On Friday last week the Hong Kong China News Agency reported that China’s People’s Liberation Army Hong Kong Garrison had carried out a series of combined air and naval “realistic combat” exercises. The drills included practicing tracking and investigating “suspicious boats fleeing abroad,” the agency said. It is not hard to imagine which group of people this particular exercise was aimed at.
Beijing is erecting a “ring of steel” around Hong Kong, enforced by jackboots and faceless bureaucrats, while also extending its Great Firewall over the territory’s virtual domain to ensure Hong Kongers are physically and virtually walled in.
Mentally, its residents are being walled in, too.
As in the mainland, Beijing’s puppet government in the territory, headed by Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥), makes calculated arrests of powerful critics (tigers) and little people (flies) to ensure that a climate of fear and self censorship spreads like a metastasizing cancer.
It might not be long before the techno-dystopia of the mainland’s invasive surveillance state — perfected in Xinjiang and Tibet — is replicated in Hong Kong, with networks of informants and clusters of facial-recognition cameras silently logging everyone’s movements from cradle to grave. As Hong Kong is turned into a modern-day East Berlin, many of its residents are understandably heading for the exit.
Many who could get out legally via a British National Overseas (BNO) passport have already left, while other BNO passport holders still trapped in the territory are hastily making plans to emigrate. Like those who attempted to leave East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie during the Cold War, when the time comes, they will have to negotiate a nerve-wracking walk through airport immigration and hope they are not turned back by security.
However, even this route is now under threat: In July, Beijing said that it might cease recognizing BNO passports as a legal travel document.
For many, the most obvious alternative is a modern twist on another notorious escape route from East Berlin: a hazardous nighttime escape by speedboat to Taiwan, similar to how desperate East Berliners attempted to scale the heavily guarded Berlin Wall under the cover of darkness.
Reuters on Wednesday detailed how desperate democracy activists, who face trial and possible deportation to mainland China under Hong Kong’s new National Security Law, are running the gauntlet of a maritime getaway.
Just as many scalers of the Berlin Wall were machine-gunned to death at the last moment by East Berlin border guards, attempting to reach Taiwan across the choppy waters of the South China Sea at night risks both calamity and capture.
At the end of August, a boat carrying 12 Hong Kongers was intercepted by China’s coast guard. On Wednesday, China’s Shenzhen Yantian Detention Center, which had been holding them for 39 days without charge, announced that it had formerly approved their arrest on charges of “illegally crossing the national border” and “organizing others to illegally cross the national border.”
In August, Taiwan’s coast guard intercepted a craft carrying five Hong Kongers near the Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島) — the closest of Taiwan’s outlying islands to Hong Kong. The government is so far staying coy on their whereabouts and has also declined to reveal how many Hong Kong refugees have so far gained asylum in Taiwan through this route — or what assistance it is providing.
If the government is too conspicuous in its support, it risks handing China an excuse on a silver platter to seize the Pratas Islands, which Beijing could portray as a transit point for “illegal” people smuggling. Despite the risks, just as West Germans welcomed East Germans, Taiwan must keep its borders open and be the Checkpoint Charlie for Hong Kong.
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