Another departure from Hong Kong -- Fernando Cheung this time

Messages worth heeding

 

Another day/week, another departure from Hong Kong.  Today, news came that Fernando Cheung is the latest pro-democracy figure to have left Hong Kong.  A naturalized American (who had worked in the U.S.A. and got his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley), Dr Cheung had given up his US citizenship to run for a seat in the Legislative Council.  A social worker and retired university lecturer, he entered the Legislative Council in 2004 through the social welfare sector functional constituency.  

 

In November 2020, Fernando Cheung was among the pro-democrats who resigned enmasse from the legislative assembly after four of their colleagues were unfairly disqualified by the government.  A few days earlier, he and six other pan-democratic Legislative Councillors had been arrested on charges related to obstructing a legislative council meeting in May of that year in a move by authorities that was part of a broad crackdown on "anti-government forces".  

 

This past February, Cheung was sentenced to jail for three weeks after being pleading guilty to "contempt, under the Legislative Council (Powers and Privileges) Ordinance".  Until then, he had never been in jail.  And actually, I don't think he had ever been arrested before November 2020 as he's considered a super moderate lawmaker and generally mild mannered individual.  (In fact, so politically moderate is Fernando Cheung that he's on the record as stating that the storming of Legislative Council by protestors on July 1st, 2019, was a mistake.)

 

The sense one gets is that Cheung was not expecting to be given a prison sentence despite having pleaded guilty.  He has a daughter, Vivian, who has special needs (and who, it is hoped, will be able to get better care in Toronto, where they have now moved to.) and he had previously told reporters that  he didn't want to go to jail, because that would mean being unable to take care of her.  So it must have been a shock to have received the jail sentence that he got, however short compared to that which has been handed out to a number of his fellow pro-democrats.

And it didn't help that Cheung served his prison time as the fifth coronavirus wave was hitting Hong Kong hard.  Someone else who was in prison this past February, Samuel Bickett, has written about what it was life in the prisons during this time -- and it makes for painful reading.  A few paragraphs from his account should suffice to give an idea of what I mean: 

A cancer-stricken 75 year-old political detainee housed in the same cell as me at Lai Chi Kok Prison had his court hearing canceled and was forced to remain locked up without bail, and without any indication of when he’d be able to seek release.

Hundreds of prisoners at Stanley Prison were locked alone in tiny cells for six weeks, only permitted out briefly every other day for a shower.

A dead prisoner’s corpse was left in a shared cell for hours, as other prisoners bunched together on the furthest wall in the small room to avoid getting too close.

This is just a sampling of the dire circumstances I encountered after I was sent to prison on February 8, 2022, just as Hong Kong began ramping up restrictions in response to a new wave of Covid infections...

As it so happens, Fernando Cheung caught Covid while in prison.  (This is something that a mutual friend disclosed to me.)  Also, a lot of what he had to say about his brief but still traumatic time in prison accords with what Bickett wrote about the conditions that the prisoners faced.  So, honestly, I can understand why he would decide to leave after that experience.

The news of Cheung's departure from Hong Kong was broken by another individual who recently departed Hong Kong: former Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute (PORI) deputy chief executive, Chung Kim-wah.  The Hong Kong Free Press piece about Cheung having left Hong Kong included the following detail: "Cheung’s departure was later confirmed by another former pro-democracy legislative councillor, Shiu Ka-chun, in a Facebook post on Wednesday, who said that he had kept Cheung’s departure a secret until he had safely landed in Toronto." 

 

In view of so many members of the pan-democrat camp having now gone into exile or been jailed since what I've referred to as Hong Kong's second, scarier Handover (i.e., the day that China imposed a national security law on Hong Kong), I wonder when Shiu will leave too.  I remember him being featured in Evans Chan's We Have Boots and talking about how much he loved his mother.  I guess he'll leave Hong Kong if she's willing to do so too.

 

Just yesterday, a friend and I were talking about the members of the pro-democracy camp who are in prison or no longer in Hong Kong.  We worry about many of them but there also are those who have left Hong Kong who appear to be truly flourishing.  A prime example: former legislative councillor, Dennis Kwok -- who recently announced his setting up of a boutique law firm in New York.  

 

After the news of Fernando Cheung's departure broke, another friend (who, herself, has now left Hong Kong and is now Canada-based) and I messaged each other about it.  She wrote that she was happy for him.  I replied that I was too, but also sad for Hong Kong.

 

Speaking of being sad for Hong Kong: Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day.  To mark it, international NGO Reporters Without Borders released its latest Press Freedom Index and Hong Kong was seen to now rank 148th, dropping a whopping 68 places from the previous year.  Another measure of how dramatic Hong Kong's downward trajectory is: 20 years ago, Hong Kong occupied the 18th position on the list!   

And yet: we really should never give up hope.  Never.  As far as press freedom is concerned, there are those who maintain that "There will be journalism as long as there are journalists", and a number of them do still exist in Hong Kong.  And, as Yuen Chan wrote in a column for the Hong Kong Free Press that came out on World Press Freedom Day: "Despite the death notices, despite the closures, the arrests, the smears, the sad and reluctant departure of their peers, there are journalists who simply continue to do their jobs."  Also worth noting: "When big gestures become foolhardy, dangerous or impossible, small acts of solidarity with those quietly toiling at the coalface become more important than ever."