PR lesson

Security Secretary Chris Tang lashes out at a Ming Pao reporter for asking why a recent trip to Thailand was not announced ahead of time. The answer to the question was perfectly reasonable…

The security minister said the operation [to help Hong Kong residents who had been held at a scam farm in Burma] had to be conducted discreetly, and if not, it could jeopardise the rescue effort and endanger the lives of the detained Hongkongers.

He could have left it at that. It was a response that eloquently highlighted the seriousness of the situation and the determination of the government to help residents in distress overseas – and its success in doing so. But instead he…

…accused [the] reporter of attempting to undermine the credibility of the government…

So now that’s the story.

Brian Kern looks back at Hong Kong’s riot trials, which finally seem to have run their course (maybe). Lots of interesting points on the use of the law, individuals’ experiences, the Yuen Long ‘riot’, plus photos and more…

…even though people convicted of riot represent the largest proportion of political prisoners, and riot convictions carry some of the longest prison sentences of any of those that political prisoners have received, this phenomenon of hundreds of imprisonments for riot has gotten relatively little attention.

Why is that? I suspect it’s because lots of observers don’t know quite what to make of it. If you hear that 45 pro-democracy leaders have been convicted of “conspiracy to subvert state power” for taking part in a primary election, that sounds absurd on the face of it, and the “crime” is explicitly political. But “riot”—isn’t rioting bad? isn’t it violent? How can it be justified?

…The vast majority of political prisoners in Hong Kong have been convicted of crimes which on the face of it are not political, like “riot,” but this is done as part of a major political crackdown and to enforce the government’s narrative of the protests, that they were strictly a “law and order” issue, as opposed to what they really were: a political conflict over how Hong Kong was to be governed, between two irreconcilable visions of the kind of place Hong Kong was to be. If you refuse to face this aspect of the crackdown—the weaponization of the justice system to crush political opponents—then you’re missing a very big part of it.

…Interestingly, when the Hong Kong government first started charging large numbers of people with “riot” in 2019 and 2020, it was not very successful: out of its first 25 prosecutions, only six people were convicted. This could not stand. CCP-owned media conducted a propaganda campaign intended to intimidate judges. The Hong Kong government appealed to the Court of Appeal, which agreed with it, ruling on March 25, 2021 that while merely being present at a riot does not in itself render a defendant liable, “actively promoting or encouraging” does. In other words, the court was specifying what “taking part” constituted and was essentially saying that one needn’t take any particular aggressive action to be ruled to have “taken part” in the riot.