National Post (National Edition)
Hong Kong is dead
THE PRO-DEMOCRACY MOVEMENT HAS BEEN EVISCERATED, BUT ITS SPIRIT LIVES ON
One of the first activists the police took away on Wednesday was the social worker Jeffrey Andrews, Hong Kong's beloved advocate for refugees and minority groups. An ethnic Tamil, the 35-year-old senior staffer at the Centre for Refugees in Hong Kong's Tsim Sha Tsui district was picked up at about 6 a.m.
As the hours passed, word got around on social media of other arrests, one after the other, until police had rounded up 53 prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy figures on charges of subversion under the absurdly draconian National Security Law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong to squash its democratic uprising last June.
Wednesday's roundup is the single most dramatic noose-tightening in Beijing's repudiation of the “One Country, Two Systems” principles that secured Britain's agreement to hand over its former colony in 1997. The arrests more than double the number of people charged under the National Security Law.
Shortly after noon on Wednesday, Li Kwai-wah, the notorious Hong Kong police superintendent sanctioned by the U.S. State Department last November for his role in Being's obliteration of Hong Kong's autonomy, convened a press conference to announce the details. More than 1,000 officers were involved. The arrests were all related to last summer's “democratic primary,” an effort aimed at building a united slate of pro-democracy candidates to win all 35 of the at-large seats in Hong Kong's officially gerrymandered 70-seat Legislative Council.
Six of the primary's organizers and 47 individuals who stood as candidates had been charged. Search warrants
were executed at 72 addresses. Funds in an amount equivalent to $255,000 Canadian were frozen. Police also attended the offices of three news organizations — Stand News, Apple Daily and InMedia HK — demanding the surrender of documents related to the democratic primary.
Among those arrested Wednesday were several elected district councillors, more than a dozen former Legislative Council members, and the American solicitor John Clancey, a partner in the Ho Tse Wai law firm who had served as treasurer to the Power for Democracy group in last summer's primary. The law firm was founded by Albert Ho, veteran chairman of Hong Kong's Democratic Party.
Also charged as an organizer of the primary: the legal scholar Benny Tai Yiu-ting, who was fired by the University
of Hong Kong's governing body last July after he was convicted on charges related to his involvement in Hong Kong's 2014 Umbrella Movement protests. Sentenced to 16 months in prison, Tai was out on bail while his conviction was being appealed.
In announcing its enthusiastic satisfaction with Wednesday's operation, Beijing's Liaison Office expressed particular pleasure with Tai's persecution. “We believe that the public can clearly see the evil intentions of Tai and others and the danger they posed to Hong Kong society.”
In the charges read out to each of the individuals arrested Wednesday, the “danger' they posed was stated explicitly: their “subversion” was the objective of their planned “35 +1” democratic challenge: to force the resignation of Beijing's puppet and Hong Kong's chief executive, Carrie Lam. The
National Security Law's ambiguously-worded subversion section sets out jails terms ranging from “not more than three years” in prison all the way up to life sentences.
The September elections that the arrested candidates were intending to contest were cancelled on the pretext of the COVID-19 pandemic. Those elections were ostensibly postponed until this coming September, but it is unlikely that any of the candidates arrested Wednesday will be permitted to stand.
It would appear that every pro-democracy candidate who was elected in last July's primary who was not arrested on Wednesday is either in jail already or has fled Hong Kong to find sanctuary abroad.
While 600,000 Hongkongers turned out to vote in last summer's primary, the
democracy movement has been eviscerated. Practically nothing remains of the parliamentary opposition to the pro-Beijing cronies in Hong Kong's legislature. Last November, the Legislative Council's 15 serving pro-democracy lawmakers resigned en masse following the ouster of four of their colleagues on the charge of demonstrating insufficient loyalty to Beijing.
Wednesday's arrests nearly double the number of Hongkongers now charged under the National Security law. Among the would-be Legislative Council candidates now facing subversion charges is Carol Ng, chairperson of the 190,000-member Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions. Also charged is Winnie Yu, head of the medical union that forced a border closure with the mainland last year to protect Hong Kong from the coronavirus pandemic.
Until Wednesday, almost everyone charged under the new National Security Law had been arrested for the kinds of slogans they were heard chanting, or the words on the banners they were waving at demonstrations, or things they'd written online.
The first person arrested under the law was a 24-yearold waiter, Tong Ying-kit, arrested in July for riding his motorcycle into a line of police officers while waving a banner with the words “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times.” Tong is awaiting trial on charges of incitement to secession and engaging in terrorist activities. The first public figure charged under the law is 19-year-old student leader Tony Chung, convicted last month for throwing the Chinese flag on the ground. The charges he faces under the National Security law involve a Facebook post he composed criticizing Chinese nationalism.
The most powerful figure arrested under the new law is Jimmy Lai, a pro-democracy media magnate. Lai is facing charges of ““collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security” for advocating sanctions against human-rights abusers in Hong Kong's establishment. Over the past few days, Lai has been imprisoned, granted bail, sent back to prison and released again. His trial is set for April.
“The geographical Hong Kong that we know and love deeply has died,” Fenella Sung of the Canadian Friends of Hong Kong told me. “But her heart, mind and soul live on. Should there be continued support to stand with Hongkongers, we will see a new Hong Kong, or many Hong Kongs, springing up from her ashes, in other parts of the world or even in other cities of China.
“The phoenix of democracy will certainly rise again from the ashes in a shape or form that we might never be able to imagine. Let's continue to stand with Hongkongers.”