Sheep tales fall prey to Hong Kong’s ‘wolves’
Territory’s police arrest five on sedition charges over children’s books ‘alluding to protests’
‘A sheep is such a kindhearted animal, and the book’s producers have to say it has some attack ability’
‘The sheep were very clean and the wolves were very dirty… implies that some viruses were brought in this way’
AT FACE value, they could not look more innocent – a set of children’s picture books featuring cartoon sheep in a rural idyll.
But to Hong Kong’s newly censorious police force, there is no mistaking the real meaning behind stories such as Defenders of the Sheep Village.
Police have arrested five people on sedition charges over the books, claiming that the wolves who chase the sheep in the stories are a thinly disguised allusion to China’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s freedoms.
“The book mentioned that the sheep would become a meal after they were caught in the wolves’ village,” said Senior Superintendent Steve Li, as he held up one of the offending publications at a news conference yesterday.
They attempted to simplify “political issues not comprehensible by children”, he added, and to “beautify illegal behaviour”.
The arrests are the latest in an ongoing sweep against critics of Chinese rule, previously targeting both opposition figures and independent newspapers. It now appears that political satire is also no longer permitted.
Police said that Defenders of the Sheep Village was an allegory for the massive street protests that took place in 2019 against Beijing’s imposition of draconian new security laws in Hong Kong. In the story, wolves seek to occupy the sheeps’ village and devour its inhabitants, who then use their horns to fight back.
“A sheep is such a kind-hearted animal, and they [the producers of the book] have to say that it has some attack ability, and has to commit some violent acts,” said Mr Li.
The five people arrested – two men and three women all aged in their late 20s – were members of a speech therapists’ union that produced books for children. They have been charged with conspiring to publish seditious material, under a rarely used law dating back to colonial-era Hong Kong. It carries a sentence of up to two years in prison for a first offence.
Another offending book told the story of 12 sheep taken to a wolves’ village to be cooked. It was presumed to allude to the 12 Hong Kong activists captured by China’s coastguard last August as they tried to flee by boat to Taiwan. One of the book’s last pages features the names of the dozen activists against sheep profile pictures.
A third book, called Dustman of the Sheep Village, was taken to refer to the Covid outbreak that first surfaced in China in late 2019. “The sheep were very clean and the wolves were very dirty,” Mr Li said, adding that it “implied that some viruses were brought in this way”.
Mr Li was asked whether George Orwell’s classic allegorical books Animal Farm and 1984 would now also be illegal in Hong Kong. He claimed the two titles were different from the children’s books, which he said aimed to incite hatred. The members of the speech therapists’ union were detained ahead of planned Saturday reading sessions for children, police said. Assets of around £18,000 were also frozen. The union was not available for comment.
The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions said that the case “sounded the death knell of artistic creative freedom”.
The arrests were made as a court in Hong Kong jailed seven men for their role in a violent mob attack on prodemocracy protesters in 2019.
The attack, said to have been orchestrated by Triad gangsters, involved men wielding Chinese flags assaulting crowds with batons. Police were accused at the time of doing little to intervene, prompting a surge in support for the protesters.