While the world struggled with the COVID-19 pandemic during the holiday season and Americans focused on Donald Trump’s frantic efforts to reverse the election he lost, China ended the year in a typical way. As usual, the Chinese authorities embarked on their annual Christmas tradition of imprisoning dissidents and critics when the world was too distracted to pay attention.
Shortly after the Thanksgiving, Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow and Ivan Lam, young icons of the Hong Kong 2014 pro-democracy protests, were jailed for participating in an illegal assembly in 2019. Three days after Christmas, a court in Shanghai sentenced civilian journalist Zhang Zhan to four years in prison for critical reporting on the government’s handling of COVID-19 in Wuhan early in the outbreak.
On December 30, ten Hong Kong activists arrested in August when they tried to flee to Taiwan by boat and were detained in Shenzhen were jailed. Tang Kai-yin and Quinn Moon will spend three and two years in a mainland prison, respectively, for organizing an illegal border crossing. Eight others were each sentenced to seven months while two minors, aged 17 and 18, were handed over to Hong Kong police.
And on December 31, media magnate and activist Jimmy Lai was again put behind bars after being released on bail pending trial over alleged crimes under the new national law on national security, aimed at ambiguously defining acts of secession. to establish collusion with foreign forces. and other actions, and can be used to suppress all forms of disagreement against the Chinese government. Police in Hong Kong on Wednesday arrested dozens of pro-democracy politicians and activists for allegedly undermining state power under national security legislation.
The persecution of dissidents has worsened since President Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, but the holiday tradition of prison activists was one he inherited. In 2009, Liu Xiaobo, a proponent of constitutional reform involved in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, was sentenced to 11 years in prison on Christmas Day. He won the Nobel Peace Prize the following year and died in custody in 2017. In 2011, dissident Chen Xi was sentenced to a decade in prison on Boxing Day. In 2015, Yang Maodong, Liu Yuandong and Sun Desheng, all activists protesting against censorship, were sentenced just after Thanksgiving. The list goes on.
During 2020, however, Beijing acted as if it were Christmas all year round by trampling on freedoms, especially in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. For several years now, about 1 million Muslim members of minority groups, mostly Uighurs, have been detained in detention camps in Xinjiang. Despite global outrage, it appears that these facilities have been expanded in 2020 and supervision has been strengthened.
In April, several senior leaders of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, including Martin Lee and Margaret Ng, were arrested. In June, the government in Beijing imposed national security legislation on Hong Kong, breaking the idea that the area’s freedoms would be preserved until 2047, as promised in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration.
In July, the Hong Kong legislation was postponed by a year and Xu Zhangrun, a leading law professor in Beijing and an outspoken critic of Xi, was arrested and fired from his position at a top university. In September, a former real estate mogul was sentenced to 18 years in prison on corruption charges after publishing an essay on Xi, and authorities launched a bilingual education program in Mongolia that critics say was an attempt to dilute Mongolian culture. .
Just before the holiday in November, the Hong Kong government disqualified four pro-democracy lawmakers after Beijing’s leading legislature ruled that lawmakers threatening national security should be suspended, leaving the legislature without opposition.
Although it was a cruel year for rights and freedoms in areas under China’s control, the Beijing government had few consequences for its actions. In December, the European Union signed an investment agreement with Beijing after China agreed to ratify the International Labor Organization’s rules on forced labor. In other words, the EU has agreed to ignore the well-documented forced labor in Xinjiang, the fight in Hong Kong, and more.
The new year has begun with new distractions, and more will surely come. This could be bad news for the millions of people oppressed under the thumb of Beijing.
Jessie Lau, a Hong Kong native, is a writer and journalist based in London. Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a history professor at UC Irvine and author of “Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink.” Amy Hawkins is a Brits journalist who did research and interviews for ‘Vigil’.