In Hong Kong, the Freedom to Publish Is Under Attack

If the extradition law is eventually forced through the Hong Kong legislature, censorship of books will become commonplace in what has long been a bastion of publishing freedom.
BY JAMES TAGER
A general view shows Harcourt Road after it was cleared in Hong Kong early on June 22 after protests on June 21. 

For most of the world’s publishers, it would be very unusual for editors to take into account a country’s extradition laws before greenlighting a book. 

And yet, publishers and booksellers based in Hong Kong may well have to do so, due to a proposed new extradition policy that would have painful and chilling effects on the climate for free expression, press freedom, and the freedom to publish in the city.
Today, the future of the policy, which would allow those arrested in Hong Kong to be extradited to mainland China, stands on a knife’s edge: The bill has been so unpopular that it has been the target of a series of historically massive demonstrations, with hundreds of thousands of protesters taking to the streets. 

On June 15, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam announced that the bill was indefinitely suspended, but she has so far refused to withdraw it entirely. 

The next few days may determine whether this bill lurches forward or dies entirely as protesters gear up for another round of demonstrations.
Publishers across the globe should be paying very close attention, as their rights are among those at stake. 

If passed, such a law could force publishers with a presence in Hong Kong to choose between risking the safety of their staff or submitting to China’s harsh political censorship system under which criminal charges can lead to prison.
If passed, such a law could force publishers with a presence in Hong Kong to choose between risking the safety of their staff or submitting to China’s harsh political censorship system under which criminal charges can lead to prison.
Although Hong Kong is Chinese territory, it has a separate legal system from the rest of China, as a consequence of the 1997 handover from British control. 

This legal distinction means Hong Kong cannot at the moment turn over criminal suspects to China without a formalized extradition agreement between the two—which, to this day, China and Hong Kong do not have.
This may sound insignificant, but it is actually critical to guaranteeing the rights of Hong Kong’s people. 

In Hong Kong, the judiciary is independent from authorities, and fair trial rights are generally guaranteed. 

In mainland China—whose courts have a conviction rate of over 99 percent—the picture is dramatically different: Torture and coerced confessions are systemic, closed-door show trials are not uncommon, and the courts follow the mandate of Chinese Communist Party officials. 

The Chinese wield the courts as a weapon against political dissidents, criminalizing vast categories of political expression.
This is why large segments of Hong Kong society have reacted with such alarm to the news that Hong Kong’s legislature was attempting to ram through a sweeping legal change—one that would grant broad new powers to Hong Kong’s chief executive to authorize the extradition of any person in Hong Kong on the so-called request of mainland authorities.
Over the past couple weeks, Hong Kongers have protested in massive numbers: Organizers have estimated that a demonstration on June 16 saw almost 2 million demonstrators taking to the streets— in a city of less than 8 million people. 

The artistic community has also responded, with art galleries closing their doors in an act of protest. 

Business leaders have also expressed concerns, causing a dip in the Hong Kong stock market, and earlier this month 3,000 lawyers participated in a rare silent protestthrough the city streets.
International publishers should similarly be deeply concerned: If the extradition bill passes, no publisher in Hong Kong will be free from the threat of criminal charges.

The amendments apply to foreigners as well as citizens, meaning that anyone within—or even passing through—Hong Kong’s borders would be a potential target for extradition to the mainland. International publishers and booksellers with a presence in Hong Kong are able to produce and sell books there that would never be published in the mainland for reasons of censorship, and some Hong Kong-sold books eventually end up back in mainland China through individuals who buy them while traveling for work or on vacation. 

This is certainly enough for mainland authorities to view this entire sector with a prosecutorial—and persecutory—eye.
Hong Kong would rubber-stamp any extradition request from the mainland. 

Beijing handpicks nominees for the position of Hong Kong’s chief executive. 

It’s naive to think that the chief executive, Lam, would reject an extradition request from the same authorities who picked her for the job. 

And the decision to extradite would essentially be hers alone. 

The Hong Kong legislature—with a large majority of pro-Beijing stalwarts sitting alongside a nonetheless sizable minority of pro-democracy delegates—would have no authority to scrutinize extradition requests.
Similarly, Hong Kong courts would have little say in the matter: A Hong Kong judge would be required to approve extradition as long as there was sufficient prima-facie evidence to result in an indictment. 

This is a low standard of proof, compared to the standard for a criminal conviction. 

And while the courts can reject an extradition request if they find it is politically motivated, the burden is on suspects to prove they are being politically targeted. 

In other words, Hong Kong courts would essentially be taking mainland authorities at their word that they filed an actionable extradition request in good faith.
But authorities in mainland China have a history of bad faith in this regard, and several of the most troubling examples involve the publishing world. 

In the past few years alone, Chinese state agents have abducted several Hong Kong-based booksellers or publishers, putting them through a Kafkaesque legal process. 

In 2014, a Shenzhen court sentenced the Hong Kong publisher Yiu Man-tin to 10 years in prison for “smuggling ordinary goods,” after he planned to publish a book critical of Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.
The following year, Chinese agents abducted five Hong Kong booksellers, forcing them to appear on state television to give coerced confessions regarding running an “illegal business” by selling books to mainland China. 

This case, known as the Causeway Bay Books disappearances, is still not resolved: More than three years later, one of the booksellers—the Swedish citizen Gui Minhai — is still detained incommunicado in China as his health worsens.
In fact, mainland authorities have no problem making up spurious legal claims to punish independent voices in the Hong Kong publishing world. 

After Gui was kidnapped from his vacation home in Thailand in October 2015 by Chinese agents, mainland authorities claimed that he had voluntarily returned to China to resolve a decade-old hit-and-run charge against him.
While Hong Kong’s government has claimed that the proposed bill would not enable extradition for political crimes or for various types of commercial crimes, experts have pointed out that this would not stop mainland authorities from using elastically defined charges—like fraud—as a pretext for political censorship. 

After all, if Chinese state agents are willing to egregiously break international law through kidnapping publishers, it is hard to believe they will act with restraint after given this powerful new legal tool.
Protesters have begun demanding that the Hong Kong government withdraw the bill entirely, that Lam resign, and that the government drop charges against those who have been arrested. 

Additional demonstrations are already planned, meaning that the future of this bill could be decided within the next few weeks.
Given the incredible outpouring of protest against this bill, it would be easy to conclude that the threat has already passed. 

After all, Lam has already announced the bill’s suspension. 

But a suspended bill can always arise again. 

Lam has pointedly refused to commit to scrapping the bill entirely, saying she would only proceed with it if the “fears and anxieties” of Hong Kongers could be “adequately addressed.” 

That leaves a lot of wiggle room for the government to propose a new version of this bill down the road, once Lam or top officials in Beijing decide that the people are no longer so anxious.
Publishers and booksellers with staff in Hong Kong (or visiting the city) should be very worried. Hong Kong has traditionally been a bastion of media freedom and uncensored publishing in Asia—accessible to the Chinese market but removed from China’s censorship strictures and its criminal penalties for those who speak truth to power.
The extradition bill and future legislation like it would threaten this freedom, and publishers around the world would need to begin asking themselves, “If I publish this book in Hong Kong, is there a chance that I or a colleague could face criminal charges in a Chinese court?” 

The result will be self-censorship driven by fear as Hong Kong is further stripped of the protections that make it a safe harbor for readers and booksellers alike.

Han Terrrorism

China detained bookseller Gui Minhai to stop him from telling his story
By Oliver Chou, Mimi Lau and Catherine Wong

China snatched a Swedish citizen and former Hong Kong-based bookseller to prevent him from telling his story before a trial over his alleged involvement in “illegal book trading” wraps up, his former employer said, citing a source.
Publisher Lau Tat-man, founder and chief editor of Ha Fai Yi Publication, where Gui Minhai was a freelance writer and editor for seven years, believes Gui’s dramatic arrest on Saturday at a train station near Beijing – under the watch of Swedish diplomatic staff – was a bid to stop him from leaving the country.
“The case of Causeway Bay Books has yet to be settled in an official trial, so Gui heading towards Beijing with Swedish diplomats could have been part a plan to get him out of the country,” Lau, citing a reliable source, told the South China Morning Post.
Gui was one of five people who went missing from 2015, all of whom were associated with the bookshop that released titles critical of Beijing. 

Gui was in Thailand when he disappeared for the first time, then resurfaced in custody across the border. 

He was freed from prison in October on a drink-driving charge.
Lau could not confirm whether Gui was released on the condition that he stay within the city of Ningbo, in Zhejiang, but he said “I’m sure there are conditions attached to his release”.
“Gui has stayed low-profile since his release in October and the only person he’s had contact with is a long-time acquaintance in Shanghai,” he said.
The European Union joined Sweden’s call on Wednesday for the immediate release of Gui, which Beijing said was “unreasonable”.
The missing booksellers case made international headlines at the time, and although not much had been heard about the booksellers recently until Gui was taken away on Saturday, Lau said the authorities had continued to keep him under tight surveillance.
“Lee Po has stayed quiet and Lui Por and Cheung Chi-ping are in their Shenzhen homes and are not free to travel – that shows the officials are still worried that these people will speak out like Lam Wing-kee did once they are set free,” he said, referring to the bookstore manager who revealed details of his detention on the mainland when he returned to Hong Kong.
Lau called on the Swedish government to take the lead for the West and stand firm on international law and human rights.
“Many Western countries have kowtowed to China because of economic gains – it’s time for the West to wake up,” he said.

Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs Margot Wallström said on Tuesday that Gui “was at the time of his arrest in the company of diplomatic staff, who were providing consular help to a Swedish citizen in need of medical care”.
“This was perfectly in line with basic international rules giving us the right to provide our citizens with consular support,” she said in a statement.
“The Chinese authorities have assured us on numerous occasions that Mr Gui Minhai has been free since his release having served a sentence for a traffic-related offence, and that we can have any contact we wish with our fellow citizen.”
In Beijing on Wednesday, the European Union’s ambassador to China Hans Dietmar Schweisgut said the EU “fully supports” Sweden’s efforts to resolve the issue with China, Reuters reported.

Magnus Fiskesjö, an associate professor at Cornell University who was a Swedish diplomat in Beijing and has known Gui since the 1980s, said the incident was “not only wrong but also damaging to China’s international image”.
“When China disrespects our country by mistreating a citizen of ours, we have to stand up for our citizen – there is no other option for it,” he said.
“It has outraged people and goes beyond the bounds of international law in a repeated and offensive manner. When people hear about this news in Sweden, they feel that this is China bullying a small country like us.”
Fiskesjö said the Swedish embassy and consulates in China had sought access to Gui since 2015 on multiple occasions since he was first detained but “with long delays and long waits”.

Perfidious Albion

Britain is looking away as China tramples on the freedom of Hong Kong – and my father

By Angela Gui

Angela Gui: ‘My father’s case is only one out of many that illustrate the death of the rule of law in Hong Kong.’ 

Iam too young to remember the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 and its promise for the new world I would live in. 

But I have lived to see that promise trampled.
The Sino-British Joint Declaration, signed to pave the way for the handover, was supposed to protect the people of Hong Kong from Chinese interference in their society and markets until 2047. 

Yet as the handover’s 20th anniversary approaches, China muscles in where it promised to tread lightly while Britain avoids eye contact.

Gui Minhai: the strange disappearance of a publisher who riled China's elite
As Xi Jinping has consolidated his grip on Chinese politics since he took office in 2013, Beijing has increasingly ignored the principle of “one country, two systems” on which the handover was based and actively eroded the freedoms this was supposed to guarantee.
In October 2015, my father Gui Minhai and his four colleagues were targeted and abducted by the agents of the Chinese Communist party for their work as booksellers and publishers. 

My father – a Swedish citizen – was taken while on holiday in Thailand, in the same place we’d spent Christmas together the year before. 

He was last seen getting into a car with a Mandarin-speaking man who had waited for him outside his holiday apartment. 

Next, his friend and colleague Lee Bo was abducted from the Hong Kong warehouse of Causeway Bay Books, which they ran together. 

Lee Bo is legally British and, like any Hong Konger, his freedom of expression should have been protected by the terms of 1997.
Their only “crime” had been to publish and sell books that were critical of the central Chinese government. 

So paranoid is Beijing about its public image, that it chooses to carry out cross-border kidnappings over some books. 

Causeway Bay Books specialised in publications that were banned on the mainland but legal in Hong Kong. 

The store’s manager, Lam Wing-kee, who was taken when travelling to Shenzhen, has described Causeway Bay Books “a symbol of resistance”. 

In spite of Hong Kong’s legal freedoms of speech and of the press the store is now closed because all its people have been abducted or bullied away. 

Other Hong Kong booksellers are picking “politically sensitive” titles off their shelves in the fear that they may be next; the next brief headline, the next gap in a family like my own.
I continue to live with my father’s absence – his image, messages from his friends, the cause he has become. 

Turning 53 this year, he spent a second birthday in a Chinese prison. 

Soon he will have spent two years in detention without access to a lawyer, Swedish consular officials, or regular contact with his family.
My father’s case is only one of many that illustrate the death of the rule of law in Hong Kong. 

Earlier this year, Canadian businessman Xiao Jianhua – who had connections to the Chinese political elite – disappeared from a Hong Kong hotel and later resurfaced on the mainland. 

In last year’s legislative council elections, six candidates were barred from running because of their political stance. 

The two pro-independence candidates who did end up getting elected were prevented from taking office. 

If “intolerable political stance” is now a valid excuse for barring LegCo candidates, then it won’t be long before the entire Hong Kong government is reduced to a miniature version of China’s.
The Joint Declaration was meant to guarantee that no Hong Kong resident would have to fear a “midnight knock on the door”. 

The reality at present is that what happened to my father can happen to any Hong Kong resident the mainland authorities wish to silence or bring before their own system of “justice”. 

Twenty-one years ago, John Major pledged that Britain would continue to defend the freedoms granted to Hong Kong by the Joint Declaration against its autocratic neighbour. 

Today, instead of holding China to its agreement, Britain glances down at its shoes and mumbles about the importance of trade. 

It is as if the British government wants to forget all about the promise it made to the people of Hong Kong. 

But China’s crackdown on dissent has made it difficult for Hong Kongers to forget.
Theresa May often emphasises the importance of British values in her speeches. 

But Britain’s limpness over Hong Kong seems to demonstrate only how easily these values are compromised away. 

I worry about the global implications of China being allowed to just walk away from such an important treaty. 

And I worry that in the years to come, we will have many more Lee Bos and Gui Minhais, kidnapped and detained because their work facilitated free speech. 

Hong Kong’s last governor, Lord Patten, has repeatedly argued that human rights issues can be pushed without bad effects on trade. 

Germany, for example, has shown that this is entirely possible, with Angela Merkel often publicly criticising China’s human rights record. 

With a potentially hard Brexit around the bend, a much reduced Britain will need a world governed by the rule of law. 

How the government handles its responsibilities to Hong Kong will be decisive in shaping the international character of the country that a stand-alone Britain will become. 

I for one hope it will be a country that honours its commitments and that stands up to defend human rights.