Beijing has a habit of saving its dirtiest work for the Christmas lull. The received explanation is that the holidays are a good time to bury bad news. Politics takes a vacation. The latitude for pushback is limited, and many journalists are still gratefully sheltering behind out of office auto-replies.
In recent years, this bad news dump has tended to involve human rights abuses in Hong Kong. Early in January 2021, 53 people were arrested under the national security law, the draconian new rules introduced in June 2020 to crush Hong Kong’s protests. Ultimately, 47 of those people were charged. In the next Christmas holiday pro-democracy media outlet Stand News was closed down, hammering yet another nail in the coffin of the Sino-British Joint Declaration.
This year, Santa brought charges of co-conspiracy against various foreigners in the trial of British citizen Jimmy Lai. Ludicrously, one of them was me.
It’s all a bit Alice in Wonderland, but I’ll try to explain. I co-founded and run the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC)—an international, cross-party group of legislators concerned about Beijing’s behavior. I’ve also worked on Hong Kong, in close support of the young people who drove forward the Hong Kong democracy movement in 2019.
Beijing cannot stomach the idea that Hong Kongers don’t want to be ruled by Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The Hong Kong protests in 2019 and the city’s emphatic rejection of pro-Beijing candidates in the 2019 District Council elections were intolerable to the Chinese Communist Party. So Beijing decided to criminalize dissent by imposing the national security law in 2020.
But this wasn’t enough for Beijing. The national security law alone fails to address the underlying problem of Hong Kong’s burning desire for autonomy. So it was deemed necessary to resurrect a well-worn trope: that any dissent must be the result of a Western-orchestrated plot. Transposed to contemporary Hong Kong, this must mean that the 2019 protests were a Western conspiracy, and that the million-plus Hong Kongers who filled the streets were passive lemmings, manipulated by sleepers for foreign interests.
Enter Jimmy Lai, stage right, in the grim farce that is the contemporary Hong Kong justice system. Lai, we are told, was “colluding with foreign forces.” Septuagenarian Lai, we are expected to believe, was somehow behind the predominantly youth-run protests, ably assisted by interfering foreigners.
That’s why the charges of co-conspiracy laid against me, Magnitsky Act campaigner Bill Browder, and former Japanese Diet Member Shiori Kanno are useful tools. If Lai has supposedly colluded with foreign forces, then there need to be some foreign forces with which he has colluded.
Where to start? Perhaps with the simple fact that there is precious little evidence to connect Lai, billionaire owner of the Apple Daily media empire, to the core organizers of the 2019 protests. Lai, like veteran politician Martin Lee and a group of others mostly in their 70s, belong to a completely different generation of pro-democracy campaigners. It’s a matter of public record that many of the prominent activists in the 2019 movement were political opponents of Lai and Lee, and considered the older generation to have failed in its efforts to secure a decent constitutional settlement for the former colony before Britain handed it back in 1997.
It is preposterous to claim that the people of Hong Kong filled the streets in their millions because Jimmy Lai wanted it. The marches that put as many as a million people at a time on the streets in 2019 were principally about a proposed extradition bill that raised the specter of Hong Kongers being subjected to Chinese law. The people of Hong Kong didn’t want that, so nearly a third of the city marched against it. It’s that simple.
The idea that this was all orchestrated by Lai and so-called foreign forces is a regurgitation of a profoundly racist idea: that the people of Hong Kong or China cannot think for themselves and would only campaign for democratic values under Western instruction.
This presents a problem for Beijing’s preferred narrative: If Lai was very obviously not behind the 2019 protests, how will the government convince people otherwise? This is where my former colleague Andy Li is indispensable to them. Li is a computer technician from Hong Kong. Talented, very polite, and extremely principled, he volunteered with IPAC in the early days of the group. Not just IPAC – Li worked with pretty much anyone else who wanted to safeguard the freedoms that Hong Kong was promised.
Li was arrested in August 2020 under the newly enacted national security law. Shortly after, he tried to flee Hong Kong for Taiwan with 11 others. There’s good evidence to suggest that the coast guard allowed the boat to reach Chinese waters before apprehending them. The 12 people were taken to Shenzhen prison in China, where things got very bad for them, especially Li. The Washington Post reported last month:
“Most of the 12 were not physically abused, but seven people familiar with conditions at the center said screaming could ‘consistently’ be heard coming from one cell: Li’s.
“‘It is likely that what [Li] faced inside was 10 times worse’ than the rest, one person said.”
A few months later, Li was returned to Hong Kong, where he has remained in a psychiatric facility ever since. At around that time, his name appeared as a key witness against Lai. Li’s own national security law case is more-or-less completed. He pled guilty and was convicted, but he has yet to be sentenced. The simple explanation for the delay in sentencing is that he is now a key prosecution witness in Lai’s trial.
In August 2021, Li identified Lai as the “mastermind” behind the 2019 unrest, and he is expected to say the same in a few weeks when he takes the stand in Lai’s trial. Li has a script to deliver and won’t be sentenced without having delivered it. God knows what they did to him to make him cooperate like this. But, there you have it: The link between Lai and the youth movement is established, and Beijing gets its narrative.
If I had the opportunity to testify in these kangaroo proceedings, I would tell the court that I know Li pretty well. He was very active in his work, and many people knew him. But he simply didn’t know Lai. Li was entirely self-motivated. Nobody else was behind his work. Not me, and certainly not Lai. Of the hundreds of pages of text messages between Li and myself that are in the possession of the court, they won’t find a single mention of Jimmy Lai. Some mastermind.
This is the tragic reality of Lai’s case, which in microcosm tells the story of the degradation of a once-revered legal system and the demise of Hong Kong itself. Lai will be convicted, but not through guilt. His conviction will rely on coerced testimony from a reported torture victim who will potentially fabricate stories about certain actions that wouldn’t be criminal in any free country anyway—such as organizing roundtables on human rights or emailing a foreign politician—and all to satisfy a bizarre state obsession with a mastermind narrative.
Meanwhile, the community of democracies remains inert, seemingly unaware of the signals this sends to an increasingly bullish China, ramping up the tension in the South and East China Seas as we speak. If Beijing can destroy an international treaty, convict U.K. citizens for fabricated offenses with the help of coerced testimony, label foreign nationals as criminals with abandon, and all without meaningful consequences, it hardly bodes well for accountability over Taiwan.
The speed and depth of the decline in Hong Kong’s freedoms bears witness to the utter ineffectiveness of the current approach of the community to handling Beijing’s abuses. If democracies can’t figure out how to hold Xi’s government to account effectively, then they won’t just be facing more buried bad news at Christmas, but an existential crisis in the rules-based system.