The Hong Kong government hasn’t forgotten Anna Kwok or any of the other prominent pro-democracy Hong Kong dissidents who emigrated to other lands to escape the post-2020 tyranny. The government has offered individual rewards of HK $1 million (about $128,000 USD) for Kwok and some of the others, who were already subject to harassment by pro-CCP reprobates online and on the streets of their new countries.
One way Hong Kong pressures overseas activists is by abusing family members who are still in Hong Kong. This is nothing new, family members of the persecuted having always been regarded as fair game on the mainland. But it is relatively new to Hong Kong.
Blood ties
And now there’s another wrinkle. Anna Kwok’s 68-year-old father has been “convicted and remanded in custody in Hong Kong, simply for being my father. This is the first time the Hong Kong government is convicting family to repress overseas voices. Blood ties have become a crime” (National Review, February 12, 2026).
Last May, Hong Kong authorities arrested my father and brother based on fabricated charges. My father was then detained and later prosecuted for “attempting to deal with, directly or indirectly, any funds or other financial assets or economic resources belonging to, or owned or controlled by, a relevant absconder.” After spending weeks in detention, he was then granted bail on appeal with the condition that no direct or indirect contact with me was allowed.
Since contact was not allowed, I could only gather information about the case through news reports. From the news I scraped together, the charge was based on his attempts to terminate an insurance policy by the AIA Group my father purchased in 1999, when I was a two-year-old learning to say “papa.”…
Transnational repression has always been the Chinese government’s specialty and is becoming the Hong Kong government’s stock-in-trade. They are taking my father hostage to stop me from my policy advocacy. They are making an example out of my family to discourage Hong Kongers, or anyone who dares to stand against the Chinese Communist Party, from making changes.
The insurance thing, whatever the details, is obviously something that the Hong Kong government latched onto in order to pretend that the father of the dissident is guilty of some specific bad deed. The real problem, as Kwok says, is that he’s her dad.
Earlier this week, media tycoon Jimmy Lai was given a de facto life sentence for speaking to Americans and the international community about the plight of Hong Kong. Like they did with me, Hong Kong accused him of “foreign collusion.” On Tuesday, Beijing issued a new policy paper that doubled down on the national security framework that [regards] Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement as a product of foreign interference. And on Wednesday, my dad’s verdict displayed the punishment they would take against people who dare to speak to the U.S. government.
Kwok thinks that Beijing and Hong Kong are harassing her father not just to intimidate Hongkongers but also to test whether the United States will respond to this provocation. The test comes “right as the trip between President Trump and Xi Jinping is confirmed for April.”
Congress
In addition to urging the U.S. president to help Hong Kong and her father, she urges Congress to pass the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office Certification Act to affirm that “transnational repression cannot happen on American soil.”
The Act would “require the President to remove the extension of certain privileges, exemptions, and immunities to the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Offices if Hong Kong no longer enjoys a high degree of autonomy from the People’s Republic of China.” In 2024, the bill passed the House but died in the Senate. It was again introduced in 2025 and was referred to a couple of committees. But nothing further seems to have happened.
