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The twelve Hong Kongers had a daring plan. One morning in early August, a woman and eleven men, ages 16 to 33, boarded a motorboat and headed for Taiwan. As supporters of the protest movement, they faced various legal proceedings in their hometown. Freedom called the island democratically governed. The fellow combatants had already managed to escape this way.
The South China Sea is almost calm in late summer, but the 700-kilometer trip to Taiwan in a small boat was still dangerous. The twelve Hong Kongers had been preparing for months. They had quietly organized a ship and learned how to navigate it. It was an escape attempt like in the movie, but it failed – they only got 50 nautical miles before the Chinese coast guard caught them.
Photo: JEROME FAVRE / EPA-EFE / Shutterstock
Since then they have remained on solid ground. “I tried to visit my client, but they told me that I had switched to two other lawyers,” said Chinese lawyer Lu Siwei, the group’s legal adviser. In an emotional press conference, relatives reported that the lawyers they had hired were not allowed to see the detainees and that the families were not allowed to speak with them.
Change of Hope Place Hong Kong
The failed escape highlights how much Hong Kong has changed in just a few months. The city was once a place of hope for people fleeing poverty, political persecution and war, a haven for countless mainland Chinese and more than 50,000 people on ships from Vietnam. Today, after the police put down the protests and Beijing imposed a new so-called State Security Law on the city, young people are trying to escape there as if Hong Kong were the GDR.
The Hong Kong government insists the twelve are suspects in criminal cases that have eluded justice. In fact, they had all been previously detained during the protests; eleven of them were prohibited by law from leaving the city. Some would have had to face proceedings in a constitutional state like Germany, such as four alleged members of the radical front-line group “Dragon Slayers” accused of building bombs.
The group also includes Andy Li, a well-known activist who is being prosecuted under the State Security Act. Li was arrested on the same day as critical media businessman Jimmy Lai and was only released on bail. His case illustrates the pressure that democracy activists against whom the new law is being proposed find themselves.
The case of activist Li
Last November, on the eve of the Hong Kong district council elections, Li walked through a hotel suite in the Kowloon district. A thin 29 year old man full of nervous energy, straight hair, feet in slippers. The suite served as the venue for an action that Li was in charge of organizing that was not intended to violate Hong Kong law, but rather to ensure compliance: together with supporters, Li had established an international election observation mission.
“Because the government has failed, people are now taking responsibility,” he said, explaining his commitment, which he balanced with his work as a programmer. “We the people feel that our government and law enforcement agencies are not acting in the interest of the people, but on the orders of Beijing,” he said. “The state exists for the people, not the other way around.”
To fund the mission, Li’s activists raised about $ 1.8 million through the GoFundMe donation platform. They flew in 19 experts from ten countries as election observers. Lord David Alton, a member of the House of Lords who led the mission, said he was enthusiastic about the professional organization: “It is wonderful to see how passionate these young people are about democracy,” he said. The elections were won by the so-called pan-democrats.
Today, Hong Kong law enforcement agencies accuse Li of “interacting with foreign powers,” a crime under the new State Security Law, which sets a maximum sentence of life in prison. They also accuse him of money laundering.
Court process in mainland China
After the botched escape, these accusations initially recede, after all Li and the other eleven are not currently in Hong Kong, but in the People’s Republic. The authorities in Shenzhen, in southern China, have announced that initially the twelve will have to answer for illegally crossing the border. According to lawyer Lu, a guilty verdict can mean up to a year in a Chinese prison before they are transferred to Hong Kong.
In an email to SPIEGEL, Lord Alton predicts a “classic communist trial”: “With a 99 percent conviction rate in China, you don’t have to be a fortune teller to predict the outcome.”
In fact, apparently Beijing has already rendered its verdict. The twelve are not democracy activists, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying tweeted, but “elements that are trying to separate Hong Kong from China.”
That was an expression of opinion and not yet a judgment. However, it can hardly be understood as anything other than intimidation: separatism can also be punished with life in prison under Hong Kong’s so-called State Security Act.
