5 Aug 2025 | Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Hong Kong, News and features, United Kingdom
For years now people in Hong Kong have been perfecting the art of letter writing and sending them to the neighbours of government critics living in the UK. I first came across the trend in 2018 and interviewed some of the subjects of the letters. The messages followed a pattern – people were identified as enemies of the Chinese people and, while outright threats were atypical, there was always the subtle threat – the sender knew where they lived.
Since the passage of the National Security Law in 2020, which saw thousands of Hong Kongers aligned with the democracy movement flee to the UK, the letter writers – whoever they may be – have seemingly grown in number, and their threats have become bolder and coupled with incentives. Some offer cash prizes to recipients, as was the case for the neighbours of prominent Hong Kong campaigner Carmen Lau, who were told they could receive £100,000 for information on her.
In 2018, one interviewee reported to me that their mother had told the police about receiving a letter. The police never tracked down who sent them, but they did take it very seriously. Lau reported her letters to the police too. Except in her case she claims Thames Valley police requested she “cease any activity that is likely to put you at risk” and “avoid attending public gatherings” like protests. I find this a spineless response, shifting the burden of responsibility away from the perpetrator and onto the victim. Lau has accused them of asking her to essentially “self-censor”. When approached about the story, Thames Valley police gave a tight- lipped response, neither confirming nor denying these details. The Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit are, however, apparently investigating the letters.
And so they should. An important report came out this week from the Joint Committee on Human Rights, following their public inquiry into transnational repression (TNR). Over 180 responses came in, including from Index, which showed how TNR is not a niche issue impacting a small minority – it affects freedom of expression across “entire communities”. Critics, journalists, campaigners and academics, to name a few, have all reported threats on UK soil.
The report calls for stronger action to stop the growth of TNR, including a dedicated reporting line to provide support and triage cases to law enforcement. It also calls for improved police training to deal with incidents of TNR. Lau’s case shows how much that is needed. Tackling TNR is a monumental task – the perpetrators often operate beyond borders and deep in the shadows. But while it’s one thing to tell the victim that the person behind the attack might not be caught, it’s quite another to tell them to stay indoors and stay silent.
27 Jun 2025 | Asia and Pacific, China, Hong Kong, News and features, Spotlight
This article was authored in collaboration with The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation (CFHK).
Five years ago, Hong Kong passed the National Security Law. Its message was clear – dissent at your peril. Overnight Hong Kong, a city once known for its vibrant demonstrations, became quiet. People no longer took to Victoria Park to commemorate the victims of Tiananmen Square; they no longer filled Causeway Bay to rail against extradition laws to China. Plenty who had taken part in the city’s protest movement fled; a determined number stayed, knowing the risks. Scores were arrested. Many remain behind bars to this day.
I’ve never been in prison, but I’ve spoken to enough former political prisoners to understand one central characteristic: the crushing sameness. As the world outside has spun forward – from Covid lockdowns and wars to elections and viral video trends – for Joshua Wong, Jimmy Lai, Benny Tai and others, the days likely blur, indistinguishable, from one to the next.
Such a juxtaposition has been noted, with frustration, by those who have loved ones locked up.
“My father is still in prison, there are still more than 1,000 political prisoners in Hong Kong at the moment,” Sebastien Lai told me as we reflected on the fact that while Hong Kong is largely out of the news cycle, his dad is not out of jail.
There is no downplaying the significance of the passage of the National Security Law on 30 June 2020, of the thousands who were arrested because of it, the newspapers shuttered, the pro-democracy groups disbanded, and the hundreds of thousands who fled. It was, of course, not the beginning of repression in Hong Kong. I have vivid memories from 2018 of the journalist Evan Fowler telling me, voice shaking, that it was a city “being ripped apart”.
Nor was it the end of repression. “In reality there has not been a single eye-catching moment when everything suddenly changed,” wrote Jeff Wasserstrom and Sharon Yam in New Lines last year who spoke of the “stop-and-go pace of repression”. The passage of the National Security Law was a “go” moment – a particularly big one – and one followed by other “go” moments.
Speaking to someone on the ground in Hong Kong, who wished to remain anonymous on security grounds, they said that there’s rarely a month that goes by when they “don’t discuss leaving with loved ones”.
“Whether it’s t-shirts, a song, a mobile game, books, a newspaper op-ed [opinion piece] or a social media post expressing dissatisfaction with the government, the crackdown on anything deemed seditious only seems to escalate month by month.”
They likened the attacks on freedom of expression to “death by a thousand cuts” – a phrase I’ve heard others use too.
The thousand cuts analogy is evident in many examples. There has been the passage of new legislation in the form of the 2021 “Patriots law”, which allowed only those who swear allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party to hold a position in government, and of Article 23 in 2024, another national security law that further squeezed freedoms in the city and abroad.
A police hotline has been established, inviting members of the public to report on each other. Responsible for creating what the BBC termed a “culture of anonymous informing”, it’s received more than 890,000 tip-offs to date.
In schools – the original battleground for Beijing after Hong Kong’s handover – textbooks have been rewritten to say Hong Kong was not a former British colony and “red study trips” to China are now mandatory for secondary school students.
The repression extends to the seemingly banal; just last week Greenpeace had to move a talk online after the Chinese University of Hong Kong cancelled it citing “urgent maintenance”. It extends to the families of those who dissent; in May, it was widely reported that police had arrested the father and brother of US-based pro-democracy activist Anna Kwok for allegedly helping with her finances.
For the protest leader Nathan Law, watching what has unfolded in the past five years has been sobering to say the least. When the National Security Law was announced in May 2020, he deemed it serious enough to escape the city before it was passed. Was that precautionary? Looking back, he reflected that “people were calculating whether it would be a symbolic law rarely used or a draconian law.” It was, sadly, the latter. Precaution paid off.
Law is obviously not on the ground and doesn’t contact people in Hong Kong for fear it could endanger them. Still, he avidly follows what is happening and can see the “chilling” impact it’s had through the many arrests, and through other markers too. He recently watched a video on a news site in which people on the streets of Hong Kong were filmed asking for their comments on the National Security Law. Most didn’t dare answer; a few scuttled away the second the camera came near.
Since 2020, headlines like Hong Kong is “dead”, “lost” or “over” have appeared. It’s easy to see how the headlines have come about. At the same time, some have taken issue with such a framing, which is understandable too. Dissent does still exist, even if Hong Kong is a very dim shadow of its former self. A few independent news outlets remain. They tread a careful line – keep to the facts of cases and avoid conjecture – and have to stave off new threats in the form of spurious tax audits and other bureaucratic, legal and financial scrutiny. And yet they continue to report. There are also the occasional small-scale protests, such as one held at the end of May to raise awareness about issues impacting LGBTQ+ communities. It was far from the buzzing spectacle of Hong Kong Pride – which hasn’t taken place properly since 2018 – but it was something.
Outside of Hong Kong, diaspora communities in London, Taipei and other cities have taken it upon themselves to keep the spotlight up. Artists like Hong Kong duo Lumli Lumlong create eye-catching canvases featuring the faces of protest leaders, which are displayed in galleries; talks about the crackdown in Hong Kong are hosted; critical plays written by Hong Kongers from before 2020 have transferred over to other countries; governments are lobbied and demonstrations are held outside embassies; a commemorative issue of Apple Daily was even printed this week by exiled staff in collaboration with Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
Law takes solace in this.
“When we left we brought certain parts of Hong Kong with us. We carry the spirit with us,” he remarked.
Law misses those who remain imprisoned in Hong Kong dearly. “I feel devastated to see them spending so much time behind bars,” he said. It’s unlikely he’ll see them anytime soon. Wong, who has spent the better part of his twenties in jail, was slapped with fresh charges this month in a move that exposed the authorities’ clear intent to not release him anytime soon.
Sebastien Lai hasn’t seen his father in more than four and a half years.
“I miss just the normal daily stuff. Just chatting to him, telling jokes, having dinner with him,” he told me.
Jimmy Lai is 77 and has deteriorating health. His national security trial is expected to run until the autumn. His appeal to be represented by his preferred lawyer was rejected this March. For Sebastien, and indeed many others, Jimmy’s rags to riches story, his incredible bravery and the attempts to silence him are symbolic of Hong Kong past and present.
“In what society would you imprison a human rights defender – a man who has given everything that he has to defend the rights of others – but that is Hong Kong now.”
6 Sep 2024 | Asia and Pacific, China, Hong Kong, News and features, Newsletters
It is September and the kids are back at school. Many will likely be excited for the year ahead but perhaps not Hong Kong students. They’re returning to a new lesson: Xi Jinping Thought. As announced this week, the curriculum has been updated in secondary schools to include teachings from China’s leader. The new module aims to instil “patriotic education”.
I pity these kids, I really do. Firstly because unlike Mao, who many saw as a great wordsmith (a tyrant yes but a tyrant who could write lyrically and coin a zinger, “revolution is not a dinner party” being one classic example), Xi’s words are flat. The Economist declared his Thought “woolly: a hodgepodge of Dengist and Maoist terminology combined with mostly vague ideas on topics ranging from the environment (making China “beautiful”) to building a “world-class” army.” The academic Kevin Carrico studied his Thought through a distance-learning course and wrote that it was impoverished. “It comes across as a cash-rich North Korea,” he said. I’ve never got very far. Sentences like “The fundamental reason why some of our comrades have weak ideals and faltering beliefs is that their views lack a firm grounding in historical materialism” contain too many words and too little meaning.
But beyond criticising the content is a much bigger issue. As one Hongkonger said in response to the announcement, it’s “brainwashing”. That it is. And more than that. It’s another way to strip Hong Kong of its unique identity. The curriculum is aimed at “cultivating students’ sense of nationhood, affection for our country and sense of national identity” and by identity that means one dictated through the narrow lens of the Chinese Communist Party from Beijing.
Since it was introduced formally in China in 2017, Xi Jinping Thought has become a mainstay of academic life throughout the country for all levels of students. In our forthcoming Autumn magazine, which looks at how scientists are being attacked worldwide, Chinese novelist Murong Xuecun lays bare some of the absurdities of this:
“Every scientist needs to study Xi’s speeches and thoughts. Their Western counterparts may not be able to empathise with this but imagine a group of physicists or astronomy professors sitting in a conference room at MIT or Harvard, studying Donald Trump’s or Joe Biden’s speeches, and then considering how much it would help in their research.”
Xi Jinping Thought should be relegated to the history books not promoted to textbooks. But classrooms have always been central to Beijing’s ambitions in Hong Kong, which partly explains why many of the protest leaders were students. In 2010, for example, then Hong Kong chief executive Donald Tsang announced plans to change primary education so that its messages were more in line with the CCP (one teaching manual called the CCP an “advanced, selfless and united ruling group”). These plans were shelved due to widespread protests, protests which themselves were later removed or reworded in textbooks. More recently, in 2022 history textbooks were rewritten to downplay the city’s colonial past. Today they’re taking the textbook meddling one step further.
Here’s a kicker: interference in textbooks by Beijing is happening in the UK too. The Telegraph reported this week that British GCSE books were edited to remove references to Taiwan after complaints from Chinese officials. The AQA GCSE Chinese textbook deleted references to “the Republic of China” (Taiwan) from subsequent editions. The first edition of the GCSE textbook said: “Yangmingshan National Park is the third national park of the Republic of China, and the park is located in the northern part of Taipei City.” Later editions: “Yangmingshan National Park is a very famous national park.”
The UK is not Hong Kong and the CCP cares a lot less about what British textbooks contain. And yet they still clearly care. There’s a long road to be taken before a few words removed from a Mandarin-teaching title turns into Xi Jinping Thought on the UK syllabus and it’s encouraging that Lord Alton raised the issue in Parliament this week. We must not journey further down this road and not just because his Thought is deathly dull.
Finally, on the note of back to school a reminder of the many girls of Afghanistan who are not starting school at all. Last year we gave the Index campaigning award to Matiullah Wesa, who together with his brother founded Pen Path, a remarkable organisation dedicated to improving girls’ education in Afghanistan. For over a decade, Wesa has travelled the country with his mobile library, distributing books to children and working to establish schools in conflict-riven areas. Today he meets with Taliban leaders to call for schools to be reopened for girls. Wesa is a frequent target of the Taliban and has been imprisoned. He dreams of a time when he can retire this work because access to education – a universal right – is respected and promoted in Afghanistan. Today that dream has never felt further away.
All of the above reinforces a line we often say at Index: freedoms are hard won and easily lost. So students: cherish learning, enjoy debate and never take the ability to enquire more, to read widely and to speak freely for granted.
12 Apr 2024 | Asia and Pacific, China, Hong Kong, News and features
This article first appeared in volume 53, issue 1 of Index on Censorship, The long reach: How authoritarian countries are silencing critics abroad, which was published in April 2024.
Zhou Fengsuo, Tiananmen protest leader, and Nathan Law, one of the faces of Hong Kong’s democracy movement, are high-profile and not afforded anonymity, something which means they are doubly exposed through being so recognised. But their fame can shield them to an extent too. Other overseas targets of Beijing who are less well-known can be just as ruthlessly pursued without an international community having their back. Ultimately their stories, which overlap, speak of just what dissidents suffer and often suffer silently.
Zhou Fengsuo
I was a student leader in Tiananmen because I wanted to do my duty for the country. I was proud of what I did, knowing that I had done so much to help facilitate the movement for a peaceful transition of China into a freer and more democratic China. But for this I was put on the most wanted list after the massacre. I was in position number five. From then on my life took on a different tune. I was arrested and put in a high-security jail in Beijing for a year and had my passport denied for five years. As soon as I got it I left China for the USA. It was January 1995.
The transition to the USA was not problem free, even from the start. I went to business school and got an MBA with honours and became a financial professional. Initially I was very relaxed but soon I realised I was very isolated from the ordinary Chinese community here. It seemed I bore a mark on my head wherever I went. People didn’t want to get close to me. Worse still, employers avoided me. Most of my friends at business school who were from China got jobs easily, but I couldn’t, even though my grades were really good. Wall Street banks were very concerned about the political risks of socialising with people like me. I was told by a Human Resources manager that the most high-profile female leader from 1989 Chai Ling was denied a job opportunity in New York because the Chairman of the Asian branch of the investment bank that offered her a job objected vehemently.
There was one incident that happened when I was in business school that also really alarmed me. In the spring of 1998 I met Wang Bingzhang, the most famous Chinese dissident. A few months later my family called and mentioned this meeting. They knew about it and what we’d talked about. Wang, who has been serving life in prison in China since 2002, must have been monitored. So it was a warning to me. The MSS [China’s Ministry of State Security) was telling me that even though I was in the USA they could still keep a close eye.
Still, I was largely oblivious to safety concerns in the early days and I continued my activism, including cofounding my own humanitarian organisation to support political prisoners in China.
The worst moment for me was in 2008. That year, when the Beijing Olympics happened, was the peak of China business. In San Francisco when the Olympic torch was passing by, we were beaten very brutally by CCP supporters. It was probably the largest gathering of CCP supporters on US soil ever – there were over 100,000 supporters, compared to just a handful of us protesters – and they really attacked us physically. I asked police to protect us, but they just shrugged and watched. This was the worst moment. I was surrounded by so many angry, impassioned CCP supporters. I believe they were ready to kill us. Their hatred of people like us was visceral. My friend Guo Ping was bleeding from an attack on the back of his head that could have been fatal.
Later I called all the major papers and TV stations in the United States about it but nobody responded.
Since Xi Jinping came to power it has become way more aggressive both on the ground and online. Even though I didn’t experience anything like what happened in 2008 again, I have known many attacks here, especially the attacks on the Hong Kong community in 2019. They were very extensive and well-organised. I wasn’t at the protests in San Francisco last November when Xi visited for the APEC summit. Once again protesters were attacked by CCP followers. Once again we published a report on it because we knew it wouldn’t otherwise be covered.
In 2018, after I organised a protest against Xi as leader for life, someone came to my house and used a big camera to take pictures, knowing I was inside. I realised this was a warning and also they are not trying to hide at all. It’s much more brazen and well-organised. Xi Jinping’s message is to go strong and to go after critics aboard.
They have become very sophisticated in how they threaten us. They gather all information on us that they can from publicly available sources. We know our organisation has everything closely examined by CCP. They scooped up all my personal information online too and organised a massive slandering and intimidation campaign against me on social media. My organisation’s public filings were used to harass us and to disrupt our work.
I even heard from a good source who was told the CCP would use US law and the US legal system to go after them. In FBI reported cases of the CCP spying on dissidents, tax records are often sought as a way to intimidate and coerce people and organisations.
Since 2020 US law enforcement has started to take action against those perpetrators of transnational repression and Congress is more aware too. But overall the CCP’s influence remains strong and pervasive in all areas of life. We will not be daunted. We will fight to be free, not to be silenced by fear.
Nathan Law
In June 2020, I made the difficult decision to leave Hong Kong. As a former protest leader and legislator, my outspoken criticism of Beijing had effectively painted a target on my back. The ramification of being a high-profile dissident became clear in August when the Hong Kong police, enforcing the draconian national security law newly imposed, issued arrest warrants for six democracy activists living abroad, myself included. The situation escalated in July 2023, when a bounty of 1 million Hong Kong dollars was placed on me, underscoring the lengths to which Beijing is willing to go to silence its critics beyond its borders. This pursuit is a testament to the concept of transnational repression, where authoritarian regimes extend their reach across the globe to target dissidents.
I was granted asylum in the United Kingdom in April 2021, but the threats from the Chinese Communist Party loomed large. I moved four times in the first year, living a discrete life, and had to be aware of my surroundings constantly to avoid tailing. The extended reach of the CCP was further highlighted when a UK-based anonymous group of Chinese overseas offered a reward for information about my whereabouts. I was not sure whether anyone offered them any intelligence – but the fact that they are so blatantly threatening exiled activists shows the CCP’s arrogance and aggression. As a result, I was always in doubt when connecting with new individuals because they could approach me with ulterior motives.
The repercussions of my activism were not limited to just myself. To frighten me, my family was subjected to interrogation by the Hong Kong police under false pretences of supporting my work financially. This baseless harassment aimed to inflict guilt and fear, leveraging collateral damage to the well-being of my loved ones. They were extremely bothered and scared. Friends in Hong Kong who were close to them told me this in secret.
The threats extend into the digital realm, where Beijing’s vast online propaganda machine orchestrates campaigns of vilification against its critics. Death threats and doxxing are part of the harassment I face, a constant reminder of the risks that come with dissent.
Escaping the grasp of an authoritarian regime is just the beginning of an ongoing struggle for freedom. The incidents of transnational repression are a reminder that the fight against autocracy doesn’t end at the border. It’s imperative for host countries of political refugees to recognise the sophisticated tactics of authoritarian regimes and ensure the safety of exiled activists. Their continued activism is vital, not just for their home countries, but as a beacon for democratic values worldwide.
Nathan Law attends a candle-lit vigil organised outside the Chinese Embassy in London in memory of those who died in the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre.
Photo by SOPA Images Limited/Alamy
