Taiwanese could be targeted by Chinese aggression anywhere in the world and subjected to violence, a Hong Konger who is at the center of a diplomatic row between the UK and China, said on Wednesday.
Bob Chan, who was on Sunday last week pulled into the grounds of the Chinese consulate in Manchester, England, and beaten by staff during a protest against the Chinese government, said Taiwanese should keep fighting to maintain the nation’s freedom in the face of China’s coercion.
He and about 40 other democracy advocates were staging a demonstration outside the consulate when he was pulled inside the gates and subjected to a “brutal” beating, he told a news conference attended by several British lawmakers.
Photo: AP
Some of the protesters tried to pull him back, but he was not let go until police intervened, he said.
Chan said he could not see who was beating him at the time, but video footage of the incident showed Chinese Consul-General Zheng Xiyuan (鄭曦原) pulling Chan’s hair and kicking down posters.
“I’m shocked, because I never thought something like this could happen in the UK,” Chan said. “It was later when I watched the video footage of the incident that I found out the scale of the attack. I fear for the safety of my family.”
Photo: AP
He sustained multiple injuries and psychological trauma, said Chan, a member of the Hong Kong Indigenous Defence Force, an organization of Hong Kongers in the UK that led the protest.
“I still have pain in my back,” said Chan, who is in his 30s. “It’s very painful whenever I sit down. Sometimes I have nightmares. I am worried that something bad would happen to my family.”
The abuse is also something that “could very much happen to Taiwanese,” Chan said in an interview with the Central News Agency after the news conference.
Chan, who moved to the UK last year, after China introduced a repressive law in Hong Kong, said that many like-minded Hong Kongers who remained in the territory had since committed suicide, because they could not endure China’s strangulation of their freedom.
“I hope this never happens to Taiwan,” he said. “Don’t let China’s [attempt to suppress Taiwan] get you down.”
Chan is one of many Hong Kongers who fled to the UK under a new visa scheme. He now works as a technician in Manchester.
“Hong Kong is not a safe place anymore,” Chan said, thanking the British government “for offering him safety in a country where people enjoy democracy, freedom and rule of law.”
He said that the harder the Chinese authorities try to crack down on Hong Kongers, the more the people should strive to exercise their freedom.
Separately, Zheng told TV channel Sky News that it was his “duty” to intervene when the protest was held in front of the consulate.
Asked whether he thinks his behavior was acceptable, Zheng said: “I think it was an emergency situation in which the guy threatened my colleague’s life, and on that day we tried to control the situation.”
Chan “abused my country, my leader. It’s my duty,” he said.
On Tuesday, the British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office summoned Yang Xiaoguang (楊曉光), charge d’affaires at the Chinese embassy in London, to explain the incident.
Reuters reported that British officials told Yang that all diplomats and consular staff in the UK must respect British laws and regulations.
However, British lawmaker Iain Duncan Smith, chairman of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, an international cross-party group of legislators critical of the Chinese government, told Wednesday’s news conference that the British government’s response to the incident was “wholly inadequate.”
“The government should have called in the ambassador and said it is our intention to send a series of people home who were involved in that attack, and they will no longer be welcome in the UK,” Smith said.
The protest in front of the consulate was held to coincide with the opening of the Chinese Communist Party’s 20th National Congress in Beijing.
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