Life and death in Hong Kong
Yet another friend announced on Facebook yesterday morning that she's left Hong Kong. The first departure of 2022, she adds to the total of eight friends who left Hong Kong in 2021 and three who left in 2020. In the case of this friend, she and her husband actually had decided they would need to leave the city of her birth the day after China imposed a National Security Law on Hong Kong (i.e., back on July 1st, 2020 -- the 23rd anniversary of Hong Kong's handover to China by the British) but it took some time to carry out this decision. It's not at all easy to leave one's home city, after all.
There are people who claim to not have a single friend leave Hong Kong in the past couple of years or so. Perhaps not coincidentally, they also tend to be individuals who also claim to be politically neutral. On the other side of the equation are people who tell of scores of friends and (former) colleagues who have departed Hong Kong, many of them with their partners and kids, and sometimes parents (too) in tow. And a look at such as Mandatory Provident Fund (MPF) withdrawals and rising school vacancies along with British National (Overseas) (BNO) passsports confirm that Hong Kong is experiencing a population outflow.
Among my friends who have departed from Hong Kong are individuals who had previously only ever lived in Hong Kong along with those who had done such as gone to university and/or worked in countries like Britain, Australia and the USA. For pretty much all of them though, Hong Kong had ceased to be a place that they felt comfortable and safe in (and, in the case of those with kids, wanted their children to go to school and grow up in). And even if they have said it in quite the same way to me, I reckon that many of them share now Taiwan-based artist Kacey Wong's feelings that "I didn't leave Hong Kong, Hong Kong left me".
And then there is the sense that things will only get worse; this even when things are pretty bad already. And no, I really am not (just) referring to the pandemic and its attendant restrictions. (With regards to the situation involving the Wuhan coronavirus: Hong Kong reported seven new cases today, one of them local. This may seem like nothing, especially relative to what is being experienced in much of the world, but it is worrying that we now also have a local Delta variant case along with Omicron variants in the community.)
The fact of the matter is though that Hong Kong's prison statistics point to a bigger problem and source of worry for many residents. Specifically, the fact that the number of prisoners on remand (and unconvicted) has increased by over 84 percent from 2000 points to "The courts hav[ing] discarded the presumption of innocence" and, consequently, "people are being punished without trial, and not just for [national security law]".
As Samuel Bickett was moved to point out: "In systems that value civil rights and due process, courts deny bail only for, say, alleged murderers and serial rapists. And even then, only sometimes. In [Hong Kong], I’ve got friends in prison denied bail for allegedly saying mean things about the [government] or starting trash can fires."
And when pro-democracy protestors get tried in court and sentenced upon being judged to be guilty as charged, the sense of injustice mounts at the sentences that are imposed on them. As an example, consider the sentencing this past Saturday of nine defendants -- aged between 20 and 29 years, none of them with a criminal history previously -- to up to three years and four months in prison after being found guilty of "rioting" near the Hong Kong Polytechnic University on November 18th, 2019.
As another example, consider the case of Hui Tim-lik. Eighteen years of age at the time that he slashed a policeman's neck in October 2019, the now 21 year old was sentenced today to seven years and nine months behind bars for the crime. For the record: the sentence Hui received is lengthier than the six years and four months imprisonment imposed on the Mainland Chinese man who stabbed a teenager in the neck and stomach near the Tai Po Lennon Wall in October 2019, so seriously that the youth's intestines protruded from the stomach wound!
On the subject of horrific attacks: remember that on then district councillor -- and now political prisoner -- Andrew Chiu which caused Chiu to lose part of an ear? The man found guilty of that crime and others on the day, Joe Chen, is scheduled to be sentenced next month. What's the bet that he will receive a lesser sentence than the young man who now is scheduled to spend close to eight years behind bars for attacking a police officer?
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