Sat, Dec 30, 2023 page1

• HK democracy advocate flees to UK

  • AFP, HONG KONG
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  Hong Kong democracy advocate Tony Chung (鍾翰林) yesterday said that he had fled to Britain because he could no longer endure supervision from authorities, who had pressured him to become an informant and limited his work options.

  Chung in 2021, then 20, became the youngest person to be imprisoned under Hong Kong’s National Security Law — imposed by Beijing after massive pro-democracy protests began in 2019 in the former British colony. He pleaded guilty to “secession” and was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison. Since his early release in June, Chung said he has lived in daily fear.

  “I feared stepping out of my home, feared using the phone in public, and worried about the possibility of being detained again by national security police officers on the streets,” he said in a statement posted on social media early yesterday, but dated Wednesday.

  

  Democracy advocate Tony Chung looks at a smartphone while sitting in a park in Hong Kong on Aug. 8, 2020.

  Photo: AFP

  Chung said he was told by authorities that he was not allowed to work in “specific businesses,” and that “national security police officers kept on coercing and inducing me to join them.”

  “They proposed providing informant fees, urging me to supply information about others as proof of my reformation and willingness to cooperate,” he wrote.

  He said he got permission to leave Hong Kong by saying he wanted to go on holiday in Okinawa, Japan, and sought help once outside Chinese territory.

  “As I publish this statement, I have safely arrived in the United Kingdom and have formally applied for political asylum upon entry,” Chung wrote.

  His post on social media included a photo of him holding a suitcase in front of a “UK Arrivals” sign.

  Authorities this year have issued bounties for 13 democracy advocates abroad, promising HK$1 million (US$128,030) for information leading to their capture.

  A Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson yesterday said that Hong Kong was a society with the rule of law, and that attempts to court foreign powers and evade the law were “futile.”

  Chung was convenor of the now-disbanded Student Localism, a small group he set up five years ago as a secondary-school pupil to advocate for Hong Kong’s independence from China.

  Separation from China was then a fringe view in Hong Kong, although calls for self-rule became more vocal during the 2019 protests.

  Chung in 2020 was taken by plainclothes police officers from a coffee shop opposite the US consulate, where he was allegedly planning to seek asylum.

  Since October, he had “intermittently fallen ill” following his release from prison and doctors diagnosed him with “significant mental stress.”

  National security police had requested meetings every two to four weeks, Chung said, where he was asked extensively about his activities and people he met.

  “Each meeting involved meeting at random locations, being ordered to board a seven-seater vehicle with closed curtains, and transported to unknown destinations,” he wrote.

  Authorities compelled him to sign an order banning him from public speaking and disseminating anything related to his conviction or deemed a danger to national security, Chung said.

  Calling himself a “Hong Kong exile,” Chung said it was impossible for him to return home in the foreseeable future.

  “I believe that as long as the Hong Kong people never give up, the seeds of freedom and democracy will sprout alive again,” he wrote.
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