Hong Kong’s battered youth find a welcome safe haven in Taiwan to begin their life of protest again
As a protester on the front line of fierce clashes with Hong Kong riot police during prodemocracy rallies, Dan always knew he would face a day of reckoning.
It came earlier than expected, shortly after he joined the storming of the city’s legislature in July last year to protest against an extradition bill that would allow suspects to be tried in China. His face was captured on surveillance footage.
An encounter with the police made up his mind. “I wasn’t arrested but they stopped and searched me and filmed my face and marked my ID. At that moment, I decided to go to Taiwan,” said the 21-year-old, who requested anonymity for fear of repercussions.
Dan was one of the first of hundreds to seek refuge in Taiwan, a democracy of 23million a short flight from Hong Kong, which has a history of receiving dissidents. It was easy enough then for him to flee.
Taiwan, like the UK, has offered a safe haven. Taipei last week opened a new office to make migration easier for Hong Kong residents and companies to settle there.
There are potentially massive numbers planning to join him in exile after the sudden enactment last week of China’s ambiguous and draconian national security law that can impose life sentences for acts of subversion. And now, leaving Hong Kong is becoming much more difficult.
After more than 9,000 arrests during the protest movement, many have found themselves on watch lists or had their passports confiscated, forcing them to seek alternative escape routes, sometimes being smuggled by sea.
A pipeline of clandestine Hong Kong-based sympathisers and “rescue teams” around the world have launched into action, secretly offering exit strategies, medical care, safe houses and financial donations to protesters wanted by the authorities.
The underground network has been likened by some to “Operation Yellowbird,” a sophisticated mission to extract hundreds of dissidents from China and into Hong Kong in 1989 after the massacre around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
Dan’s instincts to flee had been right. A month later, the police came to his family home to search for him. His mother, a Communist Party supporter, welcomed them with tea. They now rarely speak to each other.
His new life in Taiwan was initially tough. “We gave up all the things we grew up with in Hong Kong, and we didn’t know anything about the new place. It was very stressful,” he said.
He struggled with what he believes was post-traumatic stress disorder, glued to live-streams of the protests. “I would feel guilty because I saw many protesters get hurt and arrested by the police, tortured, or even I heard about rape,” he said.
He eventually restarted his studies and gradually recovered with the help of the Chi Nan Presbyterian Church. It has assisted hundreds fleeing Hong Kong by offering accommodation, medical care, counselling and supporting job and university applications. Huang Chun-sen, the church’s pastor, said the exiles were often traumatised. “People who come here have different degrees of PTSD. Sometimes they wake up and smell tear gas,” he said.
Others arrived with serious medical problems they had been too afraid to treat in Hong Kong in case they were turned over to the police. “Some were coughing up blood. Others had fractured bones or bruises from rubber bullets,” said Pastor Huang.
“One girl was a first aider during the protests and her back was all bruised because she was trying to protect a doctor who was giving CPR to a patient. The police wanted to hit the doctor, so she ran over and covered him so he could continue saving the patient’s life.”
The pastor is a prominent player in the network that has sprung up to help Hong Kong residents move legally to Taiwan. Dan had been connected with the church through one of many private online chat groups helping protesters to flee.
The Reverend William Lim, the programme secretary of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan’s Hong Kong Rescue Project, said church connections had also been reignited around the world to help the most vulnerable, including a handful of minors who had boarded flights alone.
A similar system was triggered during Taiwan’s own period of martial law under the Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang regime between 1947 and 1987 – known as the White Terror – when churches helped dissidents opposing authoritarian ruler Chiang Kai-shek to escape to the US, he said.
Like many of Hong Kong’s fleeing youth, Dan is now turning to political activism to lobby from abroad. He switched his studies from chemistry to politics, and hopes he can one day return to Hong Kong.
“Until now, I still have the feeling that I am travelling, not living here,” he said. “When I am upset, I want to find a place called home to let me have a good sleep. But somehow I can’t find that place.”
‘People who come here have different degrees of PTSD. Sometimes they wake up and smell tear gas’