Since Beijing passed its draconian national security law on June 30, 2020, its assault on Hong Kong’s freedoms has been alarming and rapid. The most recent abuse is the forced closure of the pro‐democracy newspaper Apple Daily—whose publisher, Jimmy Lai, was convicted and imprisoned along with other leaders of the democracy movement under the new security law—and the arrest of newspaper’s top editors and executives.
Prominent democracy activists Alex Chow and Samuel Chu of the Hong Kong Democracy Council joined Cato’s Doug Bandow and me to discuss the city’s loss of freedom, its prospects, and strategies that pro‐freedom advocates and liberal democracies should adopt in the face of Hong Kong’s crackdown. See the video discussion below.
I highlight a few snippets here.
Alex Chow: “In the next few weeks or months, people are expecting more than a hundred democratically elected district councilors will be disqualified.”
“Folks are also expecting that other independent media will be shut down soon.”
Samuel Chu: “When we founded Hong Kong Democracy Council in Washington, D.C. two years ago, I think in the back of our minds we had anticipated that at some point during this movement that folks in Hong Kong would not be able to freely speak out or travel overseas to make the case for democracy and human rights in Hong Kong. I think that many of us didn’t expect that it would happen in under two years.”
“Just a month after [the security law’s] implementation, I became the first U.S. citizen to be issued an arrest warrant by the Hong Kong authorities under the national security law for essentially lobbying and petitioning my own U.S. government as a U.S. citizen. That is how far‐reaching the tactics and the strategies” are of the Chinese Communist Party and the Hong Kong government.
