cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/31629438
Finn Lau […] fled [Hong Kong] after local officials arrested him at a pro-democracy demonstration in 2020. Months later, while he was walking down a quiet street in London, three masked men jumped him and beat him unconscious. Now 31, Lau still has a faint scar on his boyish face.
British authorities called the incident a hate crime, but Lau was convinced that Beijing had sent the men to silence him. He wasn’t being paranoid: Last year, Chinese authorities declared that Lau would be “pursued for life.” They froze his remaining assets in Hong Kong and offered a bounty for information leading to his arrest. Since then, fake journalists have approached Lau seeking interviews, dozens of social-media accounts have impersonated him, and he’s received death threats. A group on Telegram posted his address in London, forcing him to move multiple times. The intimidation extended to his family members in Hong Kong. Eventually they had to flee too.
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Lau is one of thousands who fled Hong Kong to Britain once the protests started—and particularly since June 2020, when China passed a national-security law that led to often-violent suppression. […] Assailants have stalked them in public and smeared them online. Letters have shown up at their neighbors’ doors promising a reward for turning over dissidents to the Chinese embassy. Back home, government authorities have suspended their retirement savings and interrogated their families. Some have been attacked.
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Even though China’s responsibility [for assaults of Chinese exiled dissidents] is an open secret, Western governments have struggled to deter the country from interfering on their soil. Xi’s crusade appears so brazen and far-reaching that it suggests he has little fear of provoking the West. By the same measure, it seems to reveal that something else really does scare him: China’s exiles.
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Accounts of intimidation and harassment have emerged from virtually every corner of Britain where Hong Kongers have gathered. In 2019, a group of men dragged a refugee through the gates of the Chinese consulate in Manchester and assaulted him. Similar incidents have occurred in London’s Chinatown and on college campuses, including in Southampton, where Chinese students attacked Hong Kongers during a demonstration in 2023. Videos of the incident circulated on Weibo, China’s version of X, and prompted death threats against the victims.
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In 2023, the Hong Kong government offered rewards for information leading to the arrests of [exiled dissident Simon] Cheng and 12 other overseas dissidents, six of whom lived in Britain. Officials in Hong Kong interrogated Cheng’s family, who became a focus of attention in Chinese media. “Watching my father dodge the news cameras on television sent me into a deep depression,” Cheng said. In an effort to protect his parents, Cheng encouraged them to sever ties with him. “If needed, criticize me and cut me off,” he wrote on X. “My hope is that my parents can enjoy a dignified, peaceful, and serene old age—until our next life.”
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On Christmas Eve, Hong Kong issued bounties on six more exiles, including Chloe Cheung, who was 19 at the time. “I came here to protect my future,” Cheung told me. She had moved to the city of Leeds with her family in 2020. “I had dreams of pursuing a career in business or finance,” she said. “The bounty has changed all of that.”
She showed […] a video on her phone of a Chinese man shouting death threats at her during a protest she helped organize in November. After another demonstration, two Asian men followed her into a restaurant; she alerted the police, who opened an investigation. On Instagram and X, strangers send her sexually explicit messages written in Mandarin. Friends have asked her to stop contacting them, worried that ties to her could create problems for their relatives in Hong Kong. “It feels impossible, suddenly, to meet new people or apply for jobs,” she said. “I have no idea who I can trust.”
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Alberto Fittarelli, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog group, who [said] China has two main goals when it targets activists online: to encourage self-censorship and to “discredit the targets in the eyes of the audience hosting them.”
That strategy nearly ruined the livelihoods of two exiled painters, who go by Lumli and Lumlong. When I visited their London apartment, which doubles as their studio, it was filled with oversize canvases depicting baroque scenes from the protests in Hong Kong. For years, mysterious accounts had posted hateful comments on the Facebook page they used to sell their artwork, which Lumli and Lumlong took with them when they fled Hong Kong in 2021. (A standard post: “You dogs and rioters will all die with your family.”) Many of the profiles showed signs of fakery; they were created recently, had few followers, rarely posted, and used simplified Chinese characters typical of mainland China. Experts at Citizen Lab told me the accounts’ features are “consistent with what has been observed over the years for pro-China networks.”
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