LONDON, June 19 (IPS) – When efficiency artist Sammu Chen tried to tie a purple thread to a streetpost, plainclothes police stopped him earlier than he may end. Chen has twice been detained for his symbolic acts of commemoration of the 4 June 1989 Tiananmen Sq. Bloodbath, when Chinese language authorities killed a whole lot, maybe hundreds, to crush democracy protests.
The day used to considered one of commemoration in Hong Kong. Tens of hundreds used to attend the mass vigil. However authorities banned it through the COVID-19 pandemic and haven’t permitted it since.
Chen’s tried act of commemoration came about close to the previous web site of the banned vigil. Shut by, police moved on one other artist marking the anniversary by holding a query mark-shaped balloon. Lately, different symbolic acts, equivalent to silently holding candles or flowers, have led to arrests. The organisation that used to carry the vigil closed itself down in 2021 following police investigations and prosecution of its leaders.
China’s marketing campaign to stamp out calls for for democracy in Hong Kong doesn’t cease at its borders, as occasions within the UK lately made plain.
UK spy community
Final month, two males with twin British and Chinese language nationality have been discovered responsible of spying on Hong Kong democracy activists within the UK. The case confirmed how far the Chinese language state is ready to go to silence Hong Kong’s diaspora.
Chi Leung Wai, who labored for the UK’s Border Pressure, and Chung Biu Yuen, who labored for the Hong Kong Financial Commerce Workplace in London, have been discovered to have carried out shadow policing operations to assemble info on exiles. The spies additionally focused UK politicians crucial of China.
One in all their targets was Nathan Regulation. Regulation was a scholar chief and politician lively in Hong Kong’s democracy motion, which mobilised in mass protests in 2014 and once more in 2019. Having frolicked in jail in 2017 for his position in protests, he headed into exile in 2020 when the authorities launched a draconian Nationwide Safety Regulation.
In 2023, Regulation was considered one of eight activists the Hong Kong police focused with arrest warrants, with a bounty of round US$130,000 provided as a reward. Hong Kong police took Regulation’s mother and father and brother in for questioning, and in 2024, authorities revoked his passport and people of different exiled activists.
Escalating transnational repression
Such is the extent of repression China exerts in Hong Kong that activism can solely be sustained among the many diaspora. However whereas many states are exerting transnational repression in opposition to diasporas and exiles, the spy case reveals that China stays the world chief on this discipline.
Hong Kong police issued an additional spherical of arrest warrants and bounties in opposition to six extra exiled activists in December 2024 and introduced bounties on one other 19 in July 2025. Hong Kong authorities have additionally began concentrating on exiles with spurious tax calls for and could also be gearing as much as weaponise worldwide anti-money laundering cooperation agreements in opposition to them.
Exiles’ households in Hong Kong aren’t spared. In February, Kwok Yin-sang, father of exiled activist Anna Kwok, was handed an eight-month sentence for violating nationwide safety legal guidelines after he tried to money in her schooling financial savings insurance coverage coverage.
Round 100,000 folks have fled Hong Kong to the UK, which managed the territory earlier than handing it over to China in 1997. That makes them a specific goal. In 2024, addresses of Hong Kong residents residing within the UK have been printed on-line and anti-migrant protesters have been inspired to assault them, in a transfer that confirmed all of the indicators of a Chinese language affect operation.
Intensifying home repression
As a new CIVICUS report paperwork, repression has intensified additional inside Hong Kong. In 2024, authorities launched the Safeguarding Nationwide Safety Ordinance, which permits them to criminalise easy acts of dissent by claiming they represent secession, sedition, subversion and different main crimes. They’ve used this newest regulation’s sweeping provisions and the 2020 Nationwide Safety Regulation to prosecute activists, dissidents and journalists. Since 2020, Hong Kong authorities have arrested not less than 365 folks and convicted 174 underneath the 2 legal guidelines. Folks have been convicted for such trivial offences as sporting T-shirts with protest slogans.
The authorities’ dedication to silence dissent was on show once more within the aftermath of a horrendous house complicated fireplace in November 2025, by which over 160 folks died. Folks have been arrested for social media posts calling for accountability . Pupil Miles Kwan Ching-fung was detained and expelled from college after beginning an internet petition urging an unbiased investigation. China’s nationwide safety workplace in Hong Kong warned overseas journalists about detrimental protection of the federal government’s response.
Hong Kong as soon as had considered one of Asia’s most vibrant media environments, however now it ranks a hundred and fortieth out of 180 on the Reporters With out Borders World Press Freedom Index. In February, media proprietor Jimmy Lai, whose Apple Each day newspaper championed democracy, obtained a 20-year sentence underneath the Nationwide Safety Regulation. Lai has been detained underneath a number of fees since 2019, typically in solitary confinement. At 78 years previous with diabetes and different reported well being issues, he faces dying in jail. Regardless of Lai’s British citizenship, China has refused worldwide appeals for his launch.
The marketing campaign in opposition to Lai continues, with 4 bookshop workers arrested in March on suspicion of promoting copies of his biography, deemed a seditious publication. The authorities’ makes an attempt to suppress the e-book are a part of their wider cultural censorship, which extends to banning movies, barring publishers from e-book gala’s and demanding the blocking of YouTube movies of the protest anthem ‘Glory to Hong Kong’. Within the face of this repression, many civil society organisations, media shops and political events have concluded that their solely choice is to shut down.
In these circumstances, it’s going to proceed to fall on the diaspora to maintain shining a lightweight on the suppression of primary civic freedoms in Hong Kong. States the place Hong Kong’s exiles dwell have to be alert to the threats of China’s transnational repression and defend and shield exiled activists. They have to confront the complete scope of this repression, or be complicit in it.
Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and author for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.
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