Hong Kong in 2023 is a Hong Kong where Chinese Communist Party
as well as People's Republic of China flags can be seen flying
(*though the former far less often than the latter still)
And then there were 13. By this, I'm referring to the fact that yesterday evening saw Hong Kong’s national security police announcing that they had arrest warrants for five more overseas activists -- one of them an American citizen -- and placed HK$1 million bounties on their heads like they had in July with exiled activists Anna Kwok, Finn Lau, Christopher Mung Siu-tat, Elmer Yuan Gong-yi and Kevin Yam along with former legislative councillors Nathan Law, Ted Hui and Dennis Kwok.
"Police named Simon Cheng, Frances Hui, Joey Siu, Johnny Fok and Tony Choi as wanted for alleged offences under the national security law during a press conference on Thursday." And like with the previous batch, they appear to be a a bit of a mixed bag.
Of this quintet, Simon Cheng is probably the most well known. A former trade and investment officer at the British Consulate-General in Hong Kong, he is, as the Hong Kong Free Press report points out, now "based in London [and] the founder of Hongkongers in Britain, a group that supports Hongkongers settling in the UK. He was detained by Chinese authorities as he attempted to return to Hong Kong from a business trip in Shenzhen in August 2019, when protests engulfed the city, and was granted asylum by the UK government three years ago."
Then there's Frances Hui and Joey Siu, both 24 year old activists "based in Washington DC, in the US. Hui is a policy and advocacy coordinator at The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, while Siu works at NGO World Liberty Congress and was a former policy advisor at NGO Hong Kong Watch, according to her LinkedIn. Sui has US citizenship."
Hui also is known as the then Emerson College student who came under attack from Mainland Chinese students after she penned a piece in the college newspaper in April 2019 entitled "I Am From Hong Kong, Not China" which included the lines "I am from a city owned by a country that I don’t belong to" and "I will strongly hold onto that identity because I am proud and I want to tell people where my actual home is." Meanwhile, much has been written in the past 24 hours or so (on Twitter and elsewhere) about Joey Siu being an American citizen who the Hong Kong government is accusing of colluding with... her own country's government!
Then there's Johnny Fok and Tony Choi who, frankly, I had not heard about until the news of their arrests yesterday. Apparently, they are Youtubers "accused of inciting secession and inciting subversion?"! And, as The Wire China's Aaron McNicholas Tweeted, "accused of misleading Tsang Chi-kin and several others into arranging an appeal for donations to aid their escape from HK, an escape which never happened. We can only speculate how much of the case against those two is based on Tsang's testimony."
In any case, suffice to say that their having HK$1 million bounties on their heads is a big deal -- as is the fact that the Hong Kong government has decided to increase the number of the people they have done this too. And it is a tragedy that this situation has come to pass -- for Hong Kong along with the individuals concerned, and their loved ones too.
As Anna Kwok, who herself has a HK$1 million bounty on her head, was moved to Tweet: "Solidarity with my fellow Hong Konger advocates and activists in the US and the UK [who now have this burden put on them]. Having a one-million [dollar] bounty on your head does imply safety risks and psychological pressure."
Then there's this Tweet from Kevin Yam, the one Australian citizen among the 13 Hong Kong activists with HK$1 million bounties on their head: "By all means wish them well. But don’t congratulate them or say it’s an honour for them etc. Some of them may choose fighting words in response. But I can say from personal experience that it’s not a nice thing to be happening and one wouldn’t wish it on anybody."
I'll leave the last words today of this post to Joey Siu though. First, from her 20-year-old self's college newspaper piece: "I have never felt so desperate to find other people from Hong Kong and advocate for my culture." And finally from a Tweet yesterday: "More to say later but for now: I will never be silenced, I will never back down."