Hong Kong Police Force’s latest threats to overseas activists are straight from a forcible repatriation playbook that has been honed by China for decades. At one end is persuasion, at the other is full-scale abduction. How far will Hong Kong go?
Safeguard Defenders, a Madrid-based organization specialized in researching disappearances, has extensively described China’s techniques for involuntarily returning people from outside the country to suffer Communist Party judgment and punishment. They begin with coercion to encourage such figures to, in essence, kidnap themselves, grade up to lures or intimidation by shady figures like off-record police officers and, if earlier techniques are ineffective, culminate in “irregular methods”: physically snatching people and bundling them across borders into murky detention facilities.
The first level can take different forms. Friends and family might be invited — or pressured — to sweet-talk target individuals to fly back to China of their own accord, a psychological ploy that fixates on what they miss in their loved ones lives by being away. Alternatively, relatives and connections may receive threats conditioning their personal safety or freedom with the target’s return. In the past, these have involved taking de facto hostages. Cajoling is coupled with incentives: If the person walks themselves back to the “motherland,” their treatment will purportedly be more lenient. Rewards are available to those who help the process along.
Levels two and three require deeper tentacles, all of which China has at its disposal: police officers or security agents on tourist visas who go beyond the standard sightseeing itinerary to threaten people; confiscation of income; joint law enforcement activities that may overstep their stated bounds; underground police stations linked to regional public security bureaus that interpret Beijing policy on foreign soil; third countries, like Thailand, who will allow Chinese security agents broad powers to behave as they wish; the infiltration of overseas Chinese communities with informants and enforcers; and the enlistment of local former police officers to track people down. There is, of course, the potential for participation of Beijing-blended organized crime outfits in these various activities.
Thus, when Hong Kong Police announced worldwide arrest warrants for eight exiled pro-democracy lawmakers, lawyers and activists last week, underlined the following day in a sinister statement by the city’s Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu (李家超), the subtext was distinctive. Given Hong Kong’s terrestrial jurisdiction of a mere 1,100 square kilometers and the obvious unwillingness for the pro-democracy figures to return to it by themselves, what else except some form of China’s dark repatriation arts could Lee have been envisaging when he promised the exiles that, “Regardless of how far they may flee, we will pursue these criminals for their entire lives”?
Meanwhile, Steve Li Kwai-wah (李桂華), Hong Kong’s chief superintendent for national security, provided a bizarre explanation for why the warrants were necessary, even as he admitted that the police could not act upon them outside the city. He implied that those targeted might someday come back to Hong Kong through illegal means like using another identity or stowing away. A scenario in which leaders as prominent and wanted as Nathan Law Kwun-chung (羅冠聰) or Ted Hui Chi-fung (許智峯) somehow voluntarily pop up in Hong Kong without regular border procedures stretches credulity, indicating that either the police are constructing propaganda narratives or have more nefarious orchestrations in mind.
Other echoes of Beijing’s involuntary return tactics were detectable, too. The typical enticements of lighter judgements for those who give themselves up were dangled, while Lee assured a lifetime of fear and anxiety to the eight if they do not surrender. Since they are currently believed to reside in Australia, the U.K. and the U.S., where they are not engaging in any illegal behavior and extradition treaties are suspended, the only way to follow up on this vow of eternal disquietude is through hounding people extraterritorially or in some way tampering with those close to them in Hong Kong.
Moreover, in line with the Beijing model, both Lee and the police were at pains to reach out to family and contacts of the pro-democracy figures, by turns assuring them access to rewards if they provide information leading to an arrest and warning of surveillance. As if to make the latter point in bold, a flurry of arrests of Hong Kongers linked to raising funds for overseas activists, including to at least one of the wanted eight, then tailed announcement of the warrants.
The message from authorities to others who might help the exiles is therefore clear: Work with us to isolate and entrap these human rights leaders or find yourself imprisoned in their place. To the exiles themselves, it hints that their punishment will be inflicted upon others unless they return, a psychologically devastating proposition.
Further afield, the apparatus is either gathering or already in place to facilitate intimidation abroad and worse: It would be naive to believe that China was not embedding agents in Hong Kong communities among the multitudes of genuine refugees that necessarily require protection in democratic countries. Only last month, news broke that a Hong Kong police officer who took part in the crackdown against protesters in 2019 was allowed to immigrate to Australia. The U.K. government has been warned that at least one of the organizations it is funding to help fleeing Hong Kongers resettle has ties to the Chinese Communist Party. As mentioned, the existing police and informer networks put in place by Chinese security bureaus all over the world will certainly be flexible enough to accommodate newly marked individuals.
No doubt some will argue that Hong Kong has too much to lose by heavily pressuring or disappearing a famous activist based in the West, but this overlooks more pressing questions, which are ultimately whether Beijing’s reputation — not Hong Kong’s — can be any further tarnished than it already is, and whether that will change the way other countries fawn over it anyway. Regardless, the Hong Kong government has already shown apparent willingness to work with triads and tolerance for widely publicized kidnappings that happen on its streets or to its residents elsewhere, and state security forces from mainland China have had the authority to handle national security cases relating to Hong Kong since 2020. Their jurisdiction can be transferred to Beijing under several pretexts.
While it may be tempting to dismiss the words of John Lee and the gang-like police from which he emerged as hot air, at least some risk must be acknowledged that Hong Kongers will be targeted for involuntary returns to China. The eight at the center of the recent arrest warrants can certainly expect to encounter assorted traps and terrors over the coming months and years. As long as Chinese and Hong Kong police are permitted to travel where they please, countries continue to appease Beijing, and Hong Kong Economic and Trade Offices enjoy special legal immunities in places like the U.S., a full-scale kidnapping is an incident that cannot be ruled out.
Image: Natalie Au, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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