I fear my future children will never see the Hong Kong I love,
Losing one’s basic human rights has long terrified citizens
Outside a courthouse in the northern city of Tianjin, there was a row of unmarked cars with surveillance cameras on top. But the sidewalk was clear. Maybe I could make it close enough to the courthouse to observe the atmosphere during a trial of a senior Chinese government official.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a motley crew of men wearing tracksuits and ill-fitting shirts tucked into khakis surrounded me.
It was April 2018 and I was in my fourth year in Beijing as a correspondent for European news media. My Mandarin was proficient enough by then that the men assumed I was Chinese.
“I’m just trying to walk down the street,” I said innocently, but a thuggish-looking man with a buzz cut roughly pushed me back.
They didn’t stop yelling and jostling me around until I managed to break away to call my editor. The men stepped back as they noticed I was speaking English.
They only let me go after a police officer inspected my foreign press credentials, but a few men tailed me as I hurried toward a subway station. I jumped into a taxi and hollered at the driver to leave quickly in any direction.
Thank goodness I’m not actually Chinese, I thought, as I tried to calm my nerves in the back seat of the cab. That could’ve been much worse. Thank goodness I’m Canadian.
But my passport seemed to burn a hole in my pocket. I was glad police hadn’t asked to see my passport because even though it bore Canada’s coat of arms on the cover, it clearly listed my birthplace: Hong Kong.
Even then, the Chinese government had made it clear that they weren’t going to respect the rights of people from the semi-autonomous city.
Two years earlier, a group of Hong Kong booksellers vanished. One by one, the five men mysteriously appeared inside Chinese jails in late 2015. They had worked together at a bookstore in Hong Kong, which sold titles containing unflattering gossip about Beijing’s political elite, including scintillating tales about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s wife.
The fear of being considered a citizen of China is hard to explain. It doesn’t mean you are ashamed of your cultural heritage. But losing one’s basic human rights under an authoritarian regime is something that has terrified generations of Hong Kongers. It has led hundreds of thousands of residents, including my family, to leave before the 1997 handover from British to Chinese rule.
Many residents were skeptical then that China would honour the “one country, two systems” agreement of the Sino-British Declaration, a treaty that requires Beijing to respect Hong Kong’s rule-of-law legal system for 50 years. Now, after the enactment of the National Security Law, Hong Kong no longer feels safe at all.
The sweeping legislation — which came into effect Tuesday morning — criminalizes acts including “secession,” “subversion” and collusion with “foreign forces” to endanger national security, and the maximum sentence is life in prison.
The law applies to anyone regardless of nationality in the cosmopolitan financial hub — including an estimated 300,000 Canadian citizens.
It also enables Beijing to set up a national security agency in the city, whose staff will not be bound by local laws. Activists fear that the accused could be extradited to mainland China to face the court system there, which has a 99.99 per cent conviction rate.
For the days since the law was hastily introduced in China’s parliament last month, I could barely handle reading the news for more than a few minutes at a time.
I wasn’t alone. Friends of Hong Kong origin living in places such as Sydney and New
York were having panic attacks. Writer Jessie Lau, who works in London, wrote in the Guardian that her bouts of anxiety had left her gasping for air.
Jody Chan, director of advocacy for the solidarity group Alliance Canada Hong Kong (ACHK), told me she feels like a fugitive.
Canada has an extradition treaty with Hong Kong, so even though she is Canadian, Chan doesn’t feel safe in Vancouver since she has been outspoken in support of the protests in Hong Kong.
Beijing ’s resolve to push through the law appeared to have been hardened by its anger over the ongoing protests, sparked last year by a nowabandoned extradition bill that would have allowed criminal suspects in Hong Kong to be sent to mainland China to face trial.
Although the bill has since been dropped, the protest movement expanded to call for full democracy, among other demands.
“Honestly, I haven’t digested it all,” Chan said. She said she doesn’t know if she’ll ever try to visit Hong Kong again.
Canada’s foreign affairs minister has expressed concern over the national security law but did not indicate Ottawa would take any action to protest the move or protect the interests of Canadians in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong-based journalists, meanwhile, tell me they fear press freedom in the city will further erode, as more will selfcensor to avoid topics that might land them in jail.
For me, I’ve been doing my best to push my fears and worries out of my mind, cognizant of the privilege I possess to pretend so well that nothing much has changed.
Last week, I got married. It was a perfect day, and my Hong Kong-based friends and relatives watched over a video stream.
For my entire life, when I imagined what my future would be like, it involved bringing my children to frequent visits to Hong Kong to learn the language and enjoy the unique culture of the place — just as my parents had with me.
Now, will it be worth it to teach my future children Cantonese and the pleasures of devouring dim sum and late-night meals at open-air food stalls known as dai pai dongs? Or will encouraging them to love the city only lead them down the path of similar heartbreak?
For the millions in the city and the many people around the world who call Hong Kong home, the future seems bleak.