“The CCP’s long arm is everywhere,” says Frances Hui.
Hui is one of the five Hong Kong activists now living overseas—she’s in the United States—that the Chinese Communist Party and Hong Kong government recently added to its list of most wanted advocates of democracy. Hong Kong’s criminal police recently announced bounties of a million Hong Kong dollars (about $128,000 USD) for information leading to their arrest.
Last July, similar bounties were announced for eight other Hong Kong activists no longer residing in Hong Kong.
Radio Free Asia reports (“Hong Kong vows to pursue wanted overseas activists ‘to the end,’ ” December 16, 2023):
The group are wanted on a slew of charges under a draconian security law that bans public criticism of the authorities….
“The silence and inadequate action by the international community is what have enabled this,” Hui said, citing a failure of U.S. policy and a “lack of multilateral cooperation among democracies.”
Hui, the first Hong Kong activist to be granted political asylum in the United States, cited attacks on pro-democracy demonstrators at the APEC Summit in San Francisco last month as the latest example of threats faced by exiled activists.
She recalled being targeted by death threats from fellow students, spied upon by Chinese agents and tailed to her dorm as a student in Boston, but said the university never took action against the students who had tried to intimidate her for holding rallies and demonstrations in sympathy with the 2019 protest movement.
“Throughout the time I was organizing these rallies, I was being tailed,” Hui told the seminar. “One time I was tailed to my dorm, and I got death threats from schoolmates in the same college. To my knowledge, nobody has gotten into any trouble from that.”
Hui suspects that the inaction of school administrators has much to do with the fact that her school and other universities rely heavily on the tuition paid by international students from China.
She says that the bounty on her head won’t stop her. “I will continue to do what I think is right,” which includes fighting for freedom and democracy in Hong Kong, for sanctions on Hong Kong officials, for the release of Hong Kong political prisoners, and for a more forceful worldwide response to China’s transnational violations of human rights.
