Tony Chung (鍾翰林) spends his days in fear and solitude. For the 19-year-old activist, who became the first political figure to be arrested under Hong Kong’s National Security Law, the specter of prison looms large.
Chung was arrested in late July with three other former members of the pro-independence group Studentlocalism — which he founded at the age of 15 — on suspicion of inciting secession under the law.
As he awaits his trial for another case — the desecration of the Chinese national flag — he is unable to sleep most nights.
Illustration: Mountain People
He is afraid to go out because he worries about his safety, having been followed by unidentified people on multiple occasions.
Amid the uncertainties over the impending trial, he cannot take up a place at university like most young people his age.
He has nothing to read as most of his books were taken away by the police in a house search during his arrest. He cannot travel after the authorities confiscated his passport.
“Being in prison is surely not as dreadful as the wait,” Chung said. “I am awaiting my fate like a prisoner.”
“Everything feels so different in Hong Kong now. It’s unimaginable that we have political prisoners in this international metropolis,” he said. “And we don’t know what is going to happen next.”
Chung is just one of many Hong Kongers fearful for the future under the draconian new law, which has largely stamped out the anti-government movement that rocked the territory last year.
Among pro-democracy activists and supporters, an atmosphere of sorrow, hopelessness and pessimism has pervaded ever since.
So far, at least 28 protesters and activists, including Chung, have been arrested, while more than 10,000 have been arrested since the start of the movement in June last year.
Under political pressure, Chung said he has abandoned his pro-independence position and closed his group.
“It’s not realistic to push for independence,” he said. “Amid these times, we should focus on what is going on now, and not something that’s so far away that we can’t see.”
“Many people have become dispirited, but [the road to] democracy is not a matter of half a year or one year. It’s a necessary stage in the path to democracy that some would shed blood, make a sacrifice, or even flee,” he said.
“But we need to persist. If we wallow in our misfortune, it will be more of a tragedy. Why not protect our brothers and sisters and think about how we can carry on,” he added.
Gone are the scenes of 1 to 2 million protesters filling the thoroughfares of Hong Kong. Under the National Security Law and amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of rallies and protests has dwindled.
Many of the more radical protesters who fought against the police on the streets last year have either been jailed or fled abroad.
Activists such as Agnes Chow (周庭), 23, Chung and veteran pro-democracy figures such as tycoon Jimmy Lai (黎智英) have been arrested, while Nathan Law (羅冠聰), 27, Honcques Laus (劉康), 18, and Sunny Cheung (張崑陽), 24, have escaped overseas.
However, despite the lull, supporters vow they will keep up the spirit of resistance — albeit through lower-profile gestures.
Some still turn up to smaller-scale rallies, where protesters number from a few to a few hundred — even when large numbers of police officers are deployed to swiftly arrest or search those at the scene.
At shopping centers, a number of people still turn up at “lunch with you” flash mobs to sing protest songs, often holding up blank sheets of paper and shouting slogans from behind their masks.
At a couple of lunchtime events in the middle of last month, dozens gathered at a park to read Lai’s Apple Daily newspaper, surrounded by police who registered their identity cards.
Chiu, a 71-year-old retired driver who only wants to use his surname, says he still turns up to as many rallies as he can. He shouts slogans when police officers’ backs are turned.
“When the enemy advances, I withdraw. When he retreats, I pursue,” he said, quoting Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) famous approach to guerrilla warfare.
“We have no means to fight them, but people like me who have experienced communist rule will not be cowed,” said Chiu, who escaped from China to Hong Kong as a teenager after experiencing famine and political upheaval.
Tommy Yiu, a small business owner, said he shows his support for the movement by providing job opportunities to former protesters.
“It’s not the end of the fight, but an ongoing struggle. A lot of people have suffered mentally and we need to show our support,” he said. “The dictatorial regime keeps suppressing us, but they cannot break us.”
Gone from the streets are the anti-government banners and graffiti. Instead, people use coded language to express their grievances.
The colorful sticky notes with protest slogans stuck on the so-called “Lennon walls” last year have been replaced by blank notes. New slogans proliferate in cyberspace, parodying the theme of other slogans banned under the National Security Law, such as “Recover Hong Kong, Pandemic of our times” instead of the banned slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of our times.”
Lars Laamann, a historian at the SOAS, University of London, said the “hidden messages” of resistance have a long history in China, dating back to the 13th and 14th centuries in the Yuan Dynasty under Mongolian rule, and were common after the 1989 crackdown of the Tiananmen pro-democracy movement, when democracy supporters inserted subtle political messages into their poetry.
Opposition politicians are also looking for new ways to express themselves.
Owen Chow (鄒家成), a 23-year-old “localist” advocate, said that he wants to establish a “people’s parliament” to amalgamate the power of the opposition outside the framework of the Hong Kong Legislative Council, whose elections have been canceled by the government.
“They can arrest one or two, but behind them, many more would still be resisting,” he said. “Hong Kong can’t give up. Even if we can no longer speak in public, we’ll pass our messages on through our mouths and ears.”
Edmund Cheng (鄭煒), a political scientist at the City University of Hong Kong, said even though mass mobilization has become impossible, smaller gestures are still sustaining a level of passive resistance and it would be hard for the authorities to completely wipe out the movement.
“Hong Kong is a unique society. It has a long history of protest and exercising civil liberties, protected by the rule of law. This has been embedded in the minds of generations of Hong Kongers and will still carry on despite a challenging environment,” he said.
Joseph Cheng (鄭宇碩), a retired political science professor at the City University of Hong Kong said: “The anger and frustrations are still there so the movement will not die. It will decline, but will re-emerge when opportunities emerge. People will not forget.”
Even amid deep anxiety ahead of his court trial, Chung still harbors hopes for Hong Kong.
“I have asked many times: Is Hong Kong beyond help? But it’s my home, no matter what it becomes, I won’t give up on it,” he said.
“The movement might have finished, but the resistance hasn’t,” he said.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs