Criminal Office

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Discloses Names of Chinese Dissidents to Beijing
BY EVA FU

The United Nations Human Rights Council on June 26, 2019. 

Emma Reilly, a UN employee who first alleged the practice in 2013, said in an Oct. 21 letter to senior U.S. diplomats and members of Congress, “The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) continues to provide China with advance information on whether named human rights defenders plan to attend meetings" in Geneva. 

A United Nations whistleblower has accused the organization’s human rights agency of endangering Chinese rights activists by disclosing their names to the Chinese regime.
“The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) apparently continues to provide China with advance information on whether named human rights defenders plan to attend meetings (in Geneva),” Emma Reilly, a human rights officer at the OHCHR, said in an Oct. 21 letter to U.S. congress members and senior officials, Fox News reported on Dec. 14.
The list of names provided to the Chinese authorities included Tibetan and Uyghur activists, some of whom are U.S. citizens or residents.
Reilly said that the practice has continued since 2013.

Reilly, an Irish and British dual national, also accused the organization of retaliating against her in response to the complaints.“Instead of taking action to stop names being handed over, the UN has focused its energy on retaliating against me for daring to report it. I have been ostracized, publicly defamed, deprived of functions, and my career has been left in tatters,” Reilly said.
She also said the UN approved of Beijing’s request for the name list even though it denied a similar request from Turkey.
According to Washington-based non-profit Government Accountability Project, Reilly first raised objections to the handover of dissidents’ names in early 2013 through an internal report. 

She said in response to an inquiry from the Chinese UN ambassador, she and other staff were instructed to provide information on whether 13 human rights activists were planning to attend a Human Rights Council session.
Reilly had also reported such practices to senior staff members and through other internal channels, but saw no immediate action from the organization until the Irish government intervened in 2016, the Government Accountability Project said.

OHCHR helped China arrest and kill Cao Shunli
The advocacy group further noted the disappearance of Chinese lawyer and activist Cao Shunli at a Beijing airport in September 2013, while Cao was on her way for a UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva. 

The arrest took place six months after Reilly’s first internal report. 

Cao died in detention in China six months later after being denied medical treatment.
Reilly had suffered from a range of reprisals due to her speaking up, including being discriminated for promotion, excluded from meetings, and receiving prejudicial performance evaluations.
Responding to Gomez’s comments, Reilly said that the UN has “consistently refused to act” on her request to “stop this horrific practice.”
“When Chinese dissidents come to the UN to speak out about human rights abuses, the last thing they expect is for the UN to report them to China,” she said.

Chinese Influence at the UN
Concerns over the Chinese regime’s influence at the United Nations Human Rights Council have been mounting in recent years.
In July, the Chinese delegate twice interrupted Hong Kong singer and activist Denise Ho during her testimony at the council, during which she appealed to the UN to remove China from the organization and speak up for Hong Kong, a city embroiled in protests since June in opposition to growing political interference from Beijing.
In November 2018, eight non-profit groups in a joint statement expressed concerns after the United Nations Human Rights Council removed at least seven of their submissions in a report for consideration by UN member states ahead of a review of Beijing’s human rights record. 

The groups voiced concern that the submissions were objected to by the Chinese Communist Party.
In April 2017, security officials at the UN headquarters in New York expelled a prominent Uyghur activist Dolkun Isa from the premise without explanation. 

Later in 2018, the former Under-Secretary-General for the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Wu Hongbo, revealed in an interview with Chinese state broadcaster CCTV that he had personally ordered the activist’s expulsion.
“As a Chinese diplomat, we can’t be a bit careless when it comes to issues relating to China’s national sovereignty and national interests,” Wu said at the time.
The Chinese regime has detained an estimated more than 1 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in the northwestern colony of East Turkestan in a massive campaign to combat purported “extremism.”

In January 2017, ahead of a keynote speech from Chinese dictator Xi Jinping at the UN European headquarters in Geneva, UN officials deployed rare stringent security arrangements, shutting down parking lots and meeting rooms, and sending home early its roughly 3,000 staff members. 

Small pro-Tibet protests near the site were also declared unauthorized.
Ted Piccone, senior fellow at Washington-based think tank Brookings Institution, warned that the Chinese regime is “playing the long game” in regards to human rights and reshaping the international system to its advantage.
“Without a well thought out and long-term counter-balancing strategy, China’s growing economic leverage will probably allow it to achieve its objectives”—defending its “authoritarian system of one-party control” and exporting its values that undermine international human rights system, Piccone wrote in a 2018 report.
“The result would be a weaker international human rights system in which independent voices are muffled and public criticism of egregious abuses muted behind the banner of national sovereignty.”

Freedom Fighter

A Pop Star Defends Democracy in Hong Kong
By JAY NORDLINGER
Denise Ho performs at the Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway, May 27, 2019. 

In the forthcoming issue of National Review, I have a piece about Tanya Chan, who is a Hong Konger: She is a legislator and a democracy leader, in the thick of it all. 

She is also an inspiration.
Today, I talked with Denise Ho — who is also an inspiration. 

She, too, is a Hong Konger, and a democracy leader, in the thick of it all. 

She is also a pop star — a household name in Hong Kong and beyond. 

Her activism has not come without costs. 

She has paid a price in engagements, endorsements, etc. 

Obviously, she is persona non grata in Mainland China — which is a very big market. 

But she could not remain silent. 

Something within her impelled her to join the others in the streets.
For my podcast with her — a Q&A — go here.
We met at Town Hall in New York City, where the Oslo Freedom Forum was holding a special session. (On the façade of Town Hall, it says in big, bold letters, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”) 

We talk about her life and career. 

The prospects for democracy in Hong Kong. 

The brutality of the police. 

The question of Taiwan. 

And other key subjects.
She says that all people who favor democracy, freedom, and human rights — wherever they live — are linked. 

They are allies, and should stand together against oppressors.
Usually, Q&A goes out with music by Glazunov (which is how the show is introduced, too) — the last movement of his Symphony No. 5, “Heroic.” 

This time, it goes out with a Denise Ho song. 

Again, here.

Hong Kong singer Denise Ho calls on countrymen to boycott paying taxes

By Sylvia Looi

Hong Kong singer Denise Ho has called on Hong Kongers to boycott paying taxes after the government implemented a face mask ban. 

KUALA LUMPUR — Hong Kong singer Denise Ho is calling on Hong Kong people to boycott paying taxes, following the implementation of the face mask ban by the island state government to quell the protest movement there.
In a Facebook posting, Ho said the taxes collected would only go towards paying the salaries of civil servants.
“All boycott paying taxes!! Hong Kong people must unite!!!” Sin Chew Daily reported Ho as writing in the post that has since received 25,000 reactions and been shared 1,200 times.
The face mask ban also elicited reaction from Hong Kong actor Anthony Wong Chau-sang, who said the ban would not have any positive effect and would in fact worsen matters.
He said the government should extend the olive branch if it wants to stop the violent protest in the city.
Wong, however, did not elaborate on the steps that should be taken by the government.

Hong Kong Is Winning the Global Public-Opinion War With Beijing

The city’s protest movement has unofficial representatives, crowdfunded advertising, viral videos, and much else that has caught Chinese off guard.

By CHRIS HORTON

The Hong Kong pro-democracy campaigners Joshua Wong (far left) and Denise Ho (left) testify in Congress.

TAIPEI—Months of protests in Hong Kong have pitted residents of all ages and backgrounds against their police force, local government, and the Chinese Communist Party, and there is no question of who is less powerful.
Yet in a parallel battle over international public opinion, it is Beijing and its minions that are outgunned. 

This weekend that mismatch was once again highlighted by the thousands of people in cities across Australia, Asia, Europe and North America coming out in support of Hong Kong, but also in a much broader sense, against the CCP. 

Here in Taipei alone, thousands of Taiwanese and Hong Kongers marched through the streets on a rainy Sunday, told by Denise Ho, one of the most visible faces among Hong Kong’s unofficial diplomatic corps, that her home and theirs shared the same fight against Beijing.
These latest worldwide, pro–Hong Kong rallies are the most recent iteration of what supporters of repressed groups in East Turkestan and Tibet, as well as those who back Taiwan’s sovereignty, have all struggled to do: Mobilize large communities internationally to denounce the Chinese Communist Party.

The relative success of Hong Kong’s protest movement is all the more significant because it’s occurring alongside Beijing expanding its propaganda efforts globally, as state-owned outlets trumpet China’s vision of the world in multiple languages. 

This global campaign is the biggest challenge to China’s rulers by the territory since 1989, when, still a British colony, its residents took part in demonstrations in solidarity with protesters in Tiananmen Square, while also providing financial and material support.
From Oslo to Osaka, Congress to the United Nations, Taiwan to Twitter, Hong Kongers have taken their DIY approach to protest to a global audience. 

Celebrity supporters testify in high-profile settings; highly targeted, crowdfunded media campaigns aim to keep the issue in the spotlight; and viral videos, catchy slogans, and even a movement anthem and flag help magnify the message on social media.

On September 17, a panel of witnesses including Ho and pro-democracy campaigner Joshua Wong testified before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China in Washington, the latest in a string of public appearances for the two activists around the globe. 

Ho has been especially active, shuttling back and forth between Hong Kong and elsewhere to promote her message of resisting Beijing to receptive crowds, especially in Taiwan.
Earlier this month in Taipei, Ho spoke and performed at the Asia installment of the Oslo Freedom Forum. 

Only days before, she had been in Melbourne, where she appeared in public with the Chinese dissident artist Badiucao, designer of the unofficial Hong Kong protest movement flag. 

In Taipei, Ho took the stage to a screaming crowd of hundreds of admirers, their phones raised to record her appeal to democratic Taiwan, whose way of life is also under threat from China. Describing the struggle of Hong Kongers, who cannot rely on their own government to counter China’s narrative, Ho struck a pragmatic tone. 

“When the system fails us,” she said to the attentive crowd, “we take things into our own hands.”
Wong, who rose to international fame as one of the leaders of the pro-democracy, Occupy-style Umbrella Movement of 2014, has also been busy on the diplomatic front. 

Prior to his congressional testimony, he stopped in Germany, urging its government to cease exporting crowd-control weapons to Hong Kong and to put human rights in Hong Kong on the agenda in Berlin’s trade talks with Beijing. (Germany's foreign minister, Heiko Maas, met with Wong on September 10.)
Wong’s German visit came after he and fellow activists visited Taiwan, where he implored the ruling party to pass an asylum law that would make it easier for Hong Kongers to seek refuge here, territory the CCP claims despite having never controlled it.
Although neither Wong nor Ho has been appointed by the current protest movement to represent it abroad—a remarkable feat of the demonstrations is that they have been largely leaderless—the general consensus in Hong Kong seems to be that they are well-known names and faces who offer the advantage of signal-boosting.
While in Taipei mid-month, Ho told me she thought of herself as a mediator or spokesperson for the movement at large. 

“I’m not seeing myself as a leader of any sort,” she said. 

“I am, on the other hand, one of the participants of this movement: I have been on the streets with these people. I have been teargassed.” 

She added that, as a “recognizable face,” she saw herself “as a conduit that can bring stories of these people to the world.”
In July, Ho scored one of the first public-relations victories abroad for Hong Kong’s protesters when, speaking at the United Nations in Geneva, she described growing police brutality against Hong Kongers and called on the UN to remove China from its Human Rights Council. 

During her remarks, she was interrupted twice by China’s representative to the body on procedural grounds. 

More recently, while in Washington, Ho and Wong were joined by other activists and congressional leaders for the launch of the Hong Kong Democracy Council, a D.C.-based lobbying group for the movement.
Ho and Wong are far from the only diplomats working on behalf of the movement. 

In June, a crowdfunding drive raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from more than 20,000 donors, paying for full-page ads in more than 10 major international newspapers, urging the G20 summit in Osaka to raise Hong Kong’s plight. 

How much impact the campaign had is unclear, but Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did bring up Hong Kong’s protests with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping when the two met on the sidelines of the summit. 

Another crowdfunded ad campaign is under way, this time targeting papers on October 1 to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, a particularly sensitive date for the CCP. 

The campaign is not the only bit of rain to fall on the party’s parade—Hong Kong’s government announced on September 18 that it had canceled the fireworks show planned for the anniversary.
Unlike East Turkestan or Tibet, both of which the Communists forcibly took control of in the 1950s, Hong Kong was handed over peacefully by the British in 1997, following 150 years of colonial rule. 

At the heart of the agreement between London and Beijing was an arrangement whereby Hong Kong would maintain its separate political and economic system and enjoy “a high degree of autonomy,” with Beijing handling national security and diplomacy.
This “one country, two systems” arrangement has allowed Hong Kong to have a free internet, for example, whereas Beijing heavily restricts the web within China and even went so far as to either partially or completely shut down the internet in East Turkestan—the size of western Europe—for 10 months.
Today, many Hong Kongers worry that their internet access may go the way of China’s, adding a sense of urgency to their attempts to use it to organize themselves and to reach the outside world in order to spread their message and counter Beijing’s narrative. 

Twitter, in particular, has become an important virtual battleground for foreign hearts and minds.
The Chinese authorities appear to agree. 

On September 3, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute published an investigation into the methods used in a disinformation campaign aimed at Hong Kong that Twitter has attributed to Beijing, a first. “Efforts by the Chinese government to leverage Twitter to redirect and recast political developments in Hong Kong—both in terms of covert information operations and through its state media—highlight just how powerful Twitter is as a tool of statecraft,” Danielle Cave, deputy director of the ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre, told me.
Hong Kong’s protesters have also recognized the global influence of Twitter in the information domain and are themselves trying to use Twitter diplomacy to share breaking developments and to connect with journalists, Cave noted. 

This includes providing images and videos of events on the ground, often in real time, and generating new hashtags, including ones that highlight violent incidents and police brutality. (The protesters’ tool of choice for coordinating rallies has thus far been the encrypted messaging app Telegram, but that can’t match Twitter’s global reach or public-broadcasting capabilities, nor does it have the ear of global stakeholders that the protesters seek to engage.)
Hong Kongers have, so far, proved a nimble David to China’s clumsy Goliath. 

But the CCP does occasionally score points. 

Donald Trump, for example, parroted the Chinese government’s line on the Hong Kong protests when he called them “riots” in early August, a characterization that many viewed as a win for Beijing.
In other incidents, however, the tendency of Chinese nationalism to backfire on the foreign stage has hampered the Communist cause. 

Among these incidents are violent Chinese-student reactions to pro–Hong Kong demonstrations at Australian universities, with the Chinese embassy expressing support for the students’ actions on social media afterward. 

Debate in Australia regarding the ability of China to control public speech there has since intensified. Elsewhere, Montreal’s Pride parade excluded Hong Kong participants after receiving threats from pro-Communists.

At the parade, many onlookers were aghast when, during the moment of silence for those who have died from HIV/AIDS, Chinese participants sang their national anthem.
“The most basic weakness of the external communications of the Chinese party-state is the fact that foreign audiences, and their values and interests, are never truly considered,” David Bandurski, co-director of the China Media Project, told me. 

“Sure, the messages are directed at foreigners, but the language is still the internal and insular language of the party-state.”
In this sense, Bandurski said, these propaganda efforts are not really external at all.
“Try as it might to raise the volume on China's singular, restrained voice, the party-state is still talking to itself, or shouting at its own wall,” Bandurski said. 

“The louder that voice becomes, the more uncompromising and aggressive it sounds.”

Chinazism: Hong Kong becomes a police state

The Hong Kong government is using its police force as a tool to abuse the public power and to torture the people

Agence France-Presse

WASHINGTON, United States – Hong Kong is a police state where officers – once dubbed "Asia's finest" – are conducting abuses in the service of the city's pro-Beijing leadership, prominent voices in the global financial hub's weeks-long protest movement told AFP Saturday, September 21.
The comments came as riot police and demonstrators in Hong Kong fought brief skirmishes Saturday near the Chinese border.
They were the latest clashes during more than 3 months of demonstrations to protest stuttering freedoms in the semi-autonomous territory.
"Within these 3-and-a-half months, we have seen the police in Hong Kong getting totally out of control," activist and pop star Denise Ho said in an interview with AFP.
"Hong Kong has become a police state where the government is hiding behind the police force and refusing to find solutions to the present crisis," she added.
Well-known figures in the leaderless protest movement have visited the United States, Germany, Taiwan, and Australia to raise awareness.
"Our police system has been corrupted into a personal tool for Carrie Lam to maintain her power and to abuse the public power to torture the people, to silence the people," another activist, Brian Leung, said in the AFP interview.
He was referring to the leader of the former British colony, who was not directly elected but appointed by an overwhelmingly Beijing-friendly committee.
On Friday, September 20, Amnesty International accused Hong Kong police of using excessive force.
"In an apparent thirst for retaliation, Hong Kong's security forces have engaged in a disturbing pattern of reckless and unlawful tactics against people during the protests," said Nicholas Bequelin, the watchdog's East Asia Director.
"This has included arbitrary arrests and retaliatory violence against arrested persons in custody, some of which has amounted to torture," he added.
Leung told AFP, "There are countless incidents of such brutality and the worst of the situation is the police has systematically concealed their identity, are not showing their faces... which makes accountability impossible."
He alleged that some injured protesters do not go to the hospital because they fear that could lead to police getting information about them.
"So we do not know the exact scale and numbers of those injuries and we are sure that the police, if they continue such brutality, it will be only a matter of time before some citizen might suffer from fatal injuries," Leung added.
Millions took to Hong Kong's streets beginning in June, but small groups of hardcore protesters have set fires, stormed the city's legislature, and hurled rocks and petrol bombs at officers, who have fired back with tear gas and rubber bullets.
Joshua Wong, another activist, said he is one of 200 among the 1,500 arrested to face prosecution.
A 12-year-old child was also detained, and "even [a] first aider, doctors, or [a] nurse in the protest zone, they will still be arrested by riot police without any legitimate reason," he said.
"Hong Kong [has] transformed from a modern global city to a police state with police violence," Wong told AFP.
Among their demands, activists want an independent probe of police brutality.
The protests began against a now-scrapped plan to allow extraditions to the authoritarian Chinese mainland, but grew into a wider campaign for democracy, fuelled by animosity towards the police.
Under a deal that outlined Hong Kong's return to China from British colonial rule in 1997, Hong Kong enjoys liberties and rights not seen on the mainland, but freedoms are being eroded by Beijing.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi welcomes Hong Kong pro-democracy activists to Capitol

By LISA MASCARO

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday welcomed Hong Kong pro-democracy activists to the U.S. Capitol, sending a message to Beijing that Congress supports the protesters in their months-long campaign for human rights.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is given a lapel pin by a Hong Kong activist following a news conference on human rights in Hong Kong on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2019. Behind Pelosi is Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong. 

Pelosi thanked the activists for "challenging the conscience," not only of the Chinese government, but the worldwide community with their mass protests over the territory's autonomous status. 

She sided with the protesters' demand for universal suffrage and "a political system accountable to the people." 

And Pelosi warned others in the U.S. government not to allow "commercial interests" to drive foreign policy in the region.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, left, with Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong and other members of Congress during a news conference on human right in Hong Kong on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2019. 

"If we do not speak up because of commercial interests in support of human rights in China, we lose all moral authority to speak up for them any other place in the world," Pelosi said.
Republicans joined the Democratic leader, alongside several Hong Kong activists who have become prominent figures in the mass protests since June, in a stately room off the House floor beneath a portrait of George Washington.
Republican Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas said Americans see the young people waving American flags on the Hong Kong streets. 

"America stands with you," he said.
Several of the activists appeared before Congress this week, appealing to lawmakers to support the mass protests that began with a now shelved proposal to extradite people arrested in Hong Kong to China.
Against the backdrop of the 30-year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising, with its brutal and bloody crackdown on young democracy protesters a generation ago, the U.S. lawmakers are prominently backing today's young activists. 

Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong called it "a remarkable day" to share the support of the U.S. leaders.
"We will continue our uphill battle until the day we enjoy freedom and democracy," Wong said.
Denise Ho, a singer and pro-democracy activist based in Hong Kong, thanked Pelosi for the "warm welcome" during their visit to the Capitol amid what she called a "very difficult but also very empowering" time in Hong Kong.
"This is a message to the Hong Kong people that we are not isolated in this fight," Ho said. 

"We are in the forefront of this great noble fight for universal values."
During a hearing Tuesday before a U.S. government commission set up by Congress to monitor human rights in China, several activists asked lawmakers to support their efforts by banning the export of American police equipment that is used against demonstrators. 

They also want lawmakers to more closely monitor Chinese efforts to undermine civil liberties in the city.
Republicans and Democrats on the panel, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, expressed their support. 

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said Wednesday the hearing was beamed around the world and "no doubt" watched closely by the Chinese government.
The House is expected to advance legislation that would require the secretary of State to annually review Hong Kong's special economic and trade status, providing a check on the Chinese government's influence and the territory's autonomy.
Pelosi welcomed the Hong Kong government's decision to drop the extradition bill that sparked the protests over summer, but she said Wednesday, "We all know it's not enough. Much more must be done."

The speaker, who has become something of an alternative ambassador on the global stage during her tenure, has a long history of monitoring China from her early years in Congress when she appeared with other lawmakers in Tiananmen Square to pay tribute to the protesters.
Hong Kong, a former British colony, has been allowed certain autonomy and freedoms since it was returned to China in 1997 as a territory, with a "one country, two systems" policy that was supposed to ensure a smooth political transition.
Under U.S. law, the territory of Hong Kong receives special treatment in matters of trade, customs, sanctions enforcement, law enforcement cooperation and more. 

China has benefited from this and used it to evade U.S. export controls and sanctions.
The legislation to be considered by the House from Rep. Christopher Smith, R-N.J., places Beijing on "annual notice" that it will lose Hong Kong's special economic and trade status if its autonomy continues to erode.

Sacred Union

U.S. politicians embrace Hong Kong’s struggle
By Ishaan Tharoor

For close to four months, protests have raged in Hong Kong. 

During that time, Trump has been a somewhat inconspicuous bystander. 

In August, he described the upheaval as “a very tough situation” but praised Chinese dictator Xi Jinping for acting “very responsibly” — no matter the reports of excessive police brutality and Chinese troop buildups along Hong Kong’s border with the mainland.

Trump’s former top diplomat in Hong Kong even described the protests earlier this summer as a “second-tier” matter.
But that’s hardly the view in the rest of Washington. 

Antipathy toward China marks one of the few sources of bipartisan consensus in the fractious capital. 

On Tuesday, the plight of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters took center stage at a hearing of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. 

The panel’s participants — a selection of notable Hong Kong activists and scholars — and the lawmakers in attendance stressed their commitment to Hong Kong’s democracy struggle and distaste for Chinese authoritarianism.


Rep. Jim McGovern
✔@RepMcGovern
HAPPENING NOW: The@CECCgov is holding a hearing on #HongKong.

Watch live at the link below https://twitter.com/ceccgov/status/1173936636989718529 …

China Commission
✔@CECCgov
WATCH #HONGKONG HEARING: Hearing will be livestreamed on the @CECCgov
YouTube Channel and also broadcast live on @cspan
on #CSPAN3 and C-SPAN Radio. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQJZTi-XRls&fbclid=IwAR2tiQnuttwbaySbRq7A-OTW8qyY-bYUnj3dtoc-bjTCf0GjoFGQZMJgKyg …
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“China’s leaders must respect Hong Kong’s autonomy or know that their escalating actions will lead them to face real consequences, not just from the United States but from the free world,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), one of the co-chairs of the commission and a prominent Beijing critic.
Though the city’s Beijing-backed chief executive, Carrie Lam, ultimately heeded protesters’ calls to withdraw a controversial extradition bill, that has done little to satisfy their broader demands. 

Hong Kong protesters are furious about the thuggish behavior of the city’s police force and, more significantly, determined to halt what they see as an erosion of their long-standing freedoms and democratic aspirations.
American lawmakers echoed that disquiet at the hearing and cast the protest movement at the vanguard of an epochal battle. 

It’s common to speak of Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” model, said Rep. Thomas Suozzi (D-N.Y.), but it also highlights “one world, two models” — that of Hong Kong’s open society, marked by civil liberties and rule of law, and that of China, an authoritarian state whose leadership is perfecting 21st-century methods of surveillance and repression. 

Sen. Todd C. Young (R-Ind.) said China’s rulers may style themselves as “communist” but that they “are really fascist in behavior.”
“With the unrest in Hong Kong showing no sign of abating despite limited concessions by the city’s government, attention has shifted to what the West can or should do to influence the situation,” wrote my colleague Shibani Mahtani. 

“Protesters have been lobbying the U.S. government to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which seeks to impose sanctions such as asset freezes and visa bans on those found to be ‘suppressing basic freedoms’ in Hong Kong.”
The bill, which is pending in the House and Senate, is likely to pass, and Trump has indicated that he will sign it into law. 

It would call for an annual review of the special relationship between the United States and Hong Kong, which allows a host of trade and business privileges that do not extend to mainland China. This relationship has, in part, enabled Hong Kong to become Asia’s financial capital — a position that became only more entrenched after Britain’s handover of its former colony to China in 1997.
Now, U.S. officials and Hong Kong activists say further attacks on Hong Kong freedoms — let alone a feared cross-border incursion from Chinese police or military forces — ought to bring that special relationship into question.
“Beijing shouldn’t have it both ways, reaping all the economic benefits of Hong Kong’s standing in the world while eradicating our freedoms,” Joshua Wong, a Hong Kong activist and veteran of the 2014 “umbrella revolution” protests, said at the hearing. 

He added that “our most important demand is genuine structural change in Hong Kong, which means free elections. Our government’s lack of representation lies at the heart of the matter.”


SCMP News
✔@SCMPNews
100 days have passed since the first mass march against the now-abandoned extradition bill in June. Since then, 2,414 rounds of tear gas have been fired and 1,453 protesters have been arrested.

6:05 PM - Sep 17, 2019
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There’s no sign that Xi Jinping would ever entertain allowing such political reform. 

In his years in office, Xi has built a legacy of ruthless power consolidation, purging party foes, squeezing the space for civil society and exporting China’s technologies of control to countries around the world. 

Under his watch, more than a million Turkic Muslims in the far-west colony of East Turkestan have vanished into concentration camps. 

Hong Kong’s pro-democracy champions see themselves holding the line against an increasingly totalitarian advance.
“Through the challenges of Hong Kong, the West is waking up to China’s insinuating power in a global scale,” said Denise Ho, another prominent pro-democracy activist at the hearing. 

What happens next is uncertain. 

The protests will enter a critical period for Beijing. 

Oct. 1 marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of the people’s republic, an occasion Xi and his cohort would not want clouded by scenes of chaos in the wealthiest Chinese city.
Sunny Cheung, a Hong Kong student leader at the hearing, said he doubted Chinese authorities would, at least in the near term, deploy outside forces or impose emergency law on Hong Kong. 

Such methods 30 years after the brutal crackdown at Tiananmen Square would “not be promising for the Beijing government,” he said.
Sharon Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China, invoked a saying by Mao Zedong to sum up the spirit of Hong Kong’s dissenters: “Wherever there is suppression, there will be resistance.”

'This Is a Global Fight.'

Cantonese Pop Diva Denise Ho Wants the World to Stand Up With Hong Kong
BY LAIGNEE BARRON 

Geneva, Sydney, Taipei, New York—at another point in Denise Ho’s career these might have been stops on a concert tour. 

Instead, the Cantonese pop diva turned icon of Hong Kong’s protest movement has been traveling around the world drumming up support for her city’s struggle against authoritarian China.
Ho has spent the last five years hitching her stardom to Hong Kong’s democracy fight, and in response, has been banned from the lucrative mainland Chinese market and dropped from sponsorship deals and by her record label.
As a singer, Ho hit the mainstream in the 2000s. 

Then, in 2012, she was the first major female star in Hong Kong to come out, and began advocating for LGBT+ rights. 

In 2014, she was arrested for joining the “Umbrella Revolution,” a protest movement calling for free elections and an end to Beijing’s encroachment on semi-autonomous Hong Kong.
Amid the enclave’s latest political upheaval, Ho continues to be one of the most prominent celebrities on the front lines. 

When she’s not calling on the U.N. Human Rights Council to drop China from the international body, Ho can be spotted sporting the protester’s black t-shirt uniform and joining the chants of “Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of our time.”
TIME caught up with Ho on the sidelines of the Oslo Freedom Forum in Taipei, Taiwan last week.

You’ve paid a price for your political activism. Do you feel more Hongkongers are now also having to choose between their careers and political views?
For sure. 

The main thing we can see is that people are restraining themselves from speaking their minds, not only public figures and celebrities, but also really anyone who might, say, travel to China, or who might be working in the corporate [sector]. 

I have close friends who are scared to even take a photo with me. 

So you see this kind of fear and self-censorship, and it is a very dangerous thing really, because that is how Communist governments always work. 

They instill fear and then people do these things on their own.

You’ve said the ‘one country, two systems’ framework Beijing uses to govern Hong Kong is doomed. What do you mean?
This is a very fundamental conflict, where two very different sets of values [clashed]. 

It actually worked quite well for some time, not even that far [back]. 

In 2012, when I came out in Hong Kong I expected to be blacklisted in China, but I wasn’t. 

At that time, it was before the Xi Jinping era. 

We even got a social media campaign going on [Chinese social media platform] Weibo, with people holding signs supporting the LGBT community. 

At the time, we were even hoping that the Communist Party was actually improving, loosening up. But then Xi Jinping took over with his very emperor-style of governing and controlling the population. 

It’s been downhill ever since.

So what’s the alternative?
I know that a lot of young people think that we should just basically go toward independence. 

But at this moment in 2019, I don’t see how we can do that right away. 

Maybe in 20 or 30 years the whole environment could be different. 

Anything could happen really with China facing external and also internal problems. 

From the way that they have been putting their propaganda machine at full speed, I do think they know that they are not in a very favorable situation and they are feeling the pressure. 

We need to keep the fight on, and just wait for something to shift.
The majority of people are not actually asking for Hong Kong independence. 

The five demands that we are voicing are very clear, and within that we are asking for political reform, real universal suffrage, where we can elect our own chief executive.

Why should people around the world care about what’s happening in Hong Kong?
This is a global fight. 

We are a front line trying to preserve universal values—freedom, justice, equality and human rights—that are common to a lot of the more progressive societies, especially Western societies. 

Chinese influences have been reaching out and infiltrating different corners of the world. 

You see them coming into different areas with their economic power and then also, at the same time, their Communist values, where they do not allow anyone to criticize them. 

Corporations and institutions are succumbing to this kind of intimidation. 

That is something that should be very worrying for anyone really. 

If you are someone who believes in universal values, then you are part of this fight that has brought Hongkongers onto the streets for three months.

So you’re worried about a domino effect, that if the influence isn’t stopped in Hong Kong it will spread?
It is actually happening already. 

You see all these institutions and brands censoring themselves, kowtowing to this kind of pressure because they want a piece of the China market. 

And it’s happening everywhere. 

In Canada, even. 

It was very shocking for me when I saw that my hometown, Montreal [Ho emigrated there with her parents at the age of 11 before returning to Hong Kong eight years later], they had Hong Kong activists banned from gay pride. 

Are we going to accept that the world will fall under mass censorship? 

Or is there something that we can do together to fight this kind of suppression?

Why are the protesters appealing directly to the U.S.?
The U.S. is the only country that has the power to confront China right now, and also the U.S. has always been a free and equal society, well at least a society that is trying to get to this place. 

So I do think that there is a sort of moral responsibility to safeguard the whole world against the erosion of these human rights and freedoms. 

Of course, it is not only limited to the U.S. 

I think that any country, and any person with the freedom to do so should be standing up against these authoritarian governments, because if you don’t, maybe some day maybe you will be the one calling for help.

What action could the U.S. be taking to support Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists?
At the moment, there is the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act that is supposed to be pushing ahead. 

It involves sanctions on Hong Kong and China officials who have taken part in the erosion of human rights in Hong Kong, those who have not respected the ‘one country, two systems’ model. 

If that bill actually passes then it will probably [have] a ripple effect [on] other countries that would start to evaluate this situation and see if they should be doing the same thing.

After three months, is there any indication the protests in Hong Kong are tapering off?
I don’t see that. 

I see Hongkongers creating new ways to sustain this fight, whether it’s to have more non-violent actions, peaceful protests with the human chain. 

There is this new anthem in Hong Kong and people are singing it on the streets. 

That is a sort of collective empowerment where people can draw energy from others. 

This movement has been able to sustain itself precisely by this sort of creativity and this sort of flexibility.

What is the possibility that the protests have a knock on effect in mainland China?
It’s probably happening already. 

I have received direct messages on Twitter from people in China or who are Chinese living overseas. They are very supportive of the Hongkongers because they do know that this is a fight that concerns their freedoms, too. 

But of course, they are in a situation where it is very difficult for them to participate. 

In this very digitized and highly surveilled generation, we do need to think of maybe somehow going back to a more organic stage where the human touch might be key, where people can see each other and they can communicate their ideas and their thoughts.

What is your outlook for these protests?
I really have total confidence in our next generations. 

Already we seeing secondary school kids joining in the fight, and some are even younger. 

They have initiated movements on their own, forming human chains in front of their schools and so on. 

This kind of momentum, it really needs to go on into the next and the next generation. 

And I do see that happening, so that might be where my optimism comes from. 

At the end of the day, I do think that all authoritarian governments are afraid of the awakening of the people, and if you have enough people joining in the fight then we might have a high chance of winning.

'This is a plea for democracy': Hong Kong protest leaders urge US lawmakers to take action

Joshua Wong, Denise Ho testify before US congressmen, call for passage of Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act

By Micah McCartney

Joshua Wong testifies in Washington D.C. Sept. 17 (Taken from Congressional-Executive Commission on China livestream)

Denise Ho (From Congressional-Executive Commission on China livestream)

TAIPEI — Pro-democracy Hong Kong activists Joshua Wong and Denise Ho testified on Capitol Hill Tuesday (Sept. 17), pleading with lawmakers to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which would impose consequences on China in the case of a brutal crackdown and further erosion of the city's autonomy.
Two of the most visible faces of Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement, Joshua Wong and Cantonese pop star Denise Ho, met a bipartisan group of U.S. congressmen on Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. They spoke out about the deteriorating freedoms in Hong Kong and lobbied for the passage of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act.
The hearing, entitled "Hong Kong's Summer of Discontent and U.S. Policy Responses," was held by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and presided over by Representatives Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Chris Smith (R-NJ) and Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL).
In his opening remarks, McGovern lauded Hongkongers as an inspiration to the world for risking their education, jobs, and even lives in the tireless resistance. 

Condemning Hong Kong authorities' vicious response to the protests, he asserted that U.S. companies should not be abetting police's use of excessive force by exporting crowd-control equipment such as tear gas, a position reflected in the Protect Hong Kong Act he and Rep. Smith jointly authored.
Senator Rubio, a co-sponsor of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, called the protests "one of the greatest people power movements we have witnessed in recent memory." 

He went on slam Hong Kong Chief Executive Lam over her refusal to heed millions of Hongkongers and singled out brutal acts of violence that police either perpetrated or were complicit in through inaction.
Rubio expressed outraged over reports of police officers spraying pepper spray onto the head wound of a downed protester. 

The senator also mentioned the pro-Beijing thugs who have since July been indiscriminately attacking the city's residents while police stood by and did nothing.
According to Rubio, the preservation of the "one country, two systems" framework agreed to by China prior to Hong Kong's 1997 handover is important to American interests. 

He said a response to the erosion of this system was "long overdue," warning China that, "escalating aggression will lead [China] to face real consequences, not just from the United States but from the free world."

Representative Smith said that Hong Kong's people have put a spotlight on what he called "Beijing's pernicious, repressive behavior" and cited additional instances of China's human rights abuses and malign influence in Taiwan, Tibet, and East Turkestan colony. 

The congressman expressed incredulity over the opposition of U.S. diplomats, so-called "experts", and business leaders against substantive legislation against the communist regime.
Smith also stressed the importance of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which would not only make Hong Kong's special economic status contingent on an annual State Department report on the state of Hong Kong's autonomy but would also require the president to sanction China and Hong Kong officials responsible for human rights violations in the city.
In his statement to the lawmakers, Joshua Wong remarked that instead of "one country, two systems," the semi-autonomous region is fast approaching a reality of "one country, one system."
The 22-year-old Demosisto leader praised the Protect Hong Kong Act and noted that most of the tear gas, bean bag rounds, and other equipment used by Hong Kong police had been imported from Western democratic states. 

Companies should not benefit from the crackdown on Hong Kong people, said Wong.
As for Hong Kong's special financial status, Wong said, "Beijing should not have it both ways – ​​​​​​​ reaping all the economic benefits of Hong Kong's standing in the world while [eroding] our freedom." 

He then called on Congress to stand on the right side of "human rights and democracy."
Singer-turned-activist Denise Ho joined Wong in demanding swift action from the United States. 

Ho, herself blacklisted in China for her anti-CCP views, pointed to its no-tolerance policy toward dissent, with celebrities from Hong Kong and Taiwan under pressure to do lip service to "unanimous support" to the communist government in exchange for access to the Chinese market.
Ho warned that China is already exporting its brand of censorship to other countries. 

If Hong Kong is suppressed, she cautioned, it could "become a springboard" for the country to spread its agenda throughout the world.
"This is a plea for democracy," Ho urged. 

"This is a plea for the freedom to choose."

'Stand up to Beijing,' Hong Kong singer Denise Ho tells U.S. lawmakers and companies

REUTERS

Denise Ho and Badiucao

WASHINGTON – Hong Kong singer and activist Denise Ho wants U.S. lawmakers and companies to criticize Beijing’s actions in Hong Kong to help change the Chinese Communist Party’s behavior.
Ho said Monday that Beijing was using its power and influence to quash dissent around the world, and urged businesses who invest in China and Hong Kong, a former British colony, to robustly support human rights and democracy.
The Chinese territory has been rocked by more than three months of sometimes violent clashes, with demonstrators angry about what they see as creeping interference by Beijing in Hong Kong’s affairs, despite a promise of autonomy. 

Beijing is exporting its authoritarian values around the world, Ho said.
“The only way to counter this global suppression is by hitting (China) where it really hurts,” she said. “The communist government doesn’t care about anything other than the economy. They don’t care about human rights and they don’t care about these universal values that we do have.”
“We see businesses profiting” in China, she said. 

“There are a lot of U.S. companies that have been based in Shenzhen, and they have turned a blind eye to this issue, to these human issues.”

Ho will testify with Joshua Wong, secretary-general of Hong Kong’s Demosisto party and leader of the “Umbrella Movement,” and other activists in U.S. Congress on Tuesday at an event hosted by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC).
U.S. lawmakers are fine-tuning a bipartisan bill that would require an annual review of the special treatment Washington gives Hong Kong, including trade and business privileges, under the U.S. Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992.
The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act would also make officials in China and Hong Kong, who have undermined the city’s autonomy, vulnerable to sanctions.
Donald Trump, who has been waging a tit-for-tat tariff war with China for more than a year, has suggested China should “humanely” settle the problem before a trade deal is reached.
Credit rating agency Moody’s on Monday lowered its outlook on Hong Kong’s rating to negative from stable, reflecting what it called the rising risk of “an erosion in the strength of Hong Kong’s institutions” amid the city’s ongoing protests.
Ho said the trade war had offered a “protective shield” for the people of Hong Kong, sheltering them from a violent Beijing crackdown, such as the deployment of troops.
Ho said the bill's passage would send a powerful signal to other countries and reaffirm U.S. leadership in the world.
“Hong Kong is in the front lines of this very global fight for humanity itself,” she said.

Denise Ho: Hong Kong has reached 'a point of no turning back'

Cantopop star says city has become a police state as young people fight for their lives

By Stephanie Convery

 Hong Kong singer and activist Denise Ho at the Sydney Opera House for the Antidote festival. 

“We are officially in a police state,” the Hong Kong Cantopop star and activist Denise Ho told a sold-out audience in Sydney on Sunday night.
Speaking at the Sydney Opera House’s Antidote festival, Ho told an audience of mostly self-identifying Hongkongers that the political upheaval in their home had reached “a point of no turning back”.
“We are in a state of humanitarian crisis where police have full authority to do whatever they want with the people, and the government is hiding behind the police force,” she said.
As protests in Hong Kong headed towards their 14th week, Ho reflected on the resilience and tenacity of the protesters, who have turned out in hundreds of thousands since the first demonstrations in June.
“Where does this courage come from? Hong Kong has never been known to be a politically conscious society,” she said. 

“Nothing like this has ever been seen before and now people have been pushed to this edge – these young people are fighting for their lives and for their future.”
She rejected allegations by Beijing that the movement was being provoked by the US or other international players. 

“This is a leaderless, centralised movement,” she said. 

“They are still claiming there are foreign forces coming into the movement … it’s just not the truth.”
Before she was an activist, Ho was a singer. 

She launched her music career in the 1990s when she won a singing competition run by a Hong Kong TV station, but it wasn’t until the early 2000s that she broke through into the mainstream. 

She began to identify publicly as a lesbian in 2012 – the first person in Cantopop to come out – and became an advocate for LGBT+ rights.
In 2014 she was arrested for taking part in the “umbrella movement” for universal suffrage in Hong Kong. 

As a result she was blacklisted in mainland China, where she had a growing audience, and was dropped from major sponsorship deals and by her record label. 

She responded by starting her own label, and by intensifying her political activism.

Despite being billed as a talk about pop and politics, Ho’s session at the annual ideas festival focused firmly on the latter. 

In conversation with the journalist Zing Tsjeng, Ho touched on her singing career only insofar as it related to her activism.
Art and creative practice, she said, was a space in which “the fight can go on”. 

“They can lock you up, they can ban you from going into the country, and they can censor your name on Chinese social media, but they cannot really control your mind.”
She said she believed most celebrities had been “silencing themselves” on the political situation in Hong Kong “for fear of being blacklisted, as I have been, on the China market”.
The audience gave no indication that they minded the singular focus of the event. 

Crowd members chanted pro-freedom slogans. 

Questions from the floor were focused mainly on protest strategy. 

They wanted to know what they could do from Australia to help their families at home. 

They called out in encouragement and support when the event took an emotional turn.
Ho was brought to tears as the audience was shown a short video summarising the months of protests, which were triggered in June by the introduction of a bill that would have allowed people to be extradited to mainland China to face court. 

The bill is an attempt by Beijing to undermine democracy in the relatively liberal territory, governed by China under the “one country, two systems” framework.

News had emerged in the past 48 hours that police had fired dye-filled water cannons at people in the street. 

They had disguised their identities and violently arrested protesters, as well as attacking them in a train carriage at a metro station, pepper spraying them and beating them with batons.
“The police have really been completely out of hand, and so Hong Kong people are furious,” Ho said.
Ho said she expected the crisis to escalate in the lead-up to celebrations on 1 October to mark the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
“What will happen during this month, nobody will really answer this question,” she said. 

“What we can really do in this moment is become more united in this fight and become really strategic in the face of this huge machine that is the [Chinese] communist government.”
She said six young people had killed themselves “because of despair” during the protest period.
“I really want the world to know that although we are seeing a lot of violence from all sides at this moment, this really started out as a largely peaceful protest in June,” she said.
“We tried all sorts of ways to get our voices heard, to get to the government. But they only responded with teargas, more teargas, rubber bullets, sponge bullets, police brutality.”

Vox Populi

Nearly Two Million Take to Hong Kong's Streets in Peaceful Anti-Extradition Protest
by Lau Siu-fung

Protesters stand on Harcourt Road overlooking the Legislative Council during a rally in Hong Kong, in the latest opposition to a planned extradition law that has since morphed into a wider call for democratic rights in the semi-autonomous city, August 18, 2019.

More than a million people took to the streets of Hong Kong on Sunday in another mass protest against plans to allow extradition to mainland China, organizers said.
Wielding umbrellas against the heavy rain, protesters packed out the city's Victoria Park and spilled out to fill several major highways in the surrounding area, with many marching as far as government headquarters in spite of a police ban, raising the now-familiar chant of "Go Hongkongers!"
Mass Transit Railway (MTR) stations were also packed with crowds, according to live video streams, as tens of thousands more people tried to join the rally.
Rally organizers the Civil Human Rights Front said an estimated 1.7 million people turned out. 

The group also hit out a police decision to ban a full march from the park, saying that many more people were prevented from attending owing to the "unreasonable restrictions" imposed by police.
Group convenor Jimmy Sham said the march was about sending a strong message to the administration of chief executive Carrie Lam that the majority of people in Hong Kong favored peaceful and rational protest as a way to make their views known.
"Today, we wanted to tell Carrie Lam that Hong Kong people can do peaceful, rational and non-violent protest as well as put up a brave resistance," Sham said. 

"Today was all about the peaceful part, and asking for a response from Lam to our five demands."
The anti-extradition protests that have gripped the city since early June are making five key demands of Lam's administration: the formal withdrawal of planned amendments to laws that would allow extradition of alleged criminal suspects to face trial in Chinese courts; an amnesty for arrested protesters; an end to the description of protesters as rioters; an independent inquiry into police abuse of power; and fully democratic elections.
"Lam has continued to hide behind the police, and to use their violence as a way to suppress the demands of the people of Hong Kong," Sham said.
He said some protesters had only resorted to violence because Lam's administration has been ignoring peaceful demonstrations.

Civil disobedience
Cantopop star Denise Ho told the rally that the marchers had only set off from the park to ease the sheer pressure of the crowd.
"The police told us that we couldn't march, and that we'd have to do something else, and not leave Victoria Park," Ho said. 

"But there were just too many people today, so that's why everyone took to the streets."
"This kind of civil disobedience has persisted over several months in Hong Kong in spite of the authorities' attempt to extinguish it using everything they've got," she said. 

"They tried to make people too scared to come out, but it didn't work."
"Hong Kong people are still incredibly united, to the point where they come out even in this heavy downpour," Ho said.
A protester surnamed Cheung said the two most important demands for her were fully democratic elections to the city's Legislative Council (LegCo) and for the chief executive.
"I feel that our freedoms are being stripped away, and that the police ... won't even let us come out in protest over that," Cheung said.
"It's unreasonable to talk about supporting peaceful methods of protest if things have gotten to the point where we can't even go on a peaceful march."
A highschooler surnamed Lok said he hopes that the city's young people will boycott class come September, an idea that was shown to have widespread support in a recent poll of nearly 20,000 student.
"We want our school to respond positively to the five major demands ... as well as committing to provide support for all arrested students," Lok said.

Muted police presence
Police presence was muted for most of the day, with a noticeable absence of riot police, tear gas or rubber bullets, even when protesters spilled out onto Harcourt Road, a key site in the 2014 democracy movement after night fell.
Across the harbor in Kowloon's Mong Kok district, a group of protesters gathered outside the local police station, shouting angry slogans, flashing laser pointers and throwing eggs, but left shortly before a group of riot police showed up to clear some barricades on Nathan Road.
Former 2014 student leader Joshua Wong posted video to Twitter which showed a group of around 15 people clad in the black clothes that have marked out anti-extradition protesters in recent weeks, filing into a police station at the end of the protests at around midnight on Sunday.
"Lots of undercover officials that dress up & pretend as protesters with black t-shirt," Wong wrote via his Twitter account. 

"They were spotted by citizens when they went back to the Police Headquarter in the midnight."
The government said some "breaches of the peace" had occurred in spite of the majority of protesters behaving in a peaceful manner.
"A large number of protesters rushed to the roads and occupied the carriageways of Causeway Road and Hennessy Road after leaving the public meeting venue," it said in a statement after the rally.
Protesters also blocked roads in Western and Central districts, Admiralty, Wanchai, Causeway Bay and Tin Hau.
In response to public anger over police violence, the statement said that the police had exercised restraint, tolerance and patience.
"Only when there were violent acts or illegal behaviors which endangered the safety of people at scene, police would stop them by proportionate use of force," saying the public was being "unfair" to the police force.

The Infamous Date That Looms Over the Hong Kong Protests

The demonstrations have parallels to the Tiananmen Square protests, but the legacy of another event on June 4, 1989, could shape Hong Kong’s future.

By JEFFREY WASSERSTROM
Riot police prepare to throw tear gas at protesters in Hong Kong.

The Beijing massacre was not the only important thing that happened in the world on June 4, 1989.
To be sure, the news dominated the front page of the following day’s edition of The New York Times—“Beijing Death Toll at Least 300” ran across the top, accompanied by a photograph of bloodied bodies and crushed bicycles. 

Below that image, however, was a story bearing the headline “Big Solidarity Victory Seen in Poland,” illustrated with a photograph of Lech Wałęsa, the dock worker turned political prisoner who against all odds was about to ascend to national power. 

Oh, and Iran had named a new supreme religious leader.
As eventful as that early June was, for most members of the crowd I joined at Hong Kong’s Victoria Park this month for a candlelight vigil to honor the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen, only one thing that happened in late spring of 1989 seemed important. 

The iconic Tank Man image seemed to be everywhere, on T-shirts and banners, and even turned into commemorative figurines.
Yet in spite of the powerful place Tiananmen holds in the imaginations of many Hong Kong residents, I am convinced that local activists would do well to keep in mind another thing that happened on June 4, 1989. 

At a time when a dramatic struggle over the city’s future is under way, centering on a proposed extradition law that large numbers of Hong Kong residents fear would sound the death knell for their ability to enjoy legal protections lacking on the mainland, the Tiananmen tragedy is worth remembering. 

So, too, though, is the unlikely victory of Solidarity.
The value of drawing connections between Beijing in 1989 and Hong Kong’s recent struggles is obvious: It was a key moment of political awakening, and last weekend’s march has been described as the biggest held in Hong Kong since one staged 30 years earlier to express anger at the June 4th massacre. 

To some protest leaders in Hong Kong, such as Joshua Wong, their Umbrella Movement—the name for demonstrations that erupted in 2014—carried forward a tradition that can be traced back all the way to student rallies in 1919 and was revived in 1989.
What, then—given how much further in geography and culture Hong Kong is from Warsaw than it is from Beijing—is the point of looking back to Solidarity?
For one, there are some parallels associated with the protesters themselves. 

For example, religious beliefs and organizations did not play a central role in the Tiananmen struggle, but Wong sometimes describes his activism as rooted in his faith.

One of the most important senior figures in the Umbrella Movement was Reverend Chu Yiu-ming, and Christian organizations have played significant roles in various recent Hong Kong struggles. These things all call to mind, despite important differences, the central role the Catholic Church played in Solidarity.
Another connection has to do with targets of protest. 

The people Solidarity challenged and ultimately bested were power-holders who claimed to be serving local people but were actually beholden to, and backed by the might of, a distant capital. 

This description does not fit the leaders that the Tiananmen protesters challenged, but it does apply to Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam—and in this case, the distant capital is Beijing rather than Moscow.
Looking back to Solidarity’s electoral victory is certainly a more hopeful thing to do than focusing on the time that soldiers killed civilians in Beijing. 

It is worth remembering, though, that Solidarity’s fortunes were tied to developments in the Soviet Union as well as in Poland, and that its rise went in tandem with Mikhail Gorbachev’s softening of Moscow’s line toward states operating in its shadow.
Standing in Victoria Park on June 4, holding up a candle, I felt transported by a sense of being in step with a giant crowd engaged in a collective activity. 

Adam Michnik

As I let my mind wander, though, I began thinking more about Adam Michnik, a journalist who played key roles in the Solidarity story, than about the Tank Man.
He was on my mind in part because of a conversation we had early in the 2000s, when I was teaching at Indiana University and we hosted him for a visit. 

He had just seen a documentary about Tiananmen, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, for which I had been a consultant. 

When I asked him what he thought of it, he replied: “I knew everyone in the film.” 

This was not to say that he had a lot of Chinese friends—as he watched the movie, he kept thinking of counterparts within Solidarity and felt a shock of familiarity hearing Tiananmen activists debate, just as he and his colleagues had, the relative value of different strategies for challenging authoritarian rule, some urging caution and others pushing for more radical actions. 

Would Michnik feel the same way at Hong Kong mass actions like the one I attended? 

Would he think he “knew everyone” at the scene?
Many of the protest leaders in Hong Kong have similarities with Michnik. 

As Nina Witoszek relates in her book The Origins of Anti-Authoritarianism, Michnik began his career as an activist by forming a study society at the tender age of 15. 

Wong, who was similarly in his mid-teens in 2012 when he helped lead a successful drive to block the Hong Kong government from bringing mainland-style patriotic education into the territory, was, Witoszek concluded, a “living alter ego” of Michnik—each had even fallen afoul of a Communist Party and spent time behind bars as a prisoner of conscience. (Wong was, in fact, serving his second stint in jail at the time of the recent Victoria Park vigil.)
There are other, perhaps even more apt, successors to Michnik in the city, such as the singer turned activist Denise Ho. 

Wong is still only 21, while Michnik was in his late 30s when he wrote his book Letters From Prison and Other Essays. 

Ho, now in her early 40s, has long been vocal on LGBTQ issues and began taking daring political stances on democracy five years ago. 

She saw her songs banned from all mainland streaming services and lost all chances to tour Chinese cities, and a subsidiary of the French cosmetics firm L’Oréal canceled a concert featuring her. 

More recently, she has been playing a prominent role in the fight against the extradition law, speaking at protests, giving interviews, and publishing an op-ed in The Washington Post. 

Many of her phrases bring Michnik to mind. 

While Solidarity was in the opposition, he was known for, among other things, calling for Poles to remain open to as wide a range of tactics of struggle as possible and not be too quick to assume that setbacks are failures from which there can be no return. 

Ho has struck all the same chords. 

Michnik’s writings, like Ho’s speeches, convey a passion for a beloved community and an admiration for the people struggling to protect it, flawed as their actions sometimes are, that are so poignant as to be heartrending.
Among the items I picked up on my last visit to Hong Kong was Unfree Speech, Wong’s writings during an earlier period of incarceration. 

It was not easy to find—more and more bookstores have fallen under the control of pro-Beijing companies, and even some of those that have not are wary about stocking titles that directly criticize the local political status quo and the Chinese Communist Party. 

It is a beautiful object to behold, with an elegantly designed cover that can be manipulated by hand to show the author’s face behind bars and then free, as well as some facsimile pages inside showing prison diary entries in his own hand.
I will treasure this copy of Unfree Speech, but it is not the only souvenir of the trip that means a lot to me. 

Even more precious is something my friend Jeffrey Ngo, who often co-writes op-eds with Wong, gave me on the afternoon of June 6, right after visiting his co-author in prison: the only Tank Man figurine left among those that the opposition group he and Wong belong to had brought to their booth near Victoria Park, the rest sold to help fundraise for their organization.
I can’t help but wonder, when I look at this pair of objects on my desk right now, whether Wong will ever, as Michnik did in the 1990s, be able to write an upbeat follow-up to his book. 

The Polish intellectual’s sequel was called Letters From Freedom, with the third word in the title referring to not just his being out of jail but his country being liberated from Communist Party rule.
The figurine of the Tank Man is a reminder of how hard it is to imagine the time coming when Wong will be able to write a comparable book, presumably titled Free Speech, in an era when not only is he personally at liberty but he feels sanguine about the state of the community he loves. 

Thirty years on from the June 4th massacre, after all, the People’s Republic of China remains under one-party rule and Tiananmen and the Tank Man are still taboo topics in all parts of the country, save Hong Kong and the former Portuguese colony of Macau. 

Beyond this, the shadow Beijing casts is lengthening rather than lightening under a leader more bent on controlling all under his domain than China has seen in decades.
And yet, one thing that the histories of Poland and Hong Kong alike remind us is that completely unexpected things can happen. 

Not so long ago, one conventional wisdom about Hong Kong was that its people did not care deeply about politics, yet the city has been the site of extraordinary bursts of activism. 

In the wake of Poland’s June 4th, it seemed likely that Wałęsa would be remembered as a great national hero, but the 30th anniversary of that event finds him a contested figure. 

Right-wing populists are in charge in Warsaw and, though in some cases they began their own political careers with Solidarity, they view him with disdain. 

His reputation has also suffered since 1989 even among those with no time for the populists.
Equally or even more unexpected is how quickly things changed in Poland and other parts of the Soviet bloc after Letters From Prison was published in the mid-1980s. 

In a glowing review of the book that ran in The New York Times on October 9, 1986, Walter Goodman refers to the centenary of the Statue of Liberty being marked in the United States that year, while “the nations of Eastern and Central Europe have been ending their fourth decade under Soviet control.” 

He doubted that the people of those Communist Party–controlled lands would “have much to celebrate” when the “semicentennial” of the Cold War’s start arrived in 1996. 

But just three years later, the Berlin Wall fell.
Only a fool would predict a happy ending to the Hong Kong story, but it is also foolish to assume that history will follow a predictable course. 

And just as Michnik’s most famous statement in Letters From Prison was that Poles should practice acting “as if they were free” even while living in an unfree land, there is much to be said for the people of Hong Kong now acting, despite all the logical reasons to feel hopeless, as if there is hope.
As I watch the inspiring images coming out of the city right now, that seems to be just what they are doing.