“I will not help you spread fear”: Chow Hang-tung and the possibility of resistance in an era of oppression
…. I reject [the characterization of me as] unfortunate…. It is actually a great fortune to be able to fight for one’s own ideas. How many people in the world have such an opportunity? Against the biggest Communist dictatorship in the world, no less. What a challenge. So don’t feel sad for me. We think that way because we regard ourselves as passive victims….
— Chow Hang-tung in a letter to her supporters
1.
The last time I spoke to Chow Hang-tung, we were standing at the entrance of the PLA barracks in Admiralty discussing whether or not we should block it.
The gates of the compound were open. A few meters away, a soldier stood ramrod straight, holding a semi-automatic rifle across his chest. His eyes stared out beyond us, looking at nothing.
I was telling Hang-tung about the exiled Chinese artist Badiucao’s idea: wherever we happened to be around the world on June 4, we should stand somewhere in public dressed as Tank Man did — white shirt, dark pants, holding shopping bags — all those years ago on June 5, 1989 in the aftermath of the Beijing massacre when he stood in front of a line of PLA tanks.
This was the perfect symbolic location, I told Hang-tung. After all, the killers came from this army. And imagine if not just one of us but a whole group did it, a platoon of Tank Men facing the PLA.
Hang-tung listened with a smile, in her usual cool, calm and collected way. Maybe it was a stupid idea, maybe it was a really foolish idea — it could be viewed as gratuitously provocative. But if she thought so, she didn’t say it. She just listened.
Over the years of thousands of protests in this city of protests, only once had the PLA barracks ever been targeted. In 2011 when Ai Weiwei was disappeared by the Communist Party, an image of the artist with the words, “Who’s Afraid of Ai Weiwei?” was projected onto the compound walls. In response, the PLA said doing so was against Hong Kong law and it reserved the right to respond as necessary. Though enormous protests had occurred all around the large compound — it was right next to Hong Kong government headquarters, after all — it had always had always existed in a different dimension, as if it wasn’t ever quite there.
I wasn’t really making a case for the Tank Man stunt in front of the barracks entrance per se. Well, maybe I was, but I was using it an example in a larger conversation we were having about the sorts of things Hong Kong Alliance could do to more creatively mark June 4.
The Alliance (full name: Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic, Democratic Movements of China / 香港市民支援愛國民主運動聯合會, often referred to in Chinese by the abbreviation 支聯會) was the group that for thirty years organized the annual June 4 candlelight vigil in Victoria Park. Huge crowds of over one-hundred thousand turned out, with the largest being in recent years. Nowhere else in the world was there a bigger regular gathering to commemorate a political event, all the more impressive now decades on. But the Alliance was often criticized, especially by younger people, for being old and stodgy, for repeating the same old outdated formulaic demands and marking the anniversary in the exact same tired way year after year, for being China-focused rather than Hong Kong-focused.
Hang-tung was one of the Alliance leaders. In her mid-thirties, she was the youngest. Most of the others belonged to the generation who were young adults in 1989. I’d worked for the Alliance for years and there in front of the PLA barracks was conveying some of the frustrations I’d heard from others (and mostly agreed with). That I even bothered was because Hang-tung was different. I wouldn’t have wasted my words on the oldsters, figuring they wouldn’t listen anyway. Hang-tung, on the other hand, was the sort anyone could approach and engage with. That might have had something to do with her youth, but also with her personality, her outlook and philosophy.
In general, pro-democracy organizations in HK were strongly hierarchical. HK had never been a democratic society, and this lack of experience in living and practicing democracy was notable even in the groups fighting for it. But Hang-tung was different: she had a thoroughly democratic, egalitarian soul. I found myself often thinking, If people like her take these organizations into the future, they will make a big difference. She was open, broad-minded, welcoming, interested in others, up for anything, willing to try out new ideas. Whatever was decided would not be what she decided, but what she decided together with others.
That was April 2019 when we stood in front of the PLA Barracks. It was the lead-up to the thirtieth anniversary of June 4. That day we were both participating in the annual June 4 run held every April— one kilometer for every year since 1989, to show the road was long and hard but we would resolutely travel its length until we reached our destination. So, this year, the thirtieth anniversary, thirty kilometers. I’d been doing the run for the past ten years. That makes 275 kilometers in all, including the 30th-anniversary run. Usually there were only a few dozen runners, mostly the same people every year, so we’d come to know one another well. In all that time, no leaders of HK Alliance had ever taken part, except for the final kilometer from the Pillar of Shame at the University of Hong Kong down the hill to the Liaison Office, where the run always concluded with a protest. For the most part, they were not in the best physical shape. Hang-tung was the first to actually join in. In her day job as a lawyer, she spent long days in court — she wasn’t in top shape either. It wasn’t easy, but she did it. If her organization was going to sponsor others to run thirty kilometers, then, she felt, she should as well.
Looking back, that was such a strange and remarkable period. The first protest against the extradition bill had already taken place, at the end of March. Twelve-thousand people turned out, a respectable number but still far from showing it was a matter the whole city had urgently taken to heart. At the end of April — just a couple weeks after the run — 100,000 people marched. Better, but still easy for the regime to ignore. Five weeks later, for the thirtieth anniversary of June 4, 180,000 came to the candlelight vigil, the largest turnout ever. By then, the air crackled electric in anticipation. Only five days later, on June 9, it exploded: one million people out in the streets against the extradition bill. A week after that, on June 16, two million. The lid was off Pandora’s box. Millions more would take part in an uninterrupted series of hundreds of demonstrations over the next seven months. Immense passion, frustration and anger had released such sheer energy that events seemed to take on a momentum of their own. Since it refused to engage with the protesters, the only other way for the regime to clamp the lid back down was with the harshest repression.
Little did we know it then, out front of the PLA barracks, but before long, our lives would change, Hang-tung’s, mine, everyone’s, entirely upended by forces much larger than ourselves. That June 4 vigil would be the last one freely held. All of Hong Kong would irrevocably change. Flash forward to now, late 2021: the Alliance has been forcibly shut down along with dozens of other organizations in a concerted attempt to destroy independent civil society. Along with other Alliance leaders, Hang-tung sits in prison, remanded in custody and facing four separate trials, including for “inciting subversion” under the so-called “national security law” imposed by the Communist Party in mid-2020. I am in exile. Neither Hang-tung nor I are any longer in a position to realize the crazy idea of being Tank Man at the entrance of the PLA barracks, but sometimes I imagine that if I could, I would, on her behalf.
2.
Bear with me now as I tell in some detail the story of Chow Hang-tung’s multiple arrests and trials. It’s tangled, like the stories of dozens of pro-democracy leaders in Hong Kong over the last two years who face numerous prosecutions, but worth teasing out because it illustrates the regime’s use of the judicial system as one of several means to obliterate political opposition and to keep these people, deeply loved and admired by the vast majority of HongKongers, in prison for as long as possible. It’s also a study in the stark choices an individual in that situation faces.
Hang-tung was arrested for the first time on June 23, 2020 for “inciting unlawful assembly” on June 4. That was also the first year ever that the regime banned the candlelight vigil, but Hang-tung and other Alliance leaders nevertheless insisted on going to Victoria Park, the site of the vigil for the past twenty-nine years, to commemorate the occasion. They were joined by quite a few high-profile pro-democracy activists and politicians as well as many ordinary citizens who wanted to show their solidarity and protest the unreasonable ban on all protest.
Elsewhere, at 8pm, across the city, people lit candles and flashed their mobile phone lights wherever they happened to be — in their neighborhoods and parks, in their windows and along streets, on trams and buses. It was inspiring to see all those lights across the city. The regime could ban people gathering in a particular location, but it couldn’t ban candlelight across the city, it couldn’t ban what was in people’s hearts, it couldn’t crush people’s free spirit. In fact, rather than squelching commemoration, police had simply succeeded in spreading it across the city.
Hong Kong people were heeding the call of the Alliance, which, when the vigil was banned, advised people to commemorate June 4 in their own way at that hour on that evening. I was among those who advocated this “Be Water” plan, and Hang-tung was crucial to the leadership deciding to adopt it and spread the word. It was as if the Alliance had been forced out of its comfort zone and responded positively, a sign of what the future might hold… if there had been a future.
The regime seethed at HongKongers’ defiance. Someone had to pay. Nineteen days later, the police arrested 26 high-profile pro-democracy leaders, including some of the best-known like Joshua Wong, and charged them with various “unlawful assembly” offenses. Two of those arrested, Nathan Law and Sunny Cheung, later managed to flee Hong Kong before they could be tried. Eventually, twenty-one plead guilty. That left only three — Chow Hang-tung, Gwyneth Ho and Jimmy Lai — who plead not guilty.
While this case was still hanging over Hang-tung, arrest number two took place a year later on the morning of June 4, 2021 at her office where she had spent the night. (This she did regularly, but especially in that period when there was an increased chance of arrest, as she didn’t want to unduly distress her grandmother, with whom she lived, by being arrested at home.) Again the police had banned the candlelight vigil, for the second year in a row, as they had formally banned all protests since late March 2020, on the pretext of epidemic prevention measures. The right to peaceful freedom of assembly had been suspended indefinitely. Hang-tung livestreamed her arrest. You could hear the police banging on the doors. The sun was coming up and shining through the big plate-glass office window onto her sleepy face. She was smiling again with that wry expression of hers, as if to say, “Can you believe this?” We, all her viewers, were in on the joke, which wasn’t a joke at all. From here on in, one sensed, it could very well be jail for years.
Again, she was charged with “inciting unlawful assembly”, this time for comments made on her Facebook page and in a newspaper article in the days leading up to June 4. All she’d said was she hoped people would find some way to mark the occasion. That was construed as constituting “incitement”. She was detained for 30 hours, far longer than it could possibly take the police to process her arrest. The true intention was to prevent her from publicly marking June 4 in any way. Then, somewhat surprisingly, she was released on bail.
But she was arrested again on July 1, the traditional day of the pro-democracy march (also the anniversary of the handover of HK to the CCP and of the founding of the CCP). Again the allegation was that she had incited people to protest. There was no apparent evidence to back this up and she was never charged with any offense in relation to July 1, but based on that claim, she was brought to court and this time denied bail and remanded in custody, as the prosecution asserted that since she was already facing two “incitement” trials, there was a high possibility she might re-offend if released.
Remand, previously used only in the cases of the gravest crimes or greatest flight risks, was quickly becoming a mechanism employed by the regime to hold political enemies in detention for indefinite, lengthy periods of time though they had yet to be convicted of any crime. In the year between the start of the protests in mid-2019 and the imposition of the “national security law” in mid-2020, between 60 and 90 protesters were remanded in custody at any one time, already a record-high number. But after the imposition of the security law, the number increased rapidly and was now at around 150, an all-time high. Partly due to the emergence of this tactic, I had recently devised a method to define and count political prisoners, including both those sentenced to prison and those awaiting trial on remand in relation to the protests or other political activities . As of November 5, there were 657 political prisoners in Hong Kong, Hang-tung being one of them.
While she was on remand, her boyfriend of seven years, Chinese rights activist and writer Ye Du, wrote to her on July 13 and proposed. He was under constant surveillance and unable to leave China. Because she had been barred from entering China since early 2019, it had been more than two and a half years since they’d last met. He said, “You said you wanted a romantic proposal. People come up with all kinds of weird ways to propose, but what can compare to me proposing to you in your small prison from here in my big prison, what can compare to doing so on the anniversary of Liu Xiaobo’s death, a day important to both of us, what can be more romantic than this darkest moment before the dawn?” I do not know what her answer was.
A remandee has the right to re-apply for bail every eight days. Many remandees simply don’t avail themselves of that right, figuring it’s not worth it since the chance of being released is so slim. But Hang-tung has taken every opportunity, as a matter of principle. Not least of all because she herself is a lawyer, she believes fighting for these legal rights is crucial in the struggle to uphold at least the vestiges of rule of law. Almost miraculously, at a routine bail re-application hearing on August 5, she was released. This was not a turn of events the regime would tolerate.
Her release coincided with the Party’s climactic ploy to finish off Hong Kong Alliance once and for all. Ever since the imposition of the so-called “national security law” the year before, many figured it was only a matter of time before the new blunt tool of repression would be used to shut down the Alliance, which had dedicated itself not only to preserving the memory of the 1989 democracy protests and Tiananmen Massacre but also to “ending one-party dictatorship”.
The beginning of the end came on August 25, twenty days after Hang-tung was released on bail, when the police informed Hong Kong Alliance that it was suspected of being a “foreign agent”, and demanded that, under the authority of the security law, the Alliance hand over a wide range of supposedly relevant information. The police provided no evidence to justify its suspicion that the Alliance was a “foreign agent”. The group had operated for decades in the city, interacting with the police on countless occasions to coordinate protests, but now, suddenly, after all those years, it was a “foreign agent”.
The police made similar accusations against smaller and less well-known organizations, demanding similar information. Those organizations complied, though one, China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group, shut down around that time. By contrast, Hong Kong Alliance not only refused to comply; it held a press conference to explain why. On September 6, shortly before the police deadline for handing over the information, five standing committee members, Hang-tung among them, said the police gave no reason to suspect the Alliance of being a foreign agent. It was clearly just using the security law arbitrarily to intimidate and harass. A dictatorship controls people through fear, and demanding information from civil society groups was one of this particular dictatorship’s ways of spreading fear. “The monster that is power is constructed through everyone’s cooperation,” Hang-tung said. “Conversely, that means that each of us has the power to limit or take away this power.” In soon-to-be-famous words, Hang-tung, addressing the regime directly, said, “We hereby show that your intimidation stops here. We won’t help you spread fear.”
I suspected Hang-tung was the main driver behind both the Alliance’s decision to refuse to cooperate with the police’s unreasonable demand and its very public and forthright announcement of that refusal. The defiance elated many, including myself, but also left us with a sense of foreboding.
On September 8, hardly forty-eight hours after the press conference, the police arrested Hang-tung and the four other standing committee members. They were formally charged with “breaching the Implementation Rules for Article 43” of the security law for their failure to comply with police orders. Despite the fact that the crime had a maximum penalty of only six months in prison, they were remanded in custody. Hang-tung wouldn’t be getting out any time soon again.
To make sure of that, the police also charged Hang-tung and two other HK Alliance leaders, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho, who were already in prison serving other sentences, as well as HK Alliance itself as a legal entity with “inciting subversion” under the security law. Suddenly the police’s initial pretense that HK Alliance was suspected of being a foreign agent was dropped, and they were charged with the crime with which everyone expected they’d be charged sooner or later.
The next day — all of this now happening while Hang-tung is back in detention — , September 9, the June 4 Museum, which had been founded and run by the Alliance, was raided by police. Dozens of boxes of exhibits were confiscated. In one of the most indelible images of the raid, two officers carry to an awaiting truck a giant cutout of the head of the Goddess of Democracy, a facsimile of the statue built by demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989 that the army destroyed on June 4. There could be no better symbol of how the regime was extending its tyrannical grip to HK.
(Worth noting is that the museum had actually already been raided once only a couple of months before, by the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department on June 2, just two days before the June 4 anniversary, on suspicion that, as a supposed “entertainment venue”, it did not have a proper license to operate. The Alliance did not reopen the museum after that, in order to ensure it was in compliance with FEHD directives, despite believing the regulations were being used to persecute it.)
By this point, rumors had already been floating about for weeks that the Alliance was considering disbanding. Finally, after much speculation, on September 25, the Alliance gathered its member for a vote on whether or not to cease operations. Hang-tung wrote from prison to say that she was opposed, believing it was best to go down fighting. But her two co-defendants in the “inciting subversion” trial, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho, also in prison, wrote to advise in favor of disbanding. As it turned out, the vote wasn’t even close: only four members voted against disbanding, while dozens voted in favor. The Alliance was, after thirty-two years, officially dead. One of the best known and oldest civil society groups in Hong Kong, going back to 1989 and spanning the whole history of the pro-democracy movement, had ceased to exist, just like that.
But that did not prevent the Hong Kong government from driving the final nail into the coffin. On October 26, the Chief Executive formally ordered the Alliance struck off the Companies Register, effectively shutting it down. The government had recently persecuted different groups in a variety of different ways but had never before taken the definitive action of cancelling the existence of one of them, let alone before it had even been convicted of any crime. The worst crimes any of its members had been convicted of were inciting, organizing and participating in unlawful assembly. Since the Alliance was formally charged as an entity with “inciting subversion” along with Hang-tung, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho, even the judge in the trial admitted it was hard to resolve the legal conundrum of handling a defendant that no longer existed.
But back to Hang-tung: To summarize, she now faced four separate trials: 1) “inciting unlawful assembly” for June 4, 2020; 2) “inciting unlawful assembly” for June 4, 2021; 3) failure to comply with police orders under the security law; and 4) “inciting subversion” under the security law. All of the trials were related to work with the Alliance on the preservation of the memory of June 4. The regime was placing multiple bets, hoping to send her to prison for years. All of the supposed offenses, it’s worth stressing, were entirely nonviolent and had to do with exercising her rights of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, protected under both international and Hong Kong law. And while she awaited the outcomes of these trials, she was remanded in custody, though it was hard to argue in any objective sense that she posed any sort of threat to society or state, nor was she a flight risk. Of course, one could argue quite persuasively that a figure such as Hang-tung who defied the regime at every chance in spite of its intimidation posed a significant threat to that regime, which is precisely why it was holding her; but that was a political argument, not a legal one.
3.
With a degree from Cambridge University, Hang-tung was one of the few pro-democracy leaders with a foreign education (at a top university no less) or, for that matter, much experience abroad at all. She might have followed the path taken by many academically proficient young HongKongers, parlaying that elite degree into financial success. But in the UK, she became acquainted with Chinese, Uighur and Tibetan exiles and grew more interested in human rights. After getting her bachelor’s degree in geophysics, she entered the PhD program but eventually cut her studies short, achieving a master’s degree, and in 2010 returned to Hong Kong. That’s when she started volunteering for Hong Kong Alliance. She also worked for the right group, Labour Action China. Over the next five years, she spent much time in China, travelling all over to support workers groups.
Meanwhile, she studied part-time for a law degree. She eventually joined the bar in 2016, apprenticing to long-time rights lawyer Cheung Yiu-leung. From the start, she specialized in human rights law and defense of those facing political persecution. While many Hong Kong lawyers, especially those in corporate law, have enormous incomes, Hang-tung earned very little. In fact, some of her clients couldn’t even afford to pay their legal fees. I’d frequently come across her at trials in recent years. She was in her element. At breaks, she would make some off-hand comment to me along the line of, “Isn’t it all so boring?” in her self-deprecating manner. But I could tell she didn’t really think that and was only sympathizing with what she imagined the typical court observer felt.
As one of the few young leaders of Hong Kong Alliance, she was being cultivated for a top position once the current generation, now in their sixties, decided to step down. She was their hope. She had a mix of qualities that weren’t all that easy to find among leaders in the pro-democracy movement, some of which I’ve mentioned: highly competent, with a global perspective, thoroughly democratic and egalitarian, non-hierarchical, a good listener, both young and experienced; cool, calm and collected. Not least of all, because of all of her years of work in the Alliance and supporting human rights defenders in China, she had a thorough understanding of the adversary. She’d seen close up just how evil, how thoroughly morally and intellectually bankrupt the Party was. Nothing it did surprised her. This was an understanding that most Hong Kongers had come to as well, though perhaps belatedly. Before the most recent years, though the Party affected every aspect of HK society and its future, lots of people had what I considered to be limited knowledge of the Party and how it worked, and they often seemed to be taken by surprise by its extreme actions. Sometimes they could seem almost at a loss as to how to respond. But Hang-tung was not like this. She responded to its abuses with a good-natured smile on her face, as if she were thinking, “Well, what else would you expect?”
For a younger person like herself, to be a lawyer and a leader of Hong Kong Alliance was hardly cutting edge, even a bit unfashionable and old-fashioned. She too had been a participant in the Umbrella Movement in 2014. After that, many young people became increasingly impatient and scornful: they believed the older generation of the pro-democracy movement had been lead by fools who didn’t push the regime hard enough, instead thinking their seemingly unlimited patience and moderation would somehow pay off in the end. The young were determined to do things differently. Movements for self-determination, localism and independence emerged, lead by dynamic young people with new ideas. Hang-tung admired and respected the new ideas and leaders, yet she stuck to the row she had long ago begun to hoe.
4.
There were few better examples than Hang-tung’s to illustrate the ways the security law was being used to destroy the Party’s enemies: one moment her work was unquestionably legal — she’d never faced any criminal charges in all her years of activism — , and the next she was “inciting unlawful assembly and subversion” and her organization was outlawed.
She’d always kept a low profile, as a function of the role she saw herself playing. Others were in the spotlight; there was no need for her to stick her neck out; they were doing that quite well. She was certainly well-known within the pro-democracy movement but was not among those with whom the general public was most familiar, no Joshua Wong or Jimmy Lai, not even a Lee Cheuk-yan. But over these past two years, virtually all of the most prominent leaders have either been imprisoned or fled HK before they could be.
Into that gap stepped Hang-tung. Suddenly her face was all over the place. So were her words. She knew full well that when she opened her mouth, the regime would come gunning for her, and she was prepared.
In difficult times, it is often the case that certain figures rise to the occasion. Or, to put it slightly differently, they come into their own, as if something inside them had been waiting for just this moment when it appears things are at their very worst.
Hang-tung has taken the “opportunity” of being imprisoned to show the regime cannot silence her. Her example as much as her words exhorts others to not lose heart or hope at a time of despair and fear. Rather than appearing to be reluctant, she seems to revel in the role.
In such a repressive period, the understandable and rational tactic of many is to lie low, to not draw undue attention to oneself, to not sacrifice oneself unnecessarily for no good at all. But Hang-tung is following the standard civil disobedience playbook: Here I am. This is what I believe. This is what I say. This is what I do. Come and get me. See what you can do to me. Give it your best. For I have done nothing that a just authority would ever punish.
Because she understands her adversary so well, because, in a sense, she’s been preparing for this moment for years, she bears persecution with equanimity. The strategy of multiple prosecutions of individuals is meant to exhaust them and force them to surrender. But Hang-tung refuses to. She pleads not guilty to every charge and uses her trials to turn the spotlight on the repression and rights abuses of the regime. She fights every legal point. In some trials, she represents herself, even though she’s remanded in custody and it’s hard to get all of the resources she needs to prepare her case. She refuses to forsake any opportunity to apply for bail, asserting that the terms under which she is remanded in custody are abusive of the basic right of due process. In the “inciting subversion” trial alone, she’s had nine appeals for bail rejected as of early December.
Quite often it is the case that a defendant says little to nothing in the course of a trial, whether inside the courtroom or outside of it. Defense counsels tell their clients that their words could be used against them and it is best to remain silent. On top of that, it’s clear that the regime is targeting anyone who dares to speak out. Hang-tung has taken the exact opposite approach, using every opportunity both in and outside of court to speak out. And her words become more authoritative because of her persecution.
Her insistence on defending herself has lead to some darkly comic moments. One day she appeared in court wearing a Mickey Mouse t-shirt. She later explained on a Facebook account administered by her friends that the Correctional Services Department, the prisons authority, made her wear it. When she’d been arrested, the only clothes in her possession were two June 4 t-shirts. One was black with a dove breaking through a red line and the slogan, “Fight for freedom together, share a common fate”. The other was white and said, “People will not forget”. Even though she had worn them to previous court hearings, CSD said the shirt change was for “security reasons”. She was surely the first defense counsel ever to be attired in Mickey Mouse t-shirt.
Outside of the courtroom, she publishes court diaries that include transcripts from trial proceedings as well as essays. Some of the latter deal with particular legal issues that have broader human rights implications while others are wide-ranging discussions of the challenges facing Hong Kong’s freedom-loving people.
She writes “Why I plead not guilty” at a time when many consider it tactically astute to simply plead guilty, get the matter over with and serve one’s time as quickly as possible, especially given that few have faith in the impartiality or fairness of the judicial system.
Indeed, sometimes the zeal with which she approaches her defense can seem almost quixotic: doesn’t she know the fix is in? Perhaps some find her naive — naive to believe that the words of the powerless can have any effect; naive to believe that standing up as an individual to an enormous dictatorship can achieve anything beyond hurting oneself. She hopes her example will encourage others to find their own ways to resist, but the regime is using her as an example of what happens if you do. She refuses to help the regime spread fear, but the regime is using her to do exactly that.
As if in response to that perception, she then writes “When truth and justice are on trial, ‘I have nothing to say’ means losing the case”. Here, again, she asserts that the typical advice to remain silent that counsel often gives defendants in criminal trials doesn’t work in politically motivated prosecutions where, she says, it’s best to highlight the political and rights dimensions of the case and use the trial to tell one’s own story and fight the use of the judicial system for political persecution.
Not only is she not naive; Hang-tung understands the strategies and tactics of the regime better than most. In fact, it is she who has published the most incisive and comprehensive analysis of how the regime is using the legal system as a means to achieve political ends. She identifies and itemizes the various advantages it hopes to gain. Among other things, it seeks to cloak itself in the legitimacy of the “rule of law” and justifies its persecution as simply a matter of following the law even as its very practices undermine it; it tamps down and silences opposition with months-and-years-long prosecutions; it rewrites the historical narrative and ignores the legitimate demands of protest movements by redefining them as primarily a legal matter (ie, they are “illegal”); the mass prosecutions force the opposition to use enormous financial resources to defend itself that could otherwise go toward more productive ends; prosecutions of individuals on discrete criminal charges distorts the collective nature of the protests; and the aggressive prosecutions eventually help to close down public space available to dissidents. Her detailed article, coincidentally or not, came out on the very day of her July 1 arrest.
She also writes about attempts by the regime to deprive defendants of the right to legal counsel of their own choosing and the absurd logic of the requirements for bail in the so-called “national security law” that put the onus on the defendant to prove she will not re-offend, in contrast to the common law tradition practiced in Hong Kong prior to the imposition of PRC law. She sums it up like this: the “national security law” requires defendants to “prove they won’t do something that does not exist and nobody knows what it is”.
In the already classic “On Conditioning”, she addresses a broader issue. Starting out looking at how the rule that co-defendants are not allowed to speak with one another affects her interactions with friend, co-defendant and former client Gwyneth Ho, on trial with Hang-tung for unlawful assembly on June 4, 2020, she says, “When you have to live under these rules day after day, it’s easy to forget how normal people interact.”
She then moves to discussing society in general:
“Human beings are indeed vulnerable to conditioning. ‘Not getting used to it’ is easier said than done. And conditioning doesn’t only exist in prison: LeaveHomeSafe has become part of our daily life, real-name registration for SIM cards is inevitable, search of information in government-controlled registries is facing tightening control, ‘Hong Kong Add Oil’ has become a taboo phrase, political figures try not to talk about politics, some senior officials decorate their offices with portraits of Xi Jinping, June 4 books cannot be displayed in book fairs, even lobsters can threaten national security…all of this conditions us to accept a life without rights, freedom or privacy in which the ‘state’ as the paramount authority is above accountability.
“When society is undergoing huge and profound changes, things that are not normal or right have become the ‘new norms’. How to resist the unconscious influence of such great power, how to maintain our ability to tell right from wrong, how to avoid being assimilated by authoritarian logic, how to preserve our autonomy and agency, these are the difficult questions we are facing together. We need to stay alert, to constantly reflect on ourselves, and to remind each other all the time. We must try our best to live a normal life and speak our mind as much as we can afford to. Even when we can’t break the rules, we must question them.
“When absurdity becomes part of daily life, resistance is what everyone can do in every hour and every minute. Do not belittle your power. Because every bit of resistance affects the general society and influences people around you so that they won’t be so easily conditioned. While I am in my small prison, I also need your help to remind me how the normal world works.”
In this essay, Hang-tung discusses probably the most widespread form of resistance in Hong Kong, and, for that matter, in any society so oppressive that basic rights of freedom of expression and assembly are denied and punishments for exercising them are disproportionately heavy. The last recourse you have is to resist the regime’s attempts to form you into the sort of subject it requires, to refuse to allow yourself to be “conditioned”. Hang-tung is of course doing this in a very forthright and public way, but it is a practice that every Hong Kong person can develop in their daily lives: I will not allow you to change me; I will not become the kind of person you want me to be; I will not help you spread fear. Within that resolution lies the core of human dignity, and within the preservation of human dignity lies hope for the future.
Along with a few other prolific writers in prison such as Gwyneth Ho, Hang-tung is, as I see it, developing a new kind of prison literature. In turn, it is part of what I hope might become a new kind of Hong Kong literature. Though modern Hong Kong is 180 years old, it has never really had what could be considered a “literary tradition” of the sort found in many other cultures and languages. Most Hong Kong people would be hard put to name five Hong Kong writers, whereas a country like Norway, though it has fewer people, has handfuls of writers your average citizen could not only name off the top of her head but also considers central to Norwegian identity.
Without a doubt, one important result of the mass protests of 2019 and the regime’s crackdown has been a strengthening of Hong Kong identity. This is a foundation of resistance. More than ever before, HongKongers know who they are as a people, and what they are not. No amount of oppression can change that; indeed, the oppression only serves to reinforce it. We shall use the hijacking of our society by a totalitarian regime to bring about a cultural renaissance. I hope that the inception of a Hong Kong literature can be one manifestation of that renaissance, a discovery of ourselves. Arguably, robbed of even the vestiges of popular sovereignty and basic rights, we have little left but the written word and other forms of cultural expression. There are many things we can do while sitting in prison, living in exile, being crushed, in this dark period when the prospect of positive short-term change seems virtually nil. One is to write with freedom in our hearts.
5.
As 2021 draws to a close, with four trials going at once, trying to prepare for them all is like juggling, and trying to do so while in prison and representing yourself is like juggling with one hand tied behind your back.
(And Hang-tung’s four trials don’t even rank her at the top of the “league table” of prosecutions. In the lead with six are Eddie Chu, Lee Cheuk-yan, Leung Kwok-hung, Andrew Wan, Wu Chi-wai and Figo Chan, followed by Joshua Wong, Jimmy Lai and Albert Ho who have the same number as Hang-tung, four.)
A snapshot of Hang-tung’s court schedule in December and January: On December 2 she was in court for closing submissions in the June 4, 2021 “inciting unlawful assembly” trial. December 9 brings the verdict in her trial for inciting unlawful assembly the year before, June 4, 2020, together with Gwyneth Ho and Jimmy Lai. Then on January 4 comes the verdict in the June 4, 2021 “inciting unlawful assembly trial, and on January 10, she, Lee Cheuk-yan and Albert Ho face “inciting subversion” charges under the “national security law”. And finally, on January 25, she and four other members of the Hong Kong Alliance Standing Committee face “national security” charges for failure to comply with a police order to hand over information about the Alliance. On top of that are her regular hearings every eight days to re-apply for bail in the “inciting subversion” trial.
The second of her four trials to draw to a close is for “inciting unlawful assembly” on July 4, 2021. This is arguably the most absurd of the four trials she faces. The other trials, one might say, have at least some basis in evidence: she did indeed go to Victoria Park on June 4, 2020; she did indeed advocate an end to one-party dictatorship; she did indeed refuse to comply with police orders. The main question in those trials is whether these acts constitute the crimes with which she’s charged. But in the trial of “inciting unlawful assembly” on June 4, 2021, there’s virtually no evidence she did any such thing. The prosecution asserts that the fact that she encouraged people to mark June 4 as they saw fit is in fact an incitement to unlawful assembly. But she never told people to assemble at a specific place, for example, Victoria Park. Can it be unlawful to tell people to light candles wherever they may be?
Her Facebook post on May 29 — five days before June 4 and just after the police ban on the candlelight vigil was upheld by the Appeals Board — is one of two key pieces of evidence in the prosecution’s case:
“Candlelight is not a crime; stand your ground”
“As expected, the government banned the candlelight vigil in Victoria Park, and the Appeals Board upheld the police’s decision. In the current legal environment, I am sorry that Hong Kong Alliance can no longer host the candlelight vigil in Victoria Park as an organization. I am very sorry for letting everyone down.
“But beyond our organizational affiliations, we are above all else individuals with the ability to act independently. If we can’t formally organize, we can ‘be water’; without formal leadership, we can take action. Everyone who experienced the events of 2019, everyone who experienced the candlelight vigils over the past 31 years, already knows what to do on June 4.
“I also say here in my own name that at 8 pm on June 4, I will continue this 32-year-old pact and light a candle where everyone can see it. The government can prohibit gatherings at a specific place but cannot prohibit the lighting of candles in every corner of Hong Kong. The more it tries to extinguish the flames, the wider they will spread, eventually becoming the flame that burns down the dictatorship. What we must do at this moment is keep the candlelight burning in the cold, keep the bottom line of our conscience, hold on to our remaining freedom.
“Precisely because the dictatorship is relentless, surrender is not an adequate survival mechanism, as the regime will only take it as an opportunity for endless expansion of its red lines. Only by standing our ground and defending our position and principles through action can we gain space for survival.
“On June 4 this year, let us continue to fight for justice for the dead and dignity for the living, by candlelight.”
For that, she was arrested. While she was detained, another article she wrote before her arrest appeared in Ming Pao, one of the major Hong Kong dailies. In it, she referred to the annual candlelight vigil in Victoria Park, saying, “The meaning it bears is the weight of habit, the weight of human life, and the weight of conscience. It is a rejection of dictatorship, a manifestation of collective power, and a battlefield where truth triumphs over lies…. At 8 pm tonight, I hope to see your candlelight.”
This would come to be the other major piece of “evidence” against her. But here she only “incites” people to “live in truth and resist the absurd rules imposed on us.” She is asking people to consider, in this new era of intense political repression, what “living in truth” means and how to practice it. It is really for this that she is being tried, and as with all political trials, it is really the judiciary that is on trial, for if it convicts a defendant on such a weak basis, it will be widely regarded as a sign of the degree to which it is willing to acquiesce to dictatorship and the use of the courts for political persecution.
The night before closing arguments in the trial, Hang-tung posted a summary of the statement she planned to make to the court the next day. Addressing the judge, she said the trial had to be seen within the context of the increasing persecution of Hong Kong Alliance, leading to its forced closure only months before, as well as the general crackdown on all of civil society and the banning of all protests. Then the trial could be seen for what it was: a prosecution meant as an attack on the regime’s political enemies. Her statement concluded with the following paragraph:
“In fact, I was only four years old in 1989. Many people might wonder why I am so obsessed with this matter. It is because I am a HongKonger, because the ordinary and kind-hearted people of Hong Kong have lit candles in Victoria Park for more than 30 years, because the people of Hong Kong taught me to stubbornly insist on what is right. All I am doing is trying to pass this on, to make the voices of ordinary Hong Kong people heard, to do the things that ordinary Hong Kong people wish to do at this time, to not allow those in power to determine the truth. If the court decides that this constitutes ‘incitement’, it is better to say that Hong Kong people incited me to act according to my conscience. If I am to be convicted of this, I will have no complaints or regrets.”
UPDATES:
On December 9, Hang-tung and Jimmy Lai were convicted of “inciting unlawful assembly” and Gwyneth Ho of “participating in an unlawful assembly” over the June 4, 2020 gathering at Victoria Park. On December 13, they were sentenced together with five others who earlier had plead guilty to “unlawful assembly” offenses related to the June 4, 2020 gathering. Hang-tung was sentenced to 12 month in prison; Lee Cheuk-yan, 14 months; Jimmy Lai, 13 months; Richard Tsoi, 12 months; Leung Yiu-chung and Leung Kam-wai, 9 months each; Gwyneth Ho, 6 months; and Wu Chi-wai, 4 months and 2 weeks. Prior to the sentencing, Hang-tung made an eloquent mitigation statement which adhered to her principle of taking every opportunity to speak out and employed her strategy of turning the accusations against her back on her oppressor. In times to come, it will certainly become an important historical document in the struggle against dictatorship.
On January 4, 2022, Chow Hang-tung was convicted of “inciting unlawful assembly” over her calls for people to commemorate the 1989 protests and Tiananmen Massacre in their own way wherever they happened to be on June 4, 2021. She was sentenced to 15 months in prison. Ten months of that sentence are to be served consecutively with her 12-month sentence for the June 4, 2020 “inciting unlawful assembly” conviction. In other words, she is to serve 22 months in total. This sets the record for the longest anyone in Hong Kong has been sentenced at any one time for entirely nonviolent protest-related “unlawful assembly” offenses.
She used her eloquent mitigation plea prior to sentencing to accuse the judge of participating in the government’s crackdown on June 4 commemoration and its attempt to obliterate the memory of June 4 in Hong Kong. She stood for freedom of expression, stating, “The only way to defend freedom of speech is to continue to speak. Words have inherent vitality and can never be defined by law or authority… The dead are not a hoax, nor a conspiracy of foreign powers, but a series of lives. The real scam is to shield the murderer in the name of law, and to erase the existence of the victim in the name of the country: a country that does not even respect the deceased.” A large portion of her statement consisted of eight paragraphs of testimony from the families of victims of June 4. The judge attempted to prevent her from reading out the testimony, saying the speech was “political” and therefore had no place in a courtroom. The judge was derided by supporters of Hang-tung in the public gallery and ordered security guards to take down the ID details of anyone who cheered for Hang-tung. Two members of the public stood up, said they had been among those cheering, and departed the courtroom. Hang-tung then concluded her speech by essentially recommitting the crime of which she’d just been convicted: “Fighting to the end is… the only way to safeguard dignity. Therefore, even if the candlelight is guilty, I still call on everyone, whether it is June 4 this year or June 4 every year in the future, to continue to light the candlelight of resistance. Even if there is no longer any Hong Kong Alliance and there will be no one to apply for permission to assemble, we can still all keep this pact and illuminate the long night with candlelight. This resolution made in the name of justice will outlast the oppression of any literary hell.”
Hang-tung still faces two more trials, both under the “national security law”, one for refusing to comply with police orders and the other for “subversion”. Updates to follow.
