Wiesbaden Courier (German newspaper): Hong Kong’s Hard Line

A Hong Kong court issued a guilty verdict against 16 Falun Gong members for obstructing public safety and sentenced them to monetary punitive damages. By doing so, Hong Kong has embraced Mainland China’s restrictive policies against the group.

Young Ms. XXX was present five years ago when scores of Hong Kong students witnessed the reunification ceremony of Hong Kong with Mainland China. Contrary to many sceptics’ predictions, she and these students saw a promise for positive things to come in the near future. But this Chinese woman, now living in Wiesbaden [Germany], has lost that illusion with the latest Hong Kong court decision against the Falun Gong practitioners. “Human right violations that are the order of the day in China on orders of Beijing have now found their way into Hong Kong, too.”

It was a banal incident having taken place in March in front of the Mainland Chinese de facto Embassy in Hong Kong, but it drives the keepers of the state’s “status quo” to distractions. Here is what happened. A small group of this Far- Eastern meditation system in their by now familiar bright-yellow T-shirts, carrying a modest banner, demonstrate on this 10-meters-wide (32 feet broad), drab pedestrian thoroughfare. Four Swiss nationals and a New Zealander are in the group. The whole things only lasts for a few minutes before the police arrive in several commando cars, cordon off everything and with brutal force drag the demonstrators off. Female police officers manhandle a 60-year-old woman; a male officer uses a special manoeuvre to apply pressure at an acupuncture point on a man’s ear to cause him pain; but shortly thereafter comes the accusations [against the group] “obstruction of public spaces” and “disturbing public safety.”

This represents a harsh blow for young Ms. XXX who is a member of this group that is banned in Mainland China. China’s promise from earlier times, to keep alive the “One country, two systems” policy and to guarantee freedom and human rights, seems to disappear into thin air. This verdict against the Falun Gong members points to galloping desire for obedience by the mighty, by those in power in the former Crown Colony, which still benefits from special status. “Human beings are now also persecuted in Hong Kong,” said a resigned Ms. XXX. The accused will not disappear into torture chambers or laogai (camps) as they do in China, but they will have to pay substantial punitive damages and were found guilty on all counts. The test for Hong Kong’s autonomy: result negative!

All this does not come as a surprise, though. Strained relations had already surfaced between Beijing and London during the winding up of the lease agreement in 1997. Beijing did not like the attempts by former Hong Kong Governor Chris Patton and his establishment of democratic reforms, which included election of a democratic parliament. Chief executive Tung Chee-hwa assembled a transitional parliament according to his own preferences. Shortly thereafter, two-dozen laws dealing with human rights were either stricken from the books or amended. Particularly curtailed were the rights to freely assemble and the right to have people’s privacy protected. Mr. Martin Lessenthin, a spokesperson for the Internationale Gesellschaft fuer Menschenrechte/IGFM (International Association for Threatened Peoples) calls this a “salami tactic.” [ed. note – German saying - one part of the Salami is sliced off today and another tomorrow – soon there is no Salami left] It is clear to this Frankfurt-based association that Jiang Zemin’s puppets are putting on the pressure. “This does not merely affect the Falun Gong group, but also the Christian underground,” said Lessenthin. The outlook for the future of this once liberal island-state presents itself as even more complicated. If the anti-subversive law shall be ratified, critics and non-conformists [of this system] of any shape or colour are endangered. “Wantonness will have her doors wide open then,” said Mr. Lessenthin.

Contacts with western nations abroad could become quite risky, as it is already the case in Mainland China – excepting economic interests, which will not affected.

[ed. note - The name of the practitioner was omitted for security reasons]