Exactly what penalty you get for resisting the Chinese government may come down in part to how much of a scoundrel and appeaser the judge or judges in the case happen to be. Others relevant factors may include how big a fish you are and how embarrassing your freedom is to the state.
Ronson Chan, chairman of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, was detained in September 2022 for failing to present ID to plainclothes officers when he was covering a story. A verdict has been rendered. He has been sentenced to five days in jail (Reuters, September 25, 2023):
Chan, who pleaded not guilty, earlier told the court that he had asked the police to show their warrant cards before handing over his document, which all Hong Kong residents must carry.
Magistrate Leung Ka-kie found Chan guilty, saying that a fine instead of jail would not reflect the gravity of the offence. Leung also refused to consider community service instead as she said Chan showed no remorse.
Remorse for what? It’s Magistrate Leung Ka-kie who should be tossed in the hoosegow for not dismissing the case as soon as it came to her attention. Chan is appealing his sentence. Meanwhile, he is not allowed to leave Hong Kong.
A bigger fish is entrepreneur and former publisher of Apple Daily, Jimmy Lai, who has now been incarcerated in Hong Kong for more than a thousand days but who has not yet been formally sentenced.
Mark Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, and members of parliament Tim Loughton and Jim Shannon have penned an op-ed demanding to know “When will Rishi Sunak stand up for unjustly detained British citizen and democracy?” (The Scotsman, September 26, 2023).
The 75-year-old British citizen, a husband, father, and businessman, has been relentlessly pursued by the Chinese and Hong Kong authorities since the imposition of the [National Security Law in 2020]. In August 2020, the authorities raided the offices of Apple Daily and arrested him. Lai was released on bail but was then taken back into custody in December 2020 on trumped-up fraud charges involving Apple Daily’s building lease. After being granted bail and spending Christmas at home, Lai’s bail decision was overruled by the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal on 31 December 2020. After repeated delays, Lai’s NSL trial is now expected to begin on December 18. Today marks his 1,000th day in prison. . . .
A British citizen remains behind bars in a city that continues to be destroyed by the Chinese Communist Party. [British Foreign Secretary James] Cleverly and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak—who has yet to publicly say Jimmy Lai’s name—should call for his immediate and unconditional release from prison.
Jimmy Lai’s son, Sebastien Lai, has echoed this demand. So far, though, Sunak and Cleverly have refused to meet with him about his father.
Then there’s the case of 57-year-old Rahile Dawut, a prominent Uyghur scholar, originally convicted in 2018 for “endangering state security,” one of the many bogus charges that Chinese officials pull out of a hat when they want to put someone away for no good reason. She has been sentenced to life imprisonment:
Rahile Dawut, 57, lost her appeal against her original conviction in 2018, the US-based Dui Hua Foundation said in a statement. . . .
Prior to her conviction, Dawut was a professor at Xinjiang University and founder of the school’s Ethnic Minorities Folklore Research Center. She was internationally renowned for her work studying sacred Islamic sites, authoring books and lecturing as a visiting scholar abroad.
She disappeared in December 2017 amid a brutal government crackdown aimed at the Uyghurs, a Turkic, predominately Muslim ethnicity native to China’s northwest Xinjiang region. . . .
“She was a guardian of Uyghur identity, and that’s something the Chinese government is after,” [Mukaddas] Mijit told the Associated Press.
Rahile Dawut was reportedly a member of the Chinese Communist Party for many years, and may never have intended her work on Islamic and Uyghur culture to constitute a form of resistance to the Chinese government.
