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ABC News
5 days ago
- General
- ABC News
Activist Ted Hui targeted in intimidation campaign SA Law Society says is 'deeply concerning'
Four years after fleeing Hong Kong, outspoken pro-democracy advocate Ted Hui says he continues to be the target of an intimidation campaign involving an anonymous "wanted" letter and fake pamphlets. The South Australian Law Society has come out in support of Mr Hui, a former Hong Kong parliamentarian who is now an Adelaide-based lawyer, and said it was "deeply concerned" about the content of those documents. The anonymous letter sent to Mr Hui's colleagues purports to be from Hong Kong authorities and offered a reward of $HK1 million, about $200,000 Australian dollars, for information leading to the arrest of Mr Hui or the whereabouts of his family. Mr Hui posted the letter on his public social media accounts, and said it contained fictitious claims that he and his family had fled Hong Kong with the proceeds of crime. The fake pamphlet was sent to Adelaide mosques, misrepresenting Mr Hui with false claims that he was a pro-Israel lawyer who wanted to "wage war" against "Islamic terrorism". Mr Hui told the ABC the provocative pamphlet was "trying to stir conflict" and said the continued intimidation and harassment directed at him was "frustrating". "I've been here in Australia over four years now, but it's never been peaceful in the past four years," he said. "The Chinese regime's long arm has never stopped trying to harass me internationally. The 42-year-old father fled Hong Kong while on bail for protest-related criminal charges. He arrived first in Europe in December 2020 and, in March 2021, Mr Hui became the first Hong Kong politician to be granted a special travel exemption to enter Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2022, he was convicted in his absence of the protest-related charges and sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail. He began working for an Adelaide law firm in 2023. Earlier this year, the federal government lodged diplomatic protests with China after Mr Hui and another pro-democracy advocate, Kevin Yam, was also targeted by the apparent intimidation campaign. In 2023, Hong Kong authorities issued arrest warrants for both men and placed a "bounty" on their heads in the amount of $HK 1 million, or about $200,000 Australian dollars. Mr Hui said he was viewed as a "fugitive on the run" and living in exile by Chinese authorities. "I have an arrest warrant over my head and a bounty of about $200,000 Australian, that's $HK1 million over my head," he said. "There are public appeals everywhere … with my picture showing up, saying that 'this man is on the run, please capture this man and bring him to the Hong Kong police'." Mr Hui said he spent his first year in Australia constantly looking over his shoulder, but said he now felt safer. But he said he could not rule out the threat of being kidnapped and handed over to Chinese authorities. "I will just be kidnapped and my family wouldn't know where I am." Mr Hui said the continued harassment made him more determined. "Over the past four years they couldn't make me shut up internationally, so they have to find some other way to make me shut up. "It's not going to work." He said he would use his freedom in Australia to "speak for my people back in Hong Kong". In a statement, SA Law Society president Marissa Mackie said the society was "deeply concerned" about the claims made in the material about Mr Hui. "No member of the legal profession, or anyone for that matter, deserves to be intimidated, harassed, surveilled, or impersonated by any other person," she said. "The Law Society denounces these intimidation tactics used against Mr Hui." Ms Mackie said the society "strongly supports a person's right to express their political beliefs without fear of persecution". The comments were echoed by chair of the Law Society's Human Rights Committee, Raffaele Piccolo, who said it was important for the society to speak out because Mr Hui "shouldn't be subjected to that type of harassment". "It's very concerning for the Law Society when one of our members, or for that matter, any person that's a member of our community appears to be targeted when they peacefully express a political opinion," he said. "That's one of the rights that we hold dear to our hearts in Australia, is that people can express their political opinions without interruption, in a peaceful manner." A spokesperson for Foreign Minister Penny Wong said the Australian government had raised concerns about this matter directly with Hong Kong and Chinese authorities. "Attempts to target individuals in Australia are reprehensible and threaten our national sovereignty, as well as the safety and security of Australians," the spokesperson said. The Chinese Embassy in Canberra has been contacted for comment. In a previous statement to the ABC, the Hong Kong government said it would not issue anonymous letters. "For those who have fled overseas and are suspected of having committed offences under the Hong Kong National Security Law, the law enforcement agencies of the HKSAR [Hong Kong] Government will definitely pursue them in accordance with the law and take every measure, including cutting off their funding sources, so as to prevent and suppress them from continuing to engage in acts and activities endangering national security," the statement said.
The Age
02-05-2025
- Business
- The Age
He evaded Beijing's clutches. But this Adelaide lawyer is still a wanted man
This story is part of the May 3 edition of Good Weekend. See all 14 stories. The Virgin Airlines pilot is the first to spot them: three sleek Chinese warships sailing 278 kilometres off Sydney. Australian defence officials are notified; nearly 50 commercial flights are diverted after the warships issue an alert that they are about to conduct live-fire drills, an event unprecedented in these waters off Australia's eastern seaboard since World War II. While the drills do not breach international law, there's no mistaking the test of resolve they're presenting to the Australian government: China has arrived, the world has changed and Beijing is not to be messed with. Thirteen hundred kilometres from Sydney, lawyer Ted Hui is at a business networking meeting in the Adelaide suburb of Glenelg. Hui mingles in the reception area while we wait for our morning coffees. He is representing his employer, RSA Law, which specialises in litigation, injury claims and inheritance disputes. He's surrounded by local conveyancers and mortgage brokers, each proudly displaying their name tags. 'Did you hear about the Chinese warships off Sydney Harbour?' Helen Glanville, the network's vivacious charity work specialist, asks Hui as she collects the drinks from the reception desk. 'They're coming for you, mate.' The news of the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy ships that would circle most of Australia had broken minutes before we arrived. Hui laughs off the threat. It's an instinctive response to relieve the pressure of the $HK1 million ($200,000) bounty hanging over his head. 'He's a wanted man,' Glanville informs a couple of the attendees milling about. 'Just a few national security breaches,' 42-year-old Hui says as he sips his cappuccino. 'It's a long story.' For 20 years, Ted Hui has closely witnessed the Chinese government's rapid ascent as it manages the world's second-largest economy and exercises its growing power to bully those it deems a threat. As they wolf down their avocado on toast, few of the dozen participants in this meeting are fully aware of his journey from public enemy to Adelaide suburban lawyer. Even fewer are aware of the subterranean geopolitical espionage that Hui's arrival has unleashed in their suburbs. To his friends and colleagues in Adelaide, he's just Ted. To the Chinese and Hong Kong governments, Ted Hui Chi-fung is a traitor guilty of numerous heinous crimes. In Hong Kong, wanted posters for Hui have hung from noticeboards outside police stations. In Australia, he's the target of patriotic Chinese thugs and foreign interference campaigns. Hui lives each day knowing he and his family will always be targeted by the Chinese government because of what he represents: the last free democratic activists of Hong Kong. Student activist Ted Hui wipes tears of pepper spray from his stinging eyes as he presses forward in a line against the riot police, fortified by the tens of thousands of angry protesters behind and around him. It's January 1, 2020, and Hong Kong police have been sending volleys of rubber bullets into a massive crowd, which consists of Hongkongers from all strata of society – lawyers, students, cleaners, journalists, waiters – as the clashes turn violent. There have been other demonstrations against the increasing power of the Chinese government over Hong Kong in the past two decades, most notably the student-led occupation of the financial district in 2014, which became known as the Umbrella Movement. But this latest revolt has been going on for months, turning into a pitched battle. The protesters are fighting for Hong Kong's survival as a democracy, and this could be their last stand. Hui isn't giving up without a fight. When the British handed over Hong Kong to China in 1997, the Chinese government guaranteed its self-autonomy for 50 years. The cosmopolitan city of almost seven million, long a prosperous and bustling port, was to exist under a 'one country, two systems' model, with free speech and an independent press enshrined in law. But as the years rolled on, this high degree of autonomy was whittled away, initially as mainlanders flooded into Hong Kong, and then by legislation. Schools, the legislature and political parties were overhauled. Hui absorbed these changes while growing into his teenage years in Hong Kong's middle-class neighbourhood of Tuen Mun with his sister, father (a wholesale vegetable price regulator) and mother (a part-time public servant). To his school friends he was Teddy, the English name he chose in British Hong Kong after his hero, Tottenham Hotspur striker Teddy Sheringham, but he couldn't understand why Hongkongers didn't take more interest in their local soccer teams. 'As a teenager, I was thinking more and more about local Hongkongers' identity,' he recalls. Hui watched with alarm as a city that once celebrated Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei and held annual vigils to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre was slowly being brought under the control of Beijing. Teddy became Ted ('Teddy was just too cute,' he says, smiling) and he graduated from high school, where he excelled at English and religious studies. He poured his attention into history books and started attending Tiananmen Square vigils. He gained admission to the City University of Hong Kong, where he studied law, then spent two years in Canada. 'I experienced what freedom was like,' he says. 'I thought, 'Going back to Hong Kong, that's something that I need to be engaged in.' ' Frustrated by student politics in Hong Kong and eager to make his mark on the city's political future, Hui joined the Democratic Party (DP) as a researcher straight out of university. It was there, at the headquarters of Hong Kong's flagship opposition party, that he met his wife. They were married in 2009. Two kids, a daughter (now aged 13) and a son (now 11), would follow. Hui's house in Adelaide is still filled with DP memorabilia: a shrine to the last vestiges of Hong Kong's political resistance (the party announced it was fully disbanding in April). After five years in the DP backroom and another five as a local councillor, Hui in 2016 was elected to the Legislative Council, Hong Kong's highest parliamentary body, which enacts, amends and repeals laws. It's where he gained a reputation in the South China Morning Post for his 'exaggerated responses to hot-button issues'. In 2018, he snatched a civil servant's phone after claiming she had been filming legislators voting over plans to station more mainland Chinese security officers in Hong Kong. (Two years later, he would throw a stink bomb made of rotting plant matter into the chamber of the Legislative Council, stacked with an increasing number of members loyal to Beijing.) 'I was in a dangerous situation. I knew that the rules of the game had changed.' Ted Hui Demonstrations flared up periodically as the mainland exerted more authority but in mid-2019 they escalated dramatically when the city's pro-mainland chief executive, Carrie Lam, tried to rush through a new extradition law, which at its most extreme meant anyone could be sent to the mainland for anything that offended the Chinese Communist Party. For months, up to two million people choked Hong Kong's streets in protests that grabbed headlines across the globe. But the Beijing-backed Hong Kong government was unrelenting, arresting hundreds while shutting down critical media organisations, stacking courts with sympathetic judges and banning opposition political gatherings. Foreign governments issued statements of 'serious concern' but took little concrete action. By early 2020, the Chinese government made it clear that it expected school curricula to be rewritten 'to love the motherland'. Most forms of protest, including colourful Post-it notes with democratic slogans and pro-Hong Kong songs, were banned. Only one expression of protest remained: holding up blank pieces of paper. Hui was regularly followed home from work by security officials. By July 2020, his office had been raided three times in six months. 'I was in a dangerous situation,' he recalls. 'I knew that the rules of the game had changed and that this was their new tactic, that they would come up with new things and they would use whatever means to put you in jail.' Beijing had begun implementing a new national security law, which gave the Chinese government unprecedented powers to sentence those deemed guilty of subversion to life imprisonment. In August, Hui was arrested after participating in a small protest in a local park in Tuen Mun, his childhood suburb, 11 kilometres south of the border with the mainland. He posted bail, but the Hong Kong police confiscated his passport. The only way for a Hong Kong politician to get their passport back was with a formal invitation from a foreign government. Hui and his wife had spent months agonising over potential scenarios: if he made it out of Hong Kong, what would they do? The Chinese government had a long history of detaining and questioning relatives of fugitives. They could seize assets, confiscate passports, and make it impossible for those left behind to find work or sell property. Local authorities could impose education, employment and social security restrictions on family members of people in jail or those who have escaped prosecution. Hui needed serious help. Both he and his family were at risk. Farewell to Hong Kong Hong Kong Airport, November 30, 2020, 4pm: Hui stands alone at the check-in for flight QR817, the first leg of his journey to Copenhagen via Doha. More than 70 million passengers passed through this canopy of steel and glass in 2019, but on this day it is deserted, save for the lawyer and the check-in staff hovering behind the counter. Ticket: check. Passport: check. COVID-19 vaccine: check. After months of planning, a grand scheme to smuggle Hui out of Beijing's reach is in its final test. Now all he needs to do is to get on the plane. The passport scanner at border control flashes red. Hui is taken into a cold, featureless room for questioning. 'The official lectured me for 30 minutes,' he recalls. 'Warning me of the court's permission for me to go overseas … then reminding me of the deadlines: there are trials waiting for you.' Hui had booked a return flight four days later to convince authorities that he would be back in time for his court appearance. Five officials escorted Hui to the boarding gate. 'It was a sign – we are watching your every step,' he says. At 7.05pm, flight QR817 takes off for Doha. Hui records a video as the plane flies past Victoria Harbour, through southern China and across Hainan. It is the last time Hui will see Hong Kong. Nervously waiting for Hui at Copenhagen airport is his good friend, Perth-born Anders Storgaard. Increasingly aware of his own political peril, Hui had asked Storgaard months earlier if he knew of any meetings that needed a guest to discuss less-controversial topics such as climate change. The rest was left implied but unsaid: nothing to do with human rights, democracy or national security, which would trigger the ire of Beijing and stop Hui from travelling. Storgaard understood instinctively that Hui was looking for an escape from Hong Kong via an invitation to an overseas conference. 'The problem was we didn't have anything concrete we could invite him to.' Storgaard had first met Hui on a political exchange in Denmark in 2019. 'I remember him saying it was the last straw of the democratic movement in Hong Kong,' says Storgaard. 'And he hoped that young people in Denmark would cherish their freedom.' Hui became a regular guest on Storgaard's weekly conservative radio program on Denmark's talk station Radio24syv, and later a close friend. Hui would spend evenings updating Storgaard on the latest political crackdown in the city he had once loved. 'There was just something about Ted,' recalls Storgaard. 'He has this inner strength that you can just feel. What was really striking to me was how much we had in common, even though there were so many kilometres between us, because we were all engaged in democracy. The main difference was that they had to risk their lives.' Storgaard was not a member of Denmark's government. But as the chairman of the Young Conservatives Denmark, he had the contacts and the bullishness of youth to see an unlikely plan through. 'When I got the message, I think my heart was racing away at 300 beats a minute because I was so worried, but also I realised how dangerous this could be,' he says. COVID had shut the world's borders. Zoom had killed in-person conferences. 'For the first couple of weeks, we tried to look for real meetings to invite him to,' says Storgaard. 'But there were none. So we decided, 'Let's just make an invitation.' ' Storgaard, then 26, and his then 25-year-old friend Thomas Rohden, now a regional councillor for the Social-Liberal Party, got on the phone to their contacts in the Danish parliament. They rang non-government organisations, environmental groups and two Danish MPs, the Independent Greens' Uffe Elbæk and the Conservative People's Party's Katarina Ammitzbøll. They convinced them to sign off on the official letter inviting Hui to a series of meetings and conferences that did not exist. The invitations included meetings with the Youth Climate Council, Greenpeace and the Danish parliamentary committee on climate, energy and utilities. 'We said we wanted to discuss the United Nations' sustainable goals of climate change together with mayors, members of parliament and all these things with Ted,' says Storgaard. 'It felt like a very fluffy invitation.' But on a Danish parliamentary letterhead with an official stamp, it looked the part. The Hong Kong court responded by arguing Hui could not travel because he would have to go into COVID quarantine after the trip and miss his next hearing. 'I had to make a new invitation,' says Storgaard. ' 'It's so important for us to hear all these things about the environment from Ted that we will rearrange, so we're moving the conference to a different date.' ' Four days before Hui was due to fly out, Storgaard received another message. It was an official notification from the Hong Kong police asking for the complete program of Hui's activities in Denmark. 'They were probably getting a bit suspicious about the whole situation, and the problem was that he needed this more or less ASAP,' explains Storgaard. 'So within four hours, Thomas and I had to call all the parliamentarians and NGOs and just ask them again, 'We have this situation, we are trying to get this guy out of Hong Kong. If somebody calls you and contacts you from China, are you willing to say you're going to have a meeting with this guy?' And to my surprise, everybody said yes. For me, it proved that when people are actually given the choice to help someone to fight for democracy, a lot of people are willing to do it.' Storgaard did not tell Hui that the environmental meetings were a ruse. Instead, he was going to meet the Danish Foreign Policy Committee and the former NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen. 'The funny thing was that I was actually very prepared,' recalls Hui. 'I had a bunch of [climate change] policy documents from my parliament, and I prepared the speech to really talk about those issues.' Hui did not tell Storgaard that he, too, harboured a secret: he was also going to smuggle his family out of Hong Kong. Renee Xia, director of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a US-based NGO, says the 'Chinese government's collective punishment of human rights defenders' families appears to be a state policy'. Hui says, 'My family didn't want me to come back. They said even though we're in trouble, they didn't believe the regime would keep them in jail for a very long time.' Hui was determined to avoid that outcome. 'I didn't want them to be held hostage,' he says. Minutes after he landed in Copenhagen, Hui told Storgaard that his wife, parents and two children would be on flights to London in two days' time and that he would have to avoid speculation about not returning to Hong Kong until they were out safely. Loading Uffe Elbæk, one of the MPs who signed the letter of invitation to Hui, did not get the memo. 'Welcome to Denmark @tedhuichifung,' he wrote on Twitter. 'We will do whatever to secure your stay.' The tweet set off a media storm in Hong Kong. Then it forced Hui to lie. On Facebook and in statements to the Hong Kong press, he reassured the government that he had every intention of returning to face trial. 'I will continue to complete my official foreign visit as scheduled,' he told them. 'For the next two days, [Hui] had to act like he was not intending to escape and he was going to go back to Hong Kong,' says Storgaard. 'Because if he didn't, he was worried that his family might be kept back in Hong Kong. But some of the Danish media had found out about Ted's [intentions] because one of the members of parliament sadly had talked with the press.' What followed was a high-stakes exercise in media management led by two 20-something political novices suddenly thrust into the front line of an emerging diplomatic crisis. 'We had to keep the press at bay and keep everything down for it not to explode,' Storgaard recalls. 'Because if that was the case, then we might have a hostile situation in Hong Kong. 'I remember asking the politicians to stop … I need to take this message to see whether my family is safe.' Ted Hui 'Thomas [Rohden] basically said directly to reporters that if they wrote what they intended to write, then it was on them: a family was going to be taken hostage in Hong Kong.' An agonising 48 hours passed. 'You could just see it, he looked like a broken man. He just looked so tired,' Storgaard says of Hui waiting to hear from his wife. On December 3, just after lunch, the message arrived. Hui was in the middle of speaking to the Danish Foreign Policy Committee. 'I remember asking the politicians to stop for five minutes: I need to take this message to see whether my family is safe,' he says. 'They told me they were safe on the plane.' Sandwiched between the grand Tivoli Gardens and the trendy Meatpacking District, City Hotel Nebo in central Copenhagen has more modest rooms than its location might suggest. Bottles of Coke and sandwich wrappers litter the table inside Hui's room. His suitcase is overflowing with clothes. Twelve hours after his wife and children said they had left Hong Kong, he receives another message. They have just landed in London. Storgaard, the baby-faced conservative, and Hui, the Hong Kong lawyer, have succeeded in hoodwinking the world's most fearsome security regime. Hui, who adopts the look of a bookish bureaucrat more than that of a revolutionary, drafts a 638-word statement. 'I officially announce my exile,' Hui writes. 'I know this is a luxury because many brothers and sisters in suffering have no future at all.' Hui hesitates. He knows that once he publishes, he will never be able to return to Hong Kong. Storgaard counts down from three. 'It's heavier than I thought it would be,' Hui says of the impact of leaving his homeland behind. Then he posts the statement on Facebook. 'It was like the whole room just exploded, messages were flooding in, his phone was ringing, all the phones were ringing,' says Storgaard. Denmark had helped him escape, but it was no place for Hui to call home. The language barrier would make work difficult. Denmark's government had largely pushed a pro-business engagement with Beijing and was only beginning to grapple with the threat of foreign interference. 'For me, Hongkongers are the freedom fighters of today.' Anders Storgaard Hui and other political exiles from Hong Kong had already been plotting to spread out to countries on the front line of the emerging geopolitical confrontation with China: Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia. Several had settled in the UK, which had taken thousands of Hongkongers with documentation registering them as overseas UK citizens prior to the 1997 handover. Australia had a relatively high number of Hong Kong immigrants but few pro-democracy leaders. At the time, it also had a conservative Coalition government that was welcoming of Hongkongers and increasingly hostile to Beijing. 'It was strategic,' says Hui. Before he leaves Copenhagen, Storgaard hands Hui a pin from the 1940s. It's a Danish flag with a silver cross and the crown of Christian X, Denmark's wartime king. 'It was used by people under the Nazis to show that they were resisting the German occupation of Denmark,' says Storgaard. 'I gave it to him because for me, Hongkongers are the freedom fighters of today. That was my gift to Ted, to show him how much of a hero I believe he is.' A man in exile Hui stands outside his house in Adelaide. The banksia trees wrap around the cul-de-sac. It is early evening in this little slice of suburbia that now houses an international fugitive and his family. The only thing that distinguishes Hui's yard from the neighbours is the astroturf proudly laid out on his front lawn. 'Hongkongers are so bad at gardens,' he says with a laugh. It is not the only contrast with life in Hong Kong, one of the world's most densely populated cities, where the average apartment size for a family of three is 44 square metres. 'I bought myself a secondhand caravan, that's the most Aussie thing I do here,' he says. Hui is a torn man. Dozens of his colleagues in the pro-democracy movement no longer enjoy their freedom. 'Most of them are either overseas or in jail,' he says. 'There's value in staying in prison. It's a moral call. But not everyone had to do it. People can be outside shouting, we have some value as well.' I ask Hui a question that has preoccupied me ever since he first told me about his escape three years ago: did the Chinese and Hong Kong police let him go? Or is the world's most feared security force more gullible than we might think? 'I don't think there's any mercy in this regime,' he declares. 'I was seen as a more radical thinker. So it was me that they were after first. They hinted at prosecuting me for some very minor crimes. I got the warning signs early. I was lucky enough to leave. Some of the more moderate ones were not so lucky.' What is certain is that for those who stayed behind, the punishment for relatively minor crimes has been more severe than anything Hui has had to endure. Last November, a Hong Kong court sentenced 45 pro-democracy activists to up to 10 years in jail. Among them: Australian Gordon Ng for 'subverting state power' for his role in an unofficial preselection for disqualified pro-democracy leaders. Hui has been sentenced in absentia for his first crime of skipping bail and contempt of court. But that is only the start of his rap sheet. He has since been charged with far more serious crimes of inciting secession and colluding with foreign forces to endanger national security, charges that carry maximum terms of life imprisonment. In February, a Hong Kong court seized all of his and his family's assets, totalling about $160,000, and then went after his lawyers, confiscating any payments made by Hui to his legal representation. A Hong Kong government spokesman declared, 'Hui Chi-fung has committed numerous heinous crimes. He conspired with foreign politicians in 2020 to forge documents and deceive the court with false information in order to obtain the court's permission to leave Hong Kong while he was on bail, and jumped bail and absconded overseas … Hui Chi-fung is currently a wanted person with a reward notice by the Police.' The confiscation of payments to his lawyers has Hui particularly incensed. 'By seizing my lawyer's money, that means I cannot represent myself in any way, and no lawyer is going to represent me,' he says. 'It's bluntly against human rights.' Today, there's the matter of that $HK1 million bounty for information leading to Hui's arrest, as there is with fellow Australian lawyer and pro-democracy activist Kevin Yam. In March, Yam and Hui were targeted in a letter campaign described as 'reprehensible' and 'threaten[ing] our national sovereignty' by Foreign Minister Penny Wong. The letters offered residents in Melbourne and Adelaide a reward for information on the pair. In January, South Australian Police alerted Hui to a pamphlet that was circulating among Adelaide mosques that purported to show Hui offering legal services to the Jewish community. The pamphlets were sent from Macau, one of China's semi-autonomous regions, which is connected with Hong Kong via the world's longest sea bridge. Hui is used to receiving regular threats. What has surprised him is how brazen the latest campaigns have become. The Macau stamp was so obvious, Hui says, that it could lead to only one conclusion: the sender wanted him to know where the threat was coming from. It was not a warning to Hui, it was a warning to other members of the community: speak out – and this could happen to you. In Adelaide, Beijing's operations are expanding. Ordinary Hongkongers self-censor because they don't know where the red lines are. It means Hui's Australian contacts are happy to meet with him in public, but his closest allies in the Hong Kong community are terrified. One Hongkonger, a social worker who migrated in 2019 after taking part in protests in Hong Kong, says he can't be seen near Hui in Adelaide's small Chinatown. When we meet outside at a local pub on a brisk February afternoon, he asks to sit inside. Not because of the chill, but because of the prying eyes he suspects are reporting meetings with dissidents to Beijing. 'It's the satellites,' he says, referring to Chinese migrants loyal to the Chinese government who report the activities of dissidents to the embassy. 'There are people who report to the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]. 'We support Ted and what he is doing, but Ted is under a bounty, and we have to keep a safe profile.' Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) boss Mike Burgess warned in February that multiple foreign governments have been continually attempting to 'monitor, harass, intimidate and coerce co-operation' from migrants in Australia. 'This includes trying to strong-arm people to report on other members of their diaspora community, threatening perceived dissidents and their family members with violence, and coercing people in Australia to return to the country of their birth to face questioning or charges – or possibly worse,' he said. Loading Burgess did not name China but, for Hongkongers, it is not an abstract fear. In 2020, the Chinese government established a portal that allows people to submit reports to Chinese security services for political crimes, allowing migrants to dob in their neighbours. The portal, which is accessible in Australia, allows allegations to be made against dissidents for what's termed 'attacking the party, the state system and major policies', endangering national security, harming the national image and slandering heroes. Hui and his fellow exiles have been relentless in their advocacy since leaving Hong Kong, lobbying the Australian, British and US governments to take stronger action against Beijing, while also trying to protect Hongkongers overseas. Letters from opposition home affairs minister James Paterson and Labor MP Steve Georganas helped convince the Supreme Court of South Australia to allow him to practise as a lawyer despite a string of convictions and charges emanating from Hong Kong's once highly regarded common-law system imported from the British. Hui was admitted as a barrister and solicitor at South Australia's Supreme Court in 2023. Hui's boss, Roger Sallis, now introduces him as Australia's most convicted lawyer. His growing infamy may have its commercial benefits. 'I have a special niche,' explains Hui over a lunch of char siu pork at a Cantonese restaurant in the Adelaide CBD. Chinese-Australian clients who don't trust Chinese lawyers with connections to the mainland are increasingly turning to Hui to help them navigate contract disputes, property sales and visa applications without tipping off authorities. Often, the same clients will ask if Hui's name can be taken off the invoice, a request he is happy to grant so that no paper trail links them to the renegade lawyer. 'I'm one of the few who's past the point of no return,' says Hui. 'One client said to me she wanted someone of Chinese background who understands the Chinese system but who can be trusted, without any connections with authorities. I told her I would be the only person in Australia that she could trust.' Inside the business networking breakfast in Glenelg, Hui riffs on contract disputes, the legal obligations of company directors and admissible forms of evidence. He holds the floor while drumming up business, giving little indication that until two years ago, the career political apparatchik had never worked in the private sector before. 'I don't enjoy the spotlight,' he says. The politician who once threw a stink bomb in the Hong Kong Legislative Council maintains he prefers to be at home with his cat, Milk Bun, or playing cello in his living room than manning the political barricades. Last year, he joined the Liberal Party. Yam, his fellow Hong Kong fugitive, joined the ALP. Placing Australia's two best-known Hong Kong dissidents in each major party was also strategic, says Hui. 'We want to have some high-profile fugitives on both sides with Labor and with Liberal, so even if there's a change of government, there will be someone in that party. We want to represent to the Australian public that our advocacy is bipartisan.' Ideologically, Hui does not fit neatly into the Liberal Party. He would have voted Yes for the Voice to Parliament and is generally suspicious of big business and in favour of greater social services. He did not partake in a Hong Kong campaign to protect the rights of same-sex couples because of his strong Christian faith. Hui says he joined the Liberal Party because of its hawkish stance towards the Chinese government. It helps that the party raced through the approvals necessary to get him and his family to Australia. 'Ideologically, they understand the China risk a lot more, so it will match what I'm doing in my advocacy work,' he says. That same perspective has largely carried through to the rest of the Hong Kong community, which now leans Liberal. But it has burned the Coalition in the much larger Chinese community, which now swings heavily towards Labor. Loading The number of representatives in Parliament from Chinese backgrounds, including from Hong Kong, remains woefully below their proportional representation in Australian society. On a per capita basis, Australia has more people of Chinese ancestry than any country outside Asia. More than 1.3 million Australian residents identified themselves as having Chinese ancestry in the 2021 census, 5.5 per cent of Australia's population. That put Chinese-Australians behind only those of English, Australian, Irish and Scottish ancestry. In Parliament, there are 227 MPs and senators. None was born in China, Hong Kong or Macau. Three Labor MPs, Sam Lim, Sally Sitou and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, have Chinese heritage, but that is still just 1.3 per cent of all MPs. There are none in the Coalition. Hui believes Australian political parties can do better at broadening their representation. So can migrant communities. In the Hong Kong diaspora, their attention remains focused on events at home. 'They have been living in a culture, in a system that tells them that even if you are interested in politics, you can't change much because Beijing is always there,' he says. Could he become Australia's first fugitive MP? 'I wouldn't rule it out,' he says. 'Maybe when I care more about Australia than Hong Kong.'
Sydney Morning Herald
02-05-2025
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
He evaded Beijing's clutches. But this Adelaide lawyer is still a wanted man
This story is part of the May 3 edition of Good Weekend. See all 14 stories. The Virgin Airlines pilot is the first to spot them: three sleek Chinese warships sailing 278 kilometres off Sydney. Australian defence officials are notified; nearly 50 commercial flights are diverted after the warships issue an alert that they are about to conduct live-fire drills, an event unprecedented in these waters off Australia's eastern seaboard since World War II. While the drills do not breach international law, there's no mistaking the test of resolve they're presenting to the Australian government: China has arrived, the world has changed and Beijing is not to be messed with. Thirteen hundred kilometres from Sydney, lawyer Ted Hui is at a business networking meeting in the Adelaide suburb of Glenelg. Hui mingles in the reception area while we wait for our morning coffees. He is representing his employer, RSA Law, which specialises in litigation, injury claims and inheritance disputes. He's surrounded by local conveyancers and mortgage brokers, each proudly displaying their name tags. 'Did you hear about the Chinese warships off Sydney Harbour?' Helen Glanville, the network's vivacious charity work specialist, asks Hui as she collects the drinks from the reception desk. 'They're coming for you, mate.' The news of the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy ships that would circle most of Australia had broken minutes before we arrived. Hui laughs off the threat. It's an instinctive response to relieve the pressure of the $HK1 million ($200,000) bounty hanging over his head. 'He's a wanted man,' Glanville informs a couple of the attendees milling about. 'Just a few national security breaches,' 42-year-old Hui says as he sips his cappuccino. 'It's a long story.' For 20 years, Ted Hui has closely witnessed the Chinese government's rapid ascent as it manages the world's second-largest economy and exercises its growing power to bully those it deems a threat. As they wolf down their avocado on toast, few of the dozen participants in this meeting are fully aware of his journey from public enemy to Adelaide suburban lawyer. Even fewer are aware of the subterranean geopolitical espionage that Hui's arrival has unleashed in their suburbs. To his friends and colleagues in Adelaide, he's just Ted. To the Chinese and Hong Kong governments, Ted Hui Chi-fung is a traitor guilty of numerous heinous crimes. In Hong Kong, wanted posters for Hui have hung from noticeboards outside police stations. In Australia, he's the target of patriotic Chinese thugs and foreign interference campaigns. Hui lives each day knowing he and his family will always be targeted by the Chinese government because of what he represents: the last free democratic activists of Hong Kong. Student activist Ted Hui wipes tears of pepper spray from his stinging eyes as he presses forward in a line against the riot police, fortified by the tens of thousands of angry protesters behind and around him. It's January 1, 2020, and Hong Kong police have been sending volleys of rubber bullets into a massive crowd, which consists of Hongkongers from all strata of society – lawyers, students, cleaners, journalists, waiters – as the clashes turn violent. There have been other demonstrations against the increasing power of the Chinese government over Hong Kong in the past two decades, most notably the student-led occupation of the financial district in 2014, which became known as the Umbrella Movement. But this latest revolt has been going on for months, turning into a pitched battle. The protesters are fighting for Hong Kong's survival as a democracy, and this could be their last stand. Hui isn't giving up without a fight. When the British handed over Hong Kong to China in 1997, the Chinese government guaranteed its self-autonomy for 50 years. The cosmopolitan city of almost seven million, long a prosperous and bustling port, was to exist under a 'one country, two systems' model, with free speech and an independent press enshrined in law. But as the years rolled on, this high degree of autonomy was whittled away, initially as mainlanders flooded into Hong Kong, and then by legislation. Schools, the legislature and political parties were overhauled. Hui absorbed these changes while growing into his teenage years in Hong Kong's middle-class neighbourhood of Tuen Mun with his sister, father (a wholesale vegetable price regulator) and mother (a part-time public servant). To his school friends he was Teddy, the English name he chose in British Hong Kong after his hero, Tottenham Hotspur striker Teddy Sheringham, but he couldn't understand why Hongkongers didn't take more interest in their local soccer teams. 'As a teenager, I was thinking more and more about local Hongkongers' identity,' he recalls. Hui watched with alarm as a city that once celebrated Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei and held annual vigils to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre was slowly being brought under the control of Beijing. Teddy became Ted ('Teddy was just too cute,' he says, smiling) and he graduated from high school, where he excelled at English and religious studies. He poured his attention into history books and started attending Tiananmen Square vigils. He gained admission to the City University of Hong Kong, where he studied law, then spent two years in Canada. 'I experienced what freedom was like,' he says. 'I thought, 'Going back to Hong Kong, that's something that I need to be engaged in.' ' Frustrated by student politics in Hong Kong and eager to make his mark on the city's political future, Hui joined the Democratic Party (DP) as a researcher straight out of university. It was there, at the headquarters of Hong Kong's flagship opposition party, that he met his wife. They were married in 2009. Two kids, a daughter (now aged 13) and a son (now 11), would follow. Hui's house in Adelaide is still filled with DP memorabilia: a shrine to the last vestiges of Hong Kong's political resistance (the party announced it was fully disbanding in April). After five years in the DP backroom and another five as a local councillor, Hui in 2016 was elected to the Legislative Council, Hong Kong's highest parliamentary body, which enacts, amends and repeals laws. It's where he gained a reputation in the South China Morning Post for his 'exaggerated responses to hot-button issues'. In 2018, he snatched a civil servant's phone after claiming she had been filming legislators voting over plans to station more mainland Chinese security officers in Hong Kong. (Two years later, he would throw a stink bomb made of rotting plant matter into the chamber of the Legislative Council, stacked with an increasing number of members loyal to Beijing.) 'I was in a dangerous situation. I knew that the rules of the game had changed.' Ted Hui Demonstrations flared up periodically as the mainland exerted more authority but in mid-2019 they escalated dramatically when the city's pro-mainland chief executive, Carrie Lam, tried to rush through a new extradition law, which at its most extreme meant anyone could be sent to the mainland for anything that offended the Chinese Communist Party. For months, up to two million people choked Hong Kong's streets in protests that grabbed headlines across the globe. But the Beijing-backed Hong Kong government was unrelenting, arresting hundreds while shutting down critical media organisations, stacking courts with sympathetic judges and banning opposition political gatherings. Foreign governments issued statements of 'serious concern' but took little concrete action. By early 2020, the Chinese government made it clear that it expected school curricula to be rewritten 'to love the motherland'. Most forms of protest, including colourful Post-it notes with democratic slogans and pro-Hong Kong songs, were banned. Only one expression of protest remained: holding up blank pieces of paper. Hui was regularly followed home from work by security officials. By July 2020, his office had been raided three times in six months. 'I was in a dangerous situation,' he recalls. 'I knew that the rules of the game had changed and that this was their new tactic, that they would come up with new things and they would use whatever means to put you in jail.' Beijing had begun implementing a new national security law, which gave the Chinese government unprecedented powers to sentence those deemed guilty of subversion to life imprisonment. In August, Hui was arrested after participating in a small protest in a local park in Tuen Mun, his childhood suburb, 11 kilometres south of the border with the mainland. He posted bail, but the Hong Kong police confiscated his passport. The only way for a Hong Kong politician to get their passport back was with a formal invitation from a foreign government. Hui and his wife had spent months agonising over potential scenarios: if he made it out of Hong Kong, what would they do? The Chinese government had a long history of detaining and questioning relatives of fugitives. They could seize assets, confiscate passports, and make it impossible for those left behind to find work or sell property. Local authorities could impose education, employment and social security restrictions on family members of people in jail or those who have escaped prosecution. Hui needed serious help. Both he and his family were at risk. Farewell to Hong Kong Hong Kong Airport, November 30, 2020, 4pm: Hui stands alone at the check-in for flight QR817, the first leg of his journey to Copenhagen via Doha. More than 70 million passengers passed through this canopy of steel and glass in 2019, but on this day it is deserted, save for the lawyer and the check-in staff hovering behind the counter. Ticket: check. Passport: check. COVID-19 vaccine: check. After months of planning, a grand scheme to smuggle Hui out of Beijing's reach is in its final test. Now all he needs to do is to get on the plane. The passport scanner at border control flashes red. Hui is taken into a cold, featureless room for questioning. 'The official lectured me for 30 minutes,' he recalls. 'Warning me of the court's permission for me to go overseas … then reminding me of the deadlines: there are trials waiting for you.' Hui had booked a return flight four days later to convince authorities that he would be back in time for his court appearance. Five officials escorted Hui to the boarding gate. 'It was a sign – we are watching your every step,' he says. At 7.05pm, flight QR817 takes off for Doha. Hui records a video as the plane flies past Victoria Harbour, through southern China and across Hainan. It is the last time Hui will see Hong Kong. Nervously waiting for Hui at Copenhagen airport is his good friend, Perth-born Anders Storgaard. Increasingly aware of his own political peril, Hui had asked Storgaard months earlier if he knew of any meetings that needed a guest to discuss less-controversial topics such as climate change. The rest was left implied but unsaid: nothing to do with human rights, democracy or national security, which would trigger the ire of Beijing and stop Hui from travelling. Storgaard understood instinctively that Hui was looking for an escape from Hong Kong via an invitation to an overseas conference. 'The problem was we didn't have anything concrete we could invite him to.' Storgaard had first met Hui on a political exchange in Denmark in 2019. 'I remember him saying it was the last straw of the democratic movement in Hong Kong,' says Storgaard. 'And he hoped that young people in Denmark would cherish their freedom.' Hui became a regular guest on Storgaard's weekly conservative radio program on Denmark's talk station Radio24syv, and later a close friend. Hui would spend evenings updating Storgaard on the latest political crackdown in the city he had once loved. 'There was just something about Ted,' recalls Storgaard. 'He has this inner strength that you can just feel. What was really striking to me was how much we had in common, even though there were so many kilometres between us, because we were all engaged in democracy. The main difference was that they had to risk their lives.' Storgaard was not a member of Denmark's government. But as the chairman of the Young Conservatives Denmark, he had the contacts and the bullishness of youth to see an unlikely plan through. 'When I got the message, I think my heart was racing away at 300 beats a minute because I was so worried, but also I realised how dangerous this could be,' he says. COVID had shut the world's borders. Zoom had killed in-person conferences. 'For the first couple of weeks, we tried to look for real meetings to invite him to,' says Storgaard. 'But there were none. So we decided, 'Let's just make an invitation.' ' Storgaard, then 26, and his then 25-year-old friend Thomas Rohden, now a regional councillor for the Social-Liberal Party, got on the phone to their contacts in the Danish parliament. They rang non-government organisations, environmental groups and two Danish MPs, the Independent Greens' Uffe Elbæk and the Conservative People's Party's Katarina Ammitzbøll. They convinced them to sign off on the official letter inviting Hui to a series of meetings and conferences that did not exist. The invitations included meetings with the Youth Climate Council, Greenpeace and the Danish parliamentary committee on climate, energy and utilities. 'We said we wanted to discuss the United Nations' sustainable goals of climate change together with mayors, members of parliament and all these things with Ted,' says Storgaard. 'It felt like a very fluffy invitation.' But on a Danish parliamentary letterhead with an official stamp, it looked the part. The Hong Kong court responded by arguing Hui could not travel because he would have to go into COVID quarantine after the trip and miss his next hearing. 'I had to make a new invitation,' says Storgaard. ' 'It's so important for us to hear all these things about the environment from Ted that we will rearrange, so we're moving the conference to a different date.' ' Four days before Hui was due to fly out, Storgaard received another message. It was an official notification from the Hong Kong police asking for the complete program of Hui's activities in Denmark. 'They were probably getting a bit suspicious about the whole situation, and the problem was that he needed this more or less ASAP,' explains Storgaard. 'So within four hours, Thomas and I had to call all the parliamentarians and NGOs and just ask them again, 'We have this situation, we are trying to get this guy out of Hong Kong. If somebody calls you and contacts you from China, are you willing to say you're going to have a meeting with this guy?' And to my surprise, everybody said yes. For me, it proved that when people are actually given the choice to help someone to fight for democracy, a lot of people are willing to do it.' Storgaard did not tell Hui that the environmental meetings were a ruse. Instead, he was going to meet the Danish Foreign Policy Committee and the former NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen. 'The funny thing was that I was actually very prepared,' recalls Hui. 'I had a bunch of [climate change] policy documents from my parliament, and I prepared the speech to really talk about those issues.' Hui did not tell Storgaard that he, too, harboured a secret: he was also going to smuggle his family out of Hong Kong. Renee Xia, director of Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a US-based NGO, says the 'Chinese government's collective punishment of human rights defenders' families appears to be a state policy'. Hui says, 'My family didn't want me to come back. They said even though we're in trouble, they didn't believe the regime would keep them in jail for a very long time.' Hui was determined to avoid that outcome. 'I didn't want them to be held hostage,' he says. Minutes after he landed in Copenhagen, Hui told Storgaard that his wife, parents and two children would be on flights to London in two days' time and that he would have to avoid speculation about not returning to Hong Kong until they were out safely. Loading Uffe Elbæk, one of the MPs who signed the letter of invitation to Hui, did not get the memo. 'Welcome to Denmark @tedhuichifung,' he wrote on Twitter. 'We will do whatever to secure your stay.' The tweet set off a media storm in Hong Kong. Then it forced Hui to lie. On Facebook and in statements to the Hong Kong press, he reassured the government that he had every intention of returning to face trial. 'I will continue to complete my official foreign visit as scheduled,' he told them. 'For the next two days, [Hui] had to act like he was not intending to escape and he was going to go back to Hong Kong,' says Storgaard. 'Because if he didn't, he was worried that his family might be kept back in Hong Kong. But some of the Danish media had found out about Ted's [intentions] because one of the members of parliament sadly had talked with the press.' What followed was a high-stakes exercise in media management led by two 20-something political novices suddenly thrust into the front line of an emerging diplomatic crisis. 'We had to keep the press at bay and keep everything down for it not to explode,' Storgaard recalls. 'Because if that was the case, then we might have a hostile situation in Hong Kong. 'I remember asking the politicians to stop … I need to take this message to see whether my family is safe.' Ted Hui 'Thomas [Rohden] basically said directly to reporters that if they wrote what they intended to write, then it was on them: a family was going to be taken hostage in Hong Kong.' An agonising 48 hours passed. 'You could just see it, he looked like a broken man. He just looked so tired,' Storgaard says of Hui waiting to hear from his wife. On December 3, just after lunch, the message arrived. Hui was in the middle of speaking to the Danish Foreign Policy Committee. 'I remember asking the politicians to stop for five minutes: I need to take this message to see whether my family is safe,' he says. 'They told me they were safe on the plane.' Sandwiched between the grand Tivoli Gardens and the trendy Meatpacking District, City Hotel Nebo in central Copenhagen has more modest rooms than its location might suggest. Bottles of Coke and sandwich wrappers litter the table inside Hui's room. His suitcase is overflowing with clothes. Twelve hours after his wife and children said they had left Hong Kong, he receives another message. They have just landed in London. Storgaard, the baby-faced conservative, and Hui, the Hong Kong lawyer, have succeeded in hoodwinking the world's most fearsome security regime. Hui, who adopts the look of a bookish bureaucrat more than that of a revolutionary, drafts a 638-word statement. 'I officially announce my exile,' Hui writes. 'I know this is a luxury because many brothers and sisters in suffering have no future at all.' Hui hesitates. He knows that once he publishes, he will never be able to return to Hong Kong. Storgaard counts down from three. 'It's heavier than I thought it would be,' Hui says of the impact of leaving his homeland behind. Then he posts the statement on Facebook. 'It was like the whole room just exploded, messages were flooding in, his phone was ringing, all the phones were ringing,' says Storgaard. Denmark had helped him escape, but it was no place for Hui to call home. The language barrier would make work difficult. Denmark's government had largely pushed a pro-business engagement with Beijing and was only beginning to grapple with the threat of foreign interference. 'For me, Hongkongers are the freedom fighters of today.' Anders Storgaard Hui and other political exiles from Hong Kong had already been plotting to spread out to countries on the front line of the emerging geopolitical confrontation with China: Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia. Several had settled in the UK, which had taken thousands of Hongkongers with documentation registering them as overseas UK citizens prior to the 1997 handover. Australia had a relatively high number of Hong Kong immigrants but few pro-democracy leaders. At the time, it also had a conservative Coalition government that was welcoming of Hongkongers and increasingly hostile to Beijing. 'It was strategic,' says Hui. Before he leaves Copenhagen, Storgaard hands Hui a pin from the 1940s. It's a Danish flag with a silver cross and the crown of Christian X, Denmark's wartime king. 'It was used by people under the Nazis to show that they were resisting the German occupation of Denmark,' says Storgaard. 'I gave it to him because for me, Hongkongers are the freedom fighters of today. That was my gift to Ted, to show him how much of a hero I believe he is.' A man in exile Hui stands outside his house in Adelaide. The banksia trees wrap around the cul-de-sac. It is early evening in this little slice of suburbia that now houses an international fugitive and his family. The only thing that distinguishes Hui's yard from the neighbours is the astroturf proudly laid out on his front lawn. 'Hongkongers are so bad at gardens,' he says with a laugh. It is not the only contrast with life in Hong Kong, one of the world's most densely populated cities, where the average apartment size for a family of three is 44 square metres. 'I bought myself a secondhand caravan, that's the most Aussie thing I do here,' he says. Hui is a torn man. Dozens of his colleagues in the pro-democracy movement no longer enjoy their freedom. 'Most of them are either overseas or in jail,' he says. 'There's value in staying in prison. It's a moral call. But not everyone had to do it. People can be outside shouting, we have some value as well.' I ask Hui a question that has preoccupied me ever since he first told me about his escape three years ago: did the Chinese and Hong Kong police let him go? Or is the world's most feared security force more gullible than we might think? 'I don't think there's any mercy in this regime,' he declares. 'I was seen as a more radical thinker. So it was me that they were after first. They hinted at prosecuting me for some very minor crimes. I got the warning signs early. I was lucky enough to leave. Some of the more moderate ones were not so lucky.' What is certain is that for those who stayed behind, the punishment for relatively minor crimes has been more severe than anything Hui has had to endure. Last November, a Hong Kong court sentenced 45 pro-democracy activists to up to 10 years in jail. Among them: Australian Gordon Ng for 'subverting state power' for his role in an unofficial preselection for disqualified pro-democracy leaders. Hui has been sentenced in absentia for his first crime of skipping bail and contempt of court. But that is only the start of his rap sheet. He has since been charged with far more serious crimes of inciting secession and colluding with foreign forces to endanger national security, charges that carry maximum terms of life imprisonment. In February, a Hong Kong court seized all of his and his family's assets, totalling about $160,000, and then went after his lawyers, confiscating any payments made by Hui to his legal representation. A Hong Kong government spokesman declared, 'Hui Chi-fung has committed numerous heinous crimes. He conspired with foreign politicians in 2020 to forge documents and deceive the court with false information in order to obtain the court's permission to leave Hong Kong while he was on bail, and jumped bail and absconded overseas … Hui Chi-fung is currently a wanted person with a reward notice by the Police.' The confiscation of payments to his lawyers has Hui particularly incensed. 'By seizing my lawyer's money, that means I cannot represent myself in any way, and no lawyer is going to represent me,' he says. 'It's bluntly against human rights.' Today, there's the matter of that $HK1 million bounty for information leading to Hui's arrest, as there is with fellow Australian lawyer and pro-democracy activist Kevin Yam. In March, Yam and Hui were targeted in a letter campaign described as 'reprehensible' and 'threaten[ing] our national sovereignty' by Foreign Minister Penny Wong. The letters offered residents in Melbourne and Adelaide a reward for information on the pair. In January, South Australian Police alerted Hui to a pamphlet that was circulating among Adelaide mosques that purported to show Hui offering legal services to the Jewish community. The pamphlets were sent from Macau, one of China's semi-autonomous regions, which is connected with Hong Kong via the world's longest sea bridge. Hui is used to receiving regular threats. What has surprised him is how brazen the latest campaigns have become. The Macau stamp was so obvious, Hui says, that it could lead to only one conclusion: the sender wanted him to know where the threat was coming from. It was not a warning to Hui, it was a warning to other members of the community: speak out – and this could happen to you. In Adelaide, Beijing's operations are expanding. Ordinary Hongkongers self-censor because they don't know where the red lines are. It means Hui's Australian contacts are happy to meet with him in public, but his closest allies in the Hong Kong community are terrified. One Hongkonger, a social worker who migrated in 2019 after taking part in protests in Hong Kong, says he can't be seen near Hui in Adelaide's small Chinatown. When we meet outside at a local pub on a brisk February afternoon, he asks to sit inside. Not because of the chill, but because of the prying eyes he suspects are reporting meetings with dissidents to Beijing. 'It's the satellites,' he says, referring to Chinese migrants loyal to the Chinese government who report the activities of dissidents to the embassy. 'There are people who report to the CCP [Chinese Communist Party]. 'We support Ted and what he is doing, but Ted is under a bounty, and we have to keep a safe profile.' Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) boss Mike Burgess warned in February that multiple foreign governments have been continually attempting to 'monitor, harass, intimidate and coerce co-operation' from migrants in Australia. 'This includes trying to strong-arm people to report on other members of their diaspora community, threatening perceived dissidents and their family members with violence, and coercing people in Australia to return to the country of their birth to face questioning or charges – or possibly worse,' he said. Loading Burgess did not name China but, for Hongkongers, it is not an abstract fear. In 2020, the Chinese government established a portal that allows people to submit reports to Chinese security services for political crimes, allowing migrants to dob in their neighbours. The portal, which is accessible in Australia, allows allegations to be made against dissidents for what's termed 'attacking the party, the state system and major policies', endangering national security, harming the national image and slandering heroes. Hui and his fellow exiles have been relentless in their advocacy since leaving Hong Kong, lobbying the Australian, British and US governments to take stronger action against Beijing, while also trying to protect Hongkongers overseas. Letters from opposition home affairs minister James Paterson and Labor MP Steve Georganas helped convince the Supreme Court of South Australia to allow him to practise as a lawyer despite a string of convictions and charges emanating from Hong Kong's once highly regarded common-law system imported from the British. Hui was admitted as a barrister and solicitor at South Australia's Supreme Court in 2023. Hui's boss, Roger Sallis, now introduces him as Australia's most convicted lawyer. His growing infamy may have its commercial benefits. 'I have a special niche,' explains Hui over a lunch of char siu pork at a Cantonese restaurant in the Adelaide CBD. Chinese-Australian clients who don't trust Chinese lawyers with connections to the mainland are increasingly turning to Hui to help them navigate contract disputes, property sales and visa applications without tipping off authorities. Often, the same clients will ask if Hui's name can be taken off the invoice, a request he is happy to grant so that no paper trail links them to the renegade lawyer. 'I'm one of the few who's past the point of no return,' says Hui. 'One client said to me she wanted someone of Chinese background who understands the Chinese system but who can be trusted, without any connections with authorities. I told her I would be the only person in Australia that she could trust.' Inside the business networking breakfast in Glenelg, Hui riffs on contract disputes, the legal obligations of company directors and admissible forms of evidence. He holds the floor while drumming up business, giving little indication that until two years ago, the career political apparatchik had never worked in the private sector before. 'I don't enjoy the spotlight,' he says. The politician who once threw a stink bomb in the Hong Kong Legislative Council maintains he prefers to be at home with his cat, Milk Bun, or playing cello in his living room than manning the political barricades. Last year, he joined the Liberal Party. Yam, his fellow Hong Kong fugitive, joined the ALP. Placing Australia's two best-known Hong Kong dissidents in each major party was also strategic, says Hui. 'We want to have some high-profile fugitives on both sides with Labor and with Liberal, so even if there's a change of government, there will be someone in that party. We want to represent to the Australian public that our advocacy is bipartisan.' Ideologically, Hui does not fit neatly into the Liberal Party. He would have voted Yes for the Voice to Parliament and is generally suspicious of big business and in favour of greater social services. He did not partake in a Hong Kong campaign to protect the rights of same-sex couples because of his strong Christian faith. Hui says he joined the Liberal Party because of its hawkish stance towards the Chinese government. It helps that the party raced through the approvals necessary to get him and his family to Australia. 'Ideologically, they understand the China risk a lot more, so it will match what I'm doing in my advocacy work,' he says. That same perspective has largely carried through to the rest of the Hong Kong community, which now leans Liberal. But it has burned the Coalition in the much larger Chinese community, which now swings heavily towards Labor. Loading The number of representatives in Parliament from Chinese backgrounds, including from Hong Kong, remains woefully below their proportional representation in Australian society. On a per capita basis, Australia has more people of Chinese ancestry than any country outside Asia. More than 1.3 million Australian residents identified themselves as having Chinese ancestry in the 2021 census, 5.5 per cent of Australia's population. That put Chinese-Australians behind only those of English, Australian, Irish and Scottish ancestry. In Parliament, there are 227 MPs and senators. None was born in China, Hong Kong or Macau. Three Labor MPs, Sam Lim, Sally Sitou and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, have Chinese heritage, but that is still just 1.3 per cent of all MPs. There are none in the Coalition. Hui believes Australian political parties can do better at broadening their representation. So can migrant communities. In the Hong Kong diaspora, their attention remains focused on events at home. 'They have been living in a culture, in a system that tells them that even if you are interested in politics, you can't change much because Beijing is always there,' he says. Could he become Australia's first fugitive MP? 'I wouldn't rule it out,' he says. 'Maybe when I care more about Australia than Hong Kong.'
The Independent
29-03-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
I have a bounty on my head in Hong Kong – why won't the British government stand up to China?
British weakness has emboldened Beijing to petition proxies to act on the HK$1m bounties (around £100,000) Hong Kong's National Security Police placed on me and 18 of my fellow activists living overseas. In total, 10 of us live in the UK, making this country an area of focus for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s escalating repression of Hong Kong activists – and a test bed of new tactics to export authoritarianism. In Hong Kong, the police call us 'fugitives', but none of us escaped. We left Hong Kong freely and have since been retroactively charged with national security offences. Yet I stand accused of 'colluding with foreign forces' for my work with the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation here in London. The 'collusion' charge is purposefully vague, so it can be levied at just about anyone for meeting, as I often do in the course of my advocacy work, diplomats, journalists, or politicians. Jimmy Lai, a British citizen who has been imprisoned for over 1,500 days in Hong Kong without a verdict, is on trial for the same 'offence'. Throughout his trial, prosecutors have presented his messages with journalists and politicians as 'evidence' of wrongdoing. Clearly, telling the truth about Hong Kong's crackdown on freedom in his capacity as the former owner of the pro-democracy newspaper Apply Daily is now sufficient to 'endanger' national security in autocratic Hong Kong. With a price on our heads, the CCP has turned to prompting proxies – ordinary British citizens – to do their dirty work for them. Neighbours of exiled activists in the UK have recently received letters urging them to "bring him or her" to the Chinese embassy. Last week, mosques near Australia-based Hong Kong activist Ted Hui's residence received leaflets falsely accusing him of "siding with Israel to wage war against Islamic terrorism." The CCP strategy is simple: leverage greed and hate to export repression. A million dollars to betray a neighbour, to turn communities against Hong Kong activists. Moreover, these letters, which were posted from Hong Kong, clearly incentivise kidnap. In Australia, Minister of Foreign Affairs Penny Wong issued a vociferous response to this blatant foreign interference and the Australian police are investigating the source of the letters. In the UK, by contrast, the authorities have not even issued a warning indicating that acting on the letter is illegal and will lead to police intervention. As Australia-based Hong Kong activist Kevin Yam said on social media, the 'UK's hitherto tepid responses to similar incidents [has] emboldened authoritarian oppressors' minions to try their luck in Australia against Ted Hui and me.' The government's failure to stand up to CCP overreach does not end there. One day after meeting with me and several other bountied Hong Kongers, it was made public that David Lammy had written to Keir Starmer to push through plans for a new Chinese mega-embassy in London, which will be the largest diplomatic outpost in Europe – 10 times the size of the current facility – including up to 225 residential units to accommodate Chinese diplomatic staff. This will surely facilitate more surveillance and intimidation. The government knows this, yet still bends the knee and supports a plan that will undoubtedly compromise British values. The British government must listen to Hong Kong activists and local residents and stop the mega Chinese embassy plan. Meanwhile, Starmer is bowing to Beijing as if nothing has happened. His government's "Challenge, Compete, Collaborate" strategy is not working. Where is the challenge, save for ministers lamely raising Hong Kong and human rights as they parade to and from photo opportunities in Beijing? Britain has thus far gained little from these interactions. Rachel Reeves' trip to China secured a pathetic £600 million in trade deals over five years. If China values Britain so little, why does the UK seem so eager to effectively trade our national security for scraps? Britain is not dealing with a "strategic partner", but an authoritarian threat. There is no "win-win" with a regime intent on silencing critics and corrupting democracies. Britain emboldens Beijing by ignoring China's repression on British soil. Keir Starmer must be bold enough to call Xi Jinping and demand the revocation of our bounties. The government must be prepared to use diplomatic tools to hold aggressors accountable and send a strong message that UK sovereignty will be defended against foreign interference. In December 2024, Hong Kong's National Security Police issued Chloe Cheung, 20, with a HK$1 million bounty for 'national security' offences allegedly committed entirely while working in London as a pro-democracy activist
The Guardian
26-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Hong Kong activist in Australia targeted with letter offering reward for information about his family
An exiled pro-democracy campaigner from Hong Kong has been targeted with another threatening letter that offers his colleagues $203,000 for information on his family shortly after China's foreign ministry accused the Albanese government of interfering with its internal affairs. The anonymous letter, which was mailed from Hong Kong earlier this month, was sent to Ted Hui's Adelaide law firm. It claims he is a 'wanted person' for a 'range of national security related offences including incitement to secession' and 'collusion with a foreign country'. The letter also accuses Hui, who fled to Australia via Europe in 2019, of leaving Hong Kong with $3m in proceeds of crime. Hui, who was a pro-democracy legislator in Hong Kong, denies that claim and says it is 'fictitious'. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email Last week, Guardian Australia revealed a fake pamphlet pretending to be from Hui's law firm was sent to mosques, falsely claiming he was a pro-Israel lawyer willing to 'wage war' against Islamic terrorism. The letter was mailed from Macau. The Coalition criticised the letter as 'a crude attempt to weaponise antisemitism for the purposes of foreign interference'. An anonymous letter very similar to the one delivered to Hui's workplace was sent to some Melbourne residents earlier this month, offering a bounty if they informed on Australian citizen and pro-democracy activist Kevin Yam. When the letters were first exposed, Australia's foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, said the government would raise them with China and would 'not accept any one of our citizens or on our shores, people being bullied or harassed or threatened by a foreign power'. In response, China's foreign ministry spokesperson, Mao Ning, has accused the Australian government of unacceptable interference in its domestic affairs. 'Australia blatantly interfered in Hong Kong's rule of law,' Ning said. 'China strongly deplores and firmly opposes it.' 'We urge Australia to respect China's sovereignty and rule of law in Hong Kong to foster good conditions and atmosphere for sustainable development of China-Australia relations.' Hui said the letter sent to his workplace 'listed my personal information, the address of the law firm, and a residential address in Adelaide that is not connected to me'. He said he was sharing the letter 'to tell the Hong Kong Communist party that I am not afraid'. 'The more you press, the higher my profile,' Hui said. 'I will continue to speak out for freedom in Hong Kong. Of course, I will also be careful to protect my family. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion 'I have informed the Australian foreign minister's office and the federal police are in close contact with the Australian government. 'The federal police have informed me they will meet with me to take statements, conduct evidence searches, trace the source of the letters and try their best to keep me and my family safe.' When the letters were first revealed, a Hong Kong government spokesperson said it would 'not issue any anonymous letters' but said it would 'take every measure' to pursue wanted people, including 'cutting off their funding sources'. It is not known who sent the letters but its language matches a public appeals notice published on the Hong Kong police force's official website. A UK phone number included at the bottom of both letters has also been linked to the Hong Kong police force, which was contacted for comment last week. Hui and Yam are wanted by Hong Kong authorities for allegedly breaching a controversial national security law that grants authorities sweeping extraterritorial powers to prosecute acts or comments made anywhere in the world that it deems criminal. In 2022, Hui was convicted in absentia for his role in pro-democracy protests during 2019 and sentenced to three and a half years in jail. Hong Kong authorities have accused him of 'foreign collusion' in social media posts seeking international support for Hong Kong under its national security law.
