Prominent democracy activists, including a lawmaker, were yesterday arrested in a dragnet across Hong Kong — a move described by rights groups as a well-worn tactic deployed by China to suffocate dissent ahead of key political events.
The sweep came after a major rally planned for tomorrow by a civil rights group was banned by police on security grounds.
Hong Kong has been locked in three months of political crisis, with increasingly violent clashes between police and protesters that have prompted an escalating public relations campaign from China.
Photo: Reuters
Protesters had planned yet another mass rally tomorrow — the fifth anniversary of Beijing’s rejection of a call for universal suffrage in the semi-autonomous territory.
It was a pivotal moment, sparking the 79-day “Umbrella movement” in 2014, which seeded the ground for the current protests.
However, organizers yesterday said that they would not march, complying with the police ban.
Bonnie Leung (梁穎敏) of the Civil Human Rights Front, the avowedly peaceful rally organizer, said that it had “no option but to cancel the march” after an appeal to hold the rally was rejected.
Early yesterday, two of the Umbrella movement’s leaders, Joshua Wong (黃之鋒) and Agnes Chow (周庭) — both still well-regarded among the territory’s youth — were arrested in dawn swoops and accused of “inciting others to take part in unauthorized assembly” among other charges.
The pair were charged in afternoon and bailed by the court. The main charge carries up to five years in jail.
Speaking outside the court, Wong said that “we will continue our fight, we will not surrender” and railed at the “chilling effect” of the arrests on opponents of Hong Kong’s Beijing-backed government.
The arrests are a sign of the “spread of ‘white terror,’” said Issac Cheng (鄭家) of Demosisto, a party cofounded by Wong, deploying a commonly used term for China’s efforts to fragment and harass Hong Kong’s protest movement.
Lawmaker Cheng Chung-tai (鄭松泰), who advocates greater political autonomy for Hong Kong, was also arrested, his Civic Passion party said on Facebook.
Police confirmed that a 35-year-old man surnamed Cheng (鄭) had been held over “conspiracy to cause criminal damage” linked to last month’s storming of the Hong Kong Legislative Council.
In a day of rolling arrests against leading pro-democracy voices, another vocal independence advocate, Andy Chan (陳浩天), was detained at Hong Kong International Airport.
Pro-democracy District Councilor Rick Hui (許銳宇) and former student leader Althea Suen (孫曉嵐) were also arrested separately.
More than 900 people have been arrested in connection with protests since June.
However, that has failed to snuff out a leaderless movement, whose participants have said that freedoms in the territory, unique within China, are being eviscerated by Beijing.
Amnesty International decried the “ludicrous dawn swoops” and condemned the arrests of Wong and Chow as an “outrageous assault on the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.”
The arrests are “scare tactics straight out of Beijing’s playbook,” it added.
Hong Kong Police Force spokesman John Tse (謝振中) said the notion that the slew of arrests were timed specifically to defang the weekend’s protests was “totally false.”
Hong Kong’s crisis-hit government is scrambling to find an appropriate response to the unprecedented pro-democracy protests, which have by turns seen millions march, closed the airport and left streets strewn with bricks and shrouded in tear gas.
The demonstrations started as a pushback against a bill allowing extraditions to China, but quickly morphed into wider calls for democracy and police accountability.
While permission for tomorrow’s mass rally was denied on security grounds, pockets of protesters swiftly vowed to hold creative events at the scheduled time and place to sidestep the ban.
Those included a mass shopping trip, a soccer match and impromptu religious gatherings in downtown Hong Kong, while a YouTuber with 800,000 followers called a fan meeting.
With a hardcore minority among the protesters, mainly young students, unlikely to heed the police ban, the weekend could be poised for renewed violent clashes.
The violence has damaged Hong Kong’s reputation for stability and prosperity.
Businesses in the financial hub — from flag carrier Cathay Pacific Airways (國泰航空) to the territory’s metro operator — have also been squeezed by Beijing for harboring apparent supporters of the pro-democracy movement.
Cathay fired several staff over the protests after the Chinese Civil Aviation Administration banned pro-democracy supporters among the carrier’s staff from its airports and airspace.
The airline yesterday went further, threatening to dismiss any staff who join a scheduled two-day strike next week.
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