democracy figures, they may be abetting crime, and he thereby hopes to cut Hong Kongers off from those who advocate for their rights by scaring media away from talking to them. His words came as Hong Kong police officially declared the well-known activist-in-exile Agnes Chow Ting (周庭) as a wanted person and reaffirmed that she will be “pursued for the rest of her life.”
Another leader of the movement to secure universal suffrage for Hong Kongers, the former lawmaker Ted Hui Chi-fung (許智峯), received a bankruptcy order in absentia on February 6 after failing to pay the legal costs of his prosecution. In 2020, his bank accounts were allegedly frozen by HSBC at the behest of the Hong Kong government after he fled the city.
Hui is the kind of figure who is likely to be in the crosshairs of cyberattack endeavors to infiltrate international advocacy for Hong Kong, which were revealed in a cache of documents that seem to have been leaked to GitHub from a company known as I-Soon (上海安洵). I-Soon provides hacking services to the Chinese Communist Party. According to cybersecurity company SentinelOne’s cybercrime and threat intelligence monitor, SentinelLabs, Hong Kong pro-democracy organizations have been among the targets of its activities.
Yet it is not always the Chinese or Hong Kong governments that are disrupting, blanking out or otherwise undermining messages that contradict or call into doubt the legitimacy of Hong Kong’s present rulership. Backstage emails from the Western administration team for the sci-fi writers’ Hugo awards verified suspicions that authors with political viewpoints considered to align with Hong Kong protesters were at risk of being blocked out of prizes. Australia has been criticized for dragging its feet with visas for Hong Kong refugees, perhaps due to business priorities. And, when filming a graduation ceremony on February 7, the U.K.’s University of York allegedly turned its camera away from a courageous mainland Chinese student named Ma Youwei (馬有為) who was holding a “liberate Hong Kong” flag as he took to the stage to receive his diploma. The university has previous history in terms of smothering the pro-democracy message to the wider world.
Nonetheless, the spirit of protest just about survives alongside vague remnants of rule of law: Anti-war and anti-dictatorship demonstrators on the streets of Hong Kong called for a ceasefire in Gaza and a Russian withdrawal from Ukraine, despite the latter contradicting China President Xi Jinping’s “no-limits” partnership with fellow dictator Vladimir Putin. Activists for PETA publicly opposed the 2024 Hong Kong International Fur & Fashion Fair. The Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal declined its government’s attempts to reverse an acquittal of seven senior human rights figures for the supposed crime of organizing an unauthorized protest. Social media videos of Japanese dance group Avantgardey exhibiting Chinese moves at Lunar New Year performances in Hong Kong were taken down after attracting wrathful criticism for supporting a mainland cultural invasion of the city and putting money before principles. The Hong Kong Bar Association’s chairman has tentatively put forward the idea of creating space for a “public interest” defense in the aforementioned Article 23 law. And, highlighting how Article 23 can be dangerous in the absence of systematic checks and balances, three members of the League of Social Democrats took enormous risks to unveil a banner on February 27 stating, “Put the people above the country, human rights above the regime,” and “There can be no national security without democracy and human rights.”
Given the context, truer words would have been hard to conceive. Far much harder to display to the world.
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