Benedict Rogers: The darkness in darkest moments deepens

Hong Kong used to be a gateway to China, but now it is becoming a shop window for repression.

It used to be a bridge from the free world into a vast, emerging economic Communist-run superpower, but now the regime in Beijing is burning that bridge and annexing the city. Today as the world hears news reports of arrests of dissidents on a weekly basis in Hong Kong, it catches a glimpse of the brutal rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that has terrorized mainland China for years. And it is starting, finally, to wake up.

Two days ago, the British Conservative Party Human Rights Commission published a major new report on human rights in China, titled The Darkness Deepens: The Crackdown on Human Rights in China 2013-2016. It follows a similar report – titled The Darkest Moment – in 2016.

Endorsed by two former British foreign secretaries, Sir Malcolm Rifkind and William Hague, former Conservative Party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the chair of the House of Commons foreign affairs committee Tom Tugendhat, the last governor of Hong Kong Chris Patten and others, the report is significant for several reasons.

Firstly, it documents in detail the massive deterioration in the human rights situation in recent years, particularly the dismantling of Hong Kong’s freedoms, in breach of an international treaty, and the genocide of the Uyghurs.

But as the report shows, the assault on human rights by the CCP is across the board. Christians throughout China are facing the worst persecution since the Cultural Revolution, repression in Tibet is intensifying, Falun Gong continues to be persecuted and space for civil society, human rights defenders, lawyers, bloggers, citizen journalists, whistleblowers – as we have seen during the Covid-19 pandemic – or any other form of dissent has been all but eliminated in the mainland.

An Orwellian surveillance state has been constructed, and arbitrary arrests, disappearances, imprisonment, torture, forced televised confessions, forced organ harvesting and endemic slave labor are the regime’s tools of repression.

And no one is safe. A foreign passport doesn’t protect you, as we saw with the arrest of American lawyer John Clancey in Hong Kong earlier this month and as we have seen with the abduction of Chinese-born Swedish national Gui Minhai from Thailand in 2015. Gui was mysteriously transported from his holiday apartment in Pattaya to the mainland, where he is now serving a ten-year prison sentence, simply for running a Hong Kong-based publishing house that produced books about China’s leaders. British businessman Peter Humphrey and his wife spent two years in prison, where he was forced to record a televised confession which was broadcast on state media. “I was placed into a metal chair with a locking bar over my lap, wearing handcuffs and the orange prison vest, inside the steel-barred cage,” he claims. Two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, continue to be held hostage in a Chinese jail.

The China Tribunal into forced organ harvesting, chaired by British barrister Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, who had led the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic, concluded in its Judgment that those who interact with the CCP should do so in the knowledge that they are “interacting with a criminal state”.

Regrettably, far too many in the democratic world continue to collude with this criminal state. The news that another British barrister, David Perry QC, has agreed to prosecute the proprietor of this publication, Jimmy Lai, as well as his own fellow barristers Martin Lee, the “father” of the democracy movement, and Margaret Ng, as well as solicitor Albert Ho and others, is a source of immense shame for me and for Britain. Mr Perry ought to consult his fellow Queen’s Counsels Baroness Helena Kennedy and Sir Geoffrey, among others, because it is likely they would have a few words of counsel for him.

The free world is, however, at least starting to wake up. The day before the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission’s report was launched, Britain’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab made one of his strongest statements ever on the plight of the Uyghurs and announced new export controls to prevent British firms from using products sourced from Uyghur slave labor camps, and new due diligence guidance to eradicate modern day slavery from supply chains. Canada announced similar steps. These are very welcome moves, but they are long overdue and do not go far enough. The United States, after all, announced a ban on all cotton products and tomatoes from Xinjiang. It is time to stop tip-toeing and tinkering around the issue and act robustly.

After all, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) reports that Uyghurs are working in factories in the supply chains of at least 83 well-known global brands in the technology, clothing and automative sectors. Between 2017 and 2019, over 80,000 Uyghurs were sent to work in factories across China. Prison labor also forms part of global supply chains, according to Mr Humphrey’s evidence to the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission. Do our consumers really want to buy electronic gadgets, car parts or clothing made by slaves?

In the past year, the world has learned a lot about the CCP regime and its broken promises, brutality and lies. While its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic has been praised in some quarters and it has certainly sought to exploit it for propaganda, let’s not forget that doctors and citizen journalists who tried to warn of the virus at the very beginning were threatened, silenced or disappeared. Instead of repressing the virus, the regime suppressed the truth about it. Those who tried to tell the truth – most recently Zhang Zhan – have been silenced. And technologies developed to handle the pandemic will only strengthen the regime’s totalitarian grip.

Yesterday – a day after the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission’s report was released – a Canadian think-tank, the Macdonald Laurier-Institute, co-hosted a major webinar on China with speakers from across the globe, including the German Green Party Member of the European Parliament Reinhard Butikofer and the British Labour Party Shadow Minister for Asia Stephen Kinnock. Increasingly there is bipartisan agreement on this issue. The task now is for the free world to strengthen ties, enhance co-ordination and build a ‘united front’ to counter the CCP’s own ‘United Front’.

The Conservative Party Human Rights Commission’s report concludes that the images detailed throughout its evidence “reveal the truth about the mendacity, brutality, inhumanity, insecurity and criminality of the Chinese Communist Party regime.”

In the face of that regime, it is vital for those who can continue to stand up. That’s why I was so privileged to interview the courageous Hong Kong former pro-democracy legislator Ted Hui, now in exile in London, earlier this week. And I asked if he had a message for 2021. His message was clear:

“To Hongkongers, don’t give up. We never give up on Hong Kong. For people like me who are outside, I want to assure the Hong Kong people that we will be fighting continuously and it’s my lifelong mission to fight for and speak for Hong Kong. I am very determined that I will go home. Hong Kong is our home. To those who are in Hong Kong, stay calm, hold back, prepare fully for the next wave of people’s movement which I believe it will come, with the international support and us speaking outside of Hong Kong and people in Hong Kong with determination and fire in the hearts, we can make a change. Tyrannies in the world won’t last forever, but the will of Hong Kong and the will of all people who support freedoms of Hong Kong will. Never give up.”

And to the free world, his message was equally clear: “It’s not only about freedoms in Hong Kong but in the world”. He called on people struggling for freedom to unite together to “fight against all tyrannies in the world.”

If we do that, history shows we can – in time – prevail. And if we do that, Hong Kong can once again be a shop window for freedom.

Benedict Rogers is Co-founder of Hong Kong Watch. This article was published in Apple Daily on 15 January 2021. (Photo: Apple Daily)