A white-shirt convicted of violently attacking protesters in Hong Kong’s Yuen Long district four years ago stated in front of a court that he felt city authorities had encouraged the notorious incident. The judge declined to hear more.
Tang Tak Chuen (鄧德全), a witness who gave evidence on the same attack, alleges that Hong Kong police attempted to intimidate him into testifying against democrat lawmaker Lam Cheuk-ting (林卓廷), who was arrested under suspicion of rioting at Yuen Long that night despite having been a victim of the violence there. Tang says he fled overseas in refusal to frame an innocent man, under threat of being hit with a rioting charge himself if he did not cooperate.
Either of these two claims ought to trigger an investigation. In the Hong Kong of August 2023, however, there is more urgency to erase images with yellow construction hats, which are believed to endanger national security, and to draft new legislation outlawing “soft-resistance.”
What might constitute soft resistance seems to be unknown, but customs officers have been tasked with finding it anyway, and yellow hats surely fit the category. One can also firmly surmise that soft resistance is surreptitiously violent even when it is peaceful, as per the wisdom of Hong Kong Secretary for Security Chris Tang Ping-kueng (鄧炳強), a figurehead for the battle against this particular form of cryptic criminality.
Tang has just re-confirmed himself as a conspiracy theorist, using his position of authority to push the implausible narrative that 20 years of protests have been driven by external forces twisting “right things as wrong,” not Hong Kongers demanding protections against the state violence that he personally propagates. He considers art to be the “modus operandi” of those who endanger the nation and implies that artists are thieves, remarks which have emerged on the back of reports that Hong Kong is seeking to capture a Danish sculptor named Jens Galschiot and bundle him into a mainland prison.
Refused entry to Hong Kong as far back as 2008, Galschiot has attracted China’s wrath due to his now orange “Pillar of Shame” sculpture, which has inconveniently expressed the agony and injustice of the Tiananmen Square Massacre since it was temporarily erected in Victoria Park in 1997. Originally intended as a reverse Nobel Peace Prize with versions to mark grave crimes across the world, the pillar subsequently fell into relative obscurity and became known most intimately to students of Hong Kong University, where it was permanently located and ceremonially washed every year. Now, however, replicas of the pillar have been displayed in Denmark, Norway, Taiwan and throughout cyberspace, after the original was controversially removed from public view in December 2021, as Hong Kong authorities turned the screw on freedom of expression.
As shown by the ongoing case of Zeng Yuxuan (曾雨璇), a doctor of law from mainland China who was arrested in June this year and charged with violating sedition laws after she commemorated the death of a man who stabbed a police officer in 2021, even posters of the sculpture are presently interpreted as criminal possessions. The act of sending and receiving them is then woven into suggestive chains of events to make it appear as if Galschiot is the lynchpin of an international subterfuge that colludes with Hong Kong malcontents. Chris Tang needs fuel for his conspiracies about external forces, after all.
Art aside, the very language of most Hong Kongers may soon be interpreted as a token of soft resistance as well. On Aug. 22, 2023, allegedly warrantless Hong Kong National Security Department officers entered both the family home and the former cake shop of Andrew Chan Lok-hang (陳樂行), the founder of Societas Linguistica Hongkongensis (SLHK), a group that promotes the use of Cantonese, a symbol of local identity spoken by around 90% of citizens.
Imitating art in life, the officers demanded the removal of an essay published on the group’s website that depicted a dystopian state of cultural erasure 27 years from now in which Mandarin predominates and all religions have been Sinicized. Its description of a mosque co-opted for propaganda purposes presumably hits too close to the truth to be tolerated, at least for China proper.
The police intimidation combined with legal advice forced Chan to shutter SLHK, and the breaching of his home adds weight to the argument that Cantonese faces the same slow demise as the Chinese Communist Party is forcing on Tibetan, Mongolian, Korean and Uyghur, all of which offer avenues to express dissent that are harder for central authorities to censor and control. Chan’s parting Facebook post to announce SLHK’s closure described death threats and other pressures he received after opposing mandatory Mandarin graduation tests in Hong Kong’s Baptist University in 2018, and suggested concerns for his family members.
The latter is well-founded as Hong Kong authorities continue to rifle through the relatives of eight well-known pro-democracy exiles and activists against which it has declared something like a fatwa. In the last few weeks alone, at minimum, the police have questioned the mother, father, older brother and sister-in-law of Dennis Kwok Wing-hang (郭榮鏗), the ex-wife, two sons, two daughters and a daughter-in-law of Elmer Yuan Gong-yi (袁弓夷), the older brother, sister-in-law and nephew of Mung Siu-tat (蒙兆達), the parents, older brother, sister-in-law and an acquaintance of Nathan Law Kwun-chung (羅冠聰), and the mother, father and two brothers of Anna Kwok Fung-yee (郭鳳儀).
The eight remain defiant and committed to galvanizing international support for democracy in Hong Kong and perhaps even establishing an elected government in exile, but the targeting of families may be discouraging less high-profile overseas figures from participating in movements for Hong Kong liberation. Indeed, it is a tactic that has been honed for many years in mainland China to control dissidents and force people wanted by the Chinese Communist Party to return home for imprisonment.
Another of China’s typical control strategies is to place the party above the state, a maneuver that Hong Kong shows signs of implementing with the government’s authoritarian response to its defeat in a court of law over an attempt to ban the unofficial Hong Kong anthem “Glory to Hong Kong.” Reacting to Judge Anthony Chan’s (陳健強) decision that an injunction on the song would constitute overstep by the state and that courts must “protect human rights, which include freedom of expression, when acting to safeguard national security,” Hong Kong’s Department of Justice launched an appeal on the basis that courts should defer to the executive in these kinds of cases.
If upheld on these grounds, as is very likely, the appeal would demonstrate even deeper mainlandization of the judicial system. Already, people are being pursued for crimes even after they have been found not guilty of them, like social worker Jackie Chen Hung-sau (陳虹秀); convicted of offenses for which they have not been charged, like Alvin Cheung Kam-mun (鄭錦滿); sentenced according to mainland justice culture, like Lui Sai-yu (呂世瑜); and charged amounts like HK$500,000 ($64,000) based on whimsical court decisions, despite having been twice acquitted of offenses and awarded legal costs, like photojournalist Marc Progin.
Nonetheless, even as Hong Kong transforms into a Matryoshka doll of prisons, pro-democracy figures are led around with bags over their heads, and the organizers of relief funds for medical, psychological and legal aid endure regular arrests, authorities still do not get everything their way. Some of the city’s most famous and revered supporters of the right to speak and vote — Jimmy Lai (黎智英), Albert Ho (何俊仁), Cyd Ho (何秀蘭), Lee Cheuk-yan (李卓人), Martin Lee (李柱銘), Leung Kwok-hung (梁國雄) and Margaret Ng (吳靄儀) — have had convictions for organizing an unauthorized assembly reversed this month.
Explaining the decision, the Court of Appeal found that participating in a protest is not the same as organizing one. Although the finding makes little material difference to any of the people concerned, some of whom either have completed sentences or are still in prison on other charges, it does at least reign in some of the injustices that are being perpetrated under Hong Kong’s fractured rule of law.
Image: Glen Bledsoe, CC BY 2.0
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