Australian lawyer Kevin Yam, who for a long time worked in Hong Kong, says that the Chinese government is targeting him for speech that he did not even utter while living there.
In early July 2023, the Hong Kong government—in effect, the mainland China government, now that Hong Kong’s political freedoms have been obliterated by the 2020 “national security” crackdowns—issued bounties on the heads of eight pro-democracy activists currently living overseas.
Yam is one of the eight.
According to Kirsty Needham’s report for Reuters:
The police on Monday offered a HK$1 million ($130,000) reward for information leading to the arrest of any of the eight.
Yam, who worked as a financial services lawyer in Hong Kong for 17 years, said he had not been involved in activism there for several years before returning to Australia last year, and his arrest warrant could have a “chilling effect on people around the world”.
“The things they are alleging against me, and putting a bounty over my head now, are all for things that I have done since I returned to Australia,” Yam said. . . .
“The ones in jail can no longer speak up. The ones in exile, some of them feel too scared to speak,” he said. “I’m an Australian citizen and I am living in my own country now. I feel a moral duty to speak up.”
With regard to such matters, we must remember the emphatic words of Wang Xiaojian, spokesman for a Chinese embassy in India:
China has the best record on peace and security. We have never invaded any country or engaged in any proxy war. We have never conducted global military operations, threatened other countries with force, exported ideology or interfered in other countries’ internal affairs.
This testament will help us resist the temptation to be swayed by facts and logic when we consider what the government of China says and does.
