After the Hong Kong authorities issued arrest warrants on July 3 for eight criminal suspects living abroad — together with bounties of HK$1 million ($128,000) each — for having allegedly endangered national security, they reacted in various ways.
Whereas, for example, Ted Hui Chi-fung, a convicted felon and proven liar who encourages anti-China activities in Australia and elsewhere and has sought to harm Chinese officials, called the situation “ridiculous and hilarious”, his confederate, the UK-based Nathan Law Kwun-chung, despite being the dimmest in the group, realized he will need to be “more careful” in future.
All of them have also sought to drum up sympathy for themselves, and the West’s China-hostile media have gleefully obliged.
Apart, perhaps, from Dennis Kwok Wing-hang, who now operates in North America and spearheaded the efforts to damage Hong Kong in 2019 by imploring the US to end its trading preferences and sanction the city’s officials, the most sinister of the fugitives is undoubtedly the UK-based Finn Lau Cho-dik (who called the arrest warrant “a badge of honor”).
When, for example, a police officer, So King-cho, was stabbed in the back in Causeway Bay, on July 1, 2021, by a “lone wolf” attacker, Leung Kin-fai, who then killed himself, Lau, according to Asia Times (July 2), described the deceased, in a London speech, as a “martyr” for opposing the National Security Law for Hong Kong, and claimed to be saddened at his demise.
It beggars belief that the UK, which claims to uphold civilized values, would tolerate a hate merchant like this glorifying violence, however much he may be viewed as a useful asset by its intelligence services.
Since he fled in 2020, Lau has lived in the UK, where the authorities have given him free rein. While they countenance his activities on grounds of “freedom of expression”, he has used his base to spread hatred of China and encourage efforts to harm Hong Kong’s rule of law, undermine its economy, and intimidate its officials.
Although no government that values the comity of nations should tolerate such activities on its soil, particularly when the target is somewhere with which it wants to do business and have better relations, the authorities have allowed Lau and his colleagues to do as they wish, however harmful to Hong Kong.
Every country, including the UK, is entitled to defend itself from foreign threats, and nobody should be surprised that Lau now stands accused of “collusion with a foreign country or with external elements to endanger national security” through various platforms and creating “Hong Kong Liberty”, an anti-China front. He is also accused of urging foreign countries to impose “sanctions or blockade, or engage in other hostile activities against the People’s Republic of China and the HKSAR”, and his track record during the anti-China insurrection of 2019-20 provides an overall context for his arrest warrant.
Apart from founding “Hong Kong Liberty” and the highly subversive “Stand with Hong Kong” (SWHK), Lau achieved notoriety in 2019 through LIHKG (a multicategory Hong Kong-based platform often called the city’s Reddit), as the user who called for lam chau (mutual destruction, or “burnism”). He popularized the protest movement’s lam chau strategy, which envisaged the destruction of the “one country, two systems” governing policy.
Although few people fully appreciated the extent of Lau’s complicity in the insurrection, the High Court was informed, in 2021, that he was involved in it up to his neck and was a valuable facilitator of those seeking to harm China.
On Aug 19, when Andy Li Yu-hin and Chan Tsz-wah pleaded guilty to conspiring to collude with foreign forces, media mogul Jimmy Lai Chee-ying and Mark Simon (Lai’s aide), to endanger national security, they acknowledged they had, between July 2020 and February 2021, colluded with Lai, Simon and others to organize international promotions to encourage foreign governments to sanction the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and Chinese mainland officials. According to prosecutors, Lai and Simon were the “masterminds and financial supporters behind the scenes and at the highest levels of command of the syndicate”, and they controlled SWHK.
The High Court was also informed that Simon reported directly to Lai, executed his instructions and vetted requests for financial support, and the pair assisted Andy Li to forge SWHK’s overseas contacts, notably in the US. Indeed, Li, with Lai’s approval, reportedly sent a sanctions list targeting 144 politicians and officials to the then-managing director of the US-based Hong Kong Democracy Council, Samuel Chu Muk-man, the son of “Occupy Central” co-founder Chu Yiu-ming. Having received the list, Chu passed it not only to US senators Ted Cruz and Rick Scott for action, but also to Hong Kong Watch’s Luke de Pulford, in the UK.
At this point, Finn Lau appeared on the scene. Prosecutors disclosed how, using Jimmy Lai’s finances, he and Andy Li had created SWHK in August 2019. At that stage, SWHK’s role included campaigning for foreign sanctions against Hong Kong, as well as seeking global condemnation of Chinese officials and the Hong Kong Police Force.
As for Lau, he is welcome to stew in his world of make-believe and malice, at least for now. In the long run, however, the company of fantasists and malcontents will inevitably pall, and reality will set in. There will, moreover, be increasing numbers of people who feel his “bounty” should, at the very least, be quintupled, and who can blame them
It also placed hostile articles in overseas newspapers, and foreign agents like Luke de Pulford (a lackey of Benedict Rogers, the serial fantasist and anti-China propagandist), were, prosecutors revealed, engaged to persuade 32 countries to terminate their extradition and mutual legal assistance agreements with Hong Kong, which some did. Lai and Simon, moreover, also offered free publicity for SWHK in Apple Daily, and Lau, who was said to be its spiritual leader, was told he could use copyrighted photographs for propaganda purposes.
With a record like that, Boris Johnson’s government should obviously have sent Lau packing when he turned up at Heathrow Airport. Instead of which, in defiance of its professed commitment to the “rules-based order,” Lau was given safe haven. Although his alleged activities violated the fundamental principles underpinning the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, notably, “the maintenance of the stability and prosperity of Hong Kong”, the government welcomed him as an honored guest.
Once the arrest warrant and the accompanying “bounty” were announced, Lau started bleating about his situation to anybody who would listen.
On July 13, for example, he told The Daily Telegraph, in an op-ed titled Hongkongers Are Open Targets on British Streets, that he was more sinned against than sinning, and some readers will have been fooled. Indeed, he demonstrated a capacity for myth-making that will have delighted his mentor, Benedict Rogers, the propagandist-in-chief.
Lau even told his readers he had fled to the UK to escape “the oppressive hand of the Chinese Communist Party”, without once mentioning his own vile activities. There was no mention of his lam chau strategy, his links to subversive organizations, or his attempts to destroy the “one country, two systems” policy (to which the UK had ostensibly committed itself in the Joint Declaration).
So it was that the man who wanted the “mutual destruction” of Hong Kong was able to use The Daily Telegraph’s pages to dupe its readers into believing that all he and his confederates wanted to do was “express our rights to the freedom of press, assembly and expression”, and duplicity could be no bolder.
Lau even claimed that his former associate Jimmy Lai had been imprisoned for “questionable fraud charges” without once mentioning that he was convicted after a trial in which he enjoyed all the protections available in a common law system, including the presumption of innocence and the conviction threshold of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Nor were readers told that if Lai is aggrieved by his conviction or sentence, he can challenge them on appeal, all the way up to the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal (upon which British judges sit).
As with others of his type, Lau also tried to harm Hong Kong’s economy, even though this would hurt ordinary working people. He told the readers that “businesses face higher risks”, and that it was “not the global financial hub the world once knew”. Although the city is now bouncing back from the damage that Lau and his allies caused, he wrote, in a squalid attempt to alarm the business world, that “the rule of law is being dismantled”.
What, however, Lau deliberately suppressed was the happy news that, in the World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2022 (the world’s leading source for original, independent data on the rule of law), Hong Kong was ranked 22nd out of the 140 places surveyed, ahead, for example, of the US, at 26th; Poland, at 36th; and Greece, at 44th.
As Lau, together with his Hong Kong Watch controllers and assorted parliamentary sympathizers, is desperate to undermine the city’s judiciary, he could not help bragging about how he had appeared before a parliamentary committee on July 5. It was chaired by the neo-McCarthyite parliamentarian Bob Seely, who lionizes people like Lau, his longtime ally.
Although Seely is a vice-chairman of the notorious All-Party Parliamentary Group on Hong Kong, which is financed by SWHK and, at its behest, periodically cooks up fallacious reports about the city, his own ties to SWHK are less well-known. In 2019, for example, after he visited Hong Kong on a three-day visit, the parliamentary “Register of Members’ Interests” revealed that all his expenses were paid for by SWHK, then controlled by Lau. His involvement with Lau, therefore, is of long-standing, and, partly in return for past favors, he now makes parliamentary facilities available to him for propaganda purposes, an abuse that cries out for remedying by the parliamentary authorities.
Be that as it may, Lau, at the hearing, titillated Seely and the other bigots (who included the serial fantasist Benedict Rogers, the US-based political agitator and Jimmy Lai acolyte Mark Clifford, and Lau’s fellow fugitive Christopher Mung Siu-tat, who is accused of advocating Hong Kong’s “independence”) with a call, as he informed his readers, for the authorities to “bar British judges from sitting on the Hong Kong High Court” (by which he presumably meant the Court of Final Appeal).
This was unsurprising, as Lau, Seely, Rogers and their ilk have a vested interest in weakening the city’s judicial arrangements. They know full well that their claims about the rule of law being dead will not be taken seriously so long as the city’s legal system is overseen not only by eminent local judges, but also by distinguished jurists from overseas, including the UK.
By any yardstick, it is disgraceful that the British authorities should allow lowlifes like Lau to use their territory for hostile purposes inimical to China, and deplorable that ideologues like Seely are able to provide him with parliamentary access.
As if this was not bad enough, Lau also sought to give his readers the impression he had been beaten up by Chinese agents in London in 2020, although he naturally provided no evidence. A little digging, however, has revealed that, although he was attacked one evening while out walking, the assault occurred in Tottenham, a suburb notorious for its high violent crime rate.
Indeed, one online review site described Tottenham as the city’s third-most dangerous borough, where residents are advised not to go out alone at night. Muggings are common, and, at the time, Lau told Stand News he was assaulted by “several black men”, who sounded for all the world, despite his subsequent spin, like local yobbos.
The Daily Telegraph clearly does itself no favors by providing a platform for Lau’s propaganda, not least because a reputable newspaper owes its readers a duty of fact-checking. If, however, it now sees its role as being simply a purveyor of anti-China sentiments, however inflammatory, then so be it, although everybody who recalls its proud history will be saddened.
The newspaper may, unfortunately, feel that since the UK’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly, wants to protect Lau and his fellow suspects from the long arm of the law, there can be no harm in playing along, even if it betrays the tradition of honest reporting with which it was once honorably associated.
As for Lau, he is welcome to stew in his world of make-believe and malice, at least for now. In the long run, however, the company of fantasists and malcontents will inevitably pall, and reality will set in. There will, moreover, be increasing numbers of people who feel his “bounty” should, at the very least, be quintupled, and who can blame them?
The author is a senior counsel and law professor, and was previously the director of public prosecutions of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.