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Ronson Chan, chair of the Hong Kong Journalist Association, posing outside the office of his former employer Stand News, which was shut down after police raided their offices and arrested seven people in Hong Kong, Jan. 7.
Photo:
peter parks/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
You know a government has become Orwellian when it punishes publishers of children’s books. That’s where Hong Kong’s Beijing supplicants have taken the territory with the conviction last week of five executives of the local speech-therapists’ union for seditious conspiracy.
Judge
Kwok Wai Kin
found the five guilty for their role in publishing and disseminating the three books, which tell the story of sheep menaced by wolves. Hong Kong’s lupine leaders claimed the books were intended to incite “hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection” against the government. The five received a 19-month sentence.
Judge Kwok referred to protests in 2019, when millions of Hong Kongers marched in hope of preserving their liberties and the rule of law. The Chinese Communist Party responded with a national-security law that criminalizes dissent. Nearly all of Hong Kong’s political opposition is now in jail or exile.
Hong Kong “has more or less calmed down after the promulgation of” that law, but “it is clear that these people have little change in their attitude,” Judge Kwok wrote, in explaining the conviction. “They just go underground and the seeds of unrest are still there. The political situation appears to be calm on the surface but very volatile underneath. Under these circumstances, there is a strong pressing need to safeguard national security . . . to prevent riots and civil unrests of any magnitude from happening again.”
The judge is telling Hong Kongers they can be arrested for their “attitude” and for somehow carrying “seeds of unrest.” No one is safe from political arrest when that is the “law.”
Last week police also arrested
Ronson Chan,
chair of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, while he was covering an apartment owners’ meeting. He was scheduled to leave the city at the end of September for a Reuters Institute fellowship at Oxford University. The Hong Kong Journalists Association said Mr. Chan is “accused of obstructing a police officer and disorderly conduct in a public place” and was released on bail.
As a British colony until 1997 and in its early years under China’s treaty with Britain, Hong Kong was a haven for free expression. But the city dropped in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index to 148th in the world in 2022, from 80th the year before. China’s President
Xi Jinping
is the real wolf in this tragic tale, and Hong Kong’s dutiful functionaires such as Judge Kwok are the sheep.
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