cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/1973418
Just over a year ago, Chloe Cheung was sitting her A-levels. Now she’s on a Chinese government list of wanted dissidents.
The choir girl-turned-democracy activist woke up to news in December that police in Hong Kong had issued a $HK1 million ($100,000; £105,000) reward for information leading to her capture abroad.
“I actually just wanted to take a gap year after school,” Chloe, 19, who lives in London, told the BBC. “But I’ve ended up with a bounty!”
Chloe is the youngest of 19 activists accused of breaching a national security law introduced by Beijing in response to huge pro-democracy protests in the former British colony five years ago.
In 2021, she and her family moved to the UK under a special visa scheme for Hong Kongers. She can probably never return to her home city and says she has to be careful about where she travels.
Her protest work has made her a fugitive of the Chinese state, a detail not lost on me as we meet one icy morning in the café in the crypt of Westminster Abbey. In medieval England, churches provided sanctuary from arrest.
Hong Kong police issued the arrest warrant on Christmas Eve, using the only photo they appear to have on file for her – in which she is aged 11.
“It freaked me out at first,” she says, but then she fired back a public response.
“I didn’t want the government to think I was scared. Because if Hong Kongers in Hong Kong can’t speak out for themselves any more, then we outside of the city - who can speak freely without fear- we have to speak up for them.”
[…]
China’s Bounty targets
- July 2023: Eight high profile activists are named including: Nathan Law, Anna Kwok and Finn Lau, former politicians Dennis Kwok and Ted Hui, lawyer and legal scholar Kevin Yam, unionist Mung Siu-tat, and online commentator Yuan Gong-yi.
- December 2023: Simon Cheng, Frances Hui, Joey Siu, Johnny Fok and Tony Choi
- December 2024: Tony Chung, Carmen Lau, Chung Kim-wah, Chloe Cheung, Victor Ho Leung-mau