I have a price on my head. I hope my neighbours won’t try to cash in

This week, letters arrived at homes in Melbourne offering a $200,000 bounty on my head.

I’m an Australian citizen who worked as a lawyer in Hong Kong for 20 years before returning to Australia in 2022. The bounty was placed by the Hong Kong government for my advocacy for Hong Kong democracy, which the letters characterise as threats to China’s “national security”.

The Hong Kong government has a $200,000 bounty on the head of Australian pro-democracy activist Kevin Yam.Credit: Oscar Colman

The anonymous letters, sent from Hong Kong, landed in the mailboxes of residents of a quiet Melbourne suburb. “Kevin is wanted on suspicion of a range of national security-related offences.

“A reward of one million Hong Kong dollars [$200,000] is being offered by the Hong Kong police to any member of the public who can provide information on this wanted person and the related crime or take him to Hong Kong or Australia Metropolitan Police.”

In short, the letters call for me to be kidnapped.

It also emerged this week that Adelaide lawyer and former Hong Kong pro-democracy politician Ted Hui, who has the same bounty over his head, has been the subject of a more elaborate plot. Fake pamphlets with his contact details were sent to mosques in Adelaide claiming Hui was a “pro-Jewish man siding with Israel to wage war against those Islamic terrorism [sic]”. It is clearly an attempt to provoke intimidation or harm towards Hui based on both Islamophobic and antisemitic stereotypes.

Who did this to us? Given the letters about me contained official Hong Kong police contact details, my conclusion is these were acts either of the Chinese or Hong Kong authorities, or parties that operate with their explicit or tacit approval.

The Australian government has reacted strongly against these threats to Hui and me, condemning them and promising to raise them directly with China. This was echoed by the federal opposition, which demanded an investigation into who was responsible. Such responses are reassuring for me and for Hui, as they show that threats against us are being taken seriously.

It is also important for Australia’s national interest for strong bipartisan responses to these crimes. The bringing of threats to Australian shores demonstrates China’s disregard for Australia’s legal sovereignty. They are even closer to home than the Chinese navy’s recent incursions into Australia’s exclusive economic zone.

As this masthead has reported, a flotilla of Chinese ships from the People’s Liberation Army Navy spent three weeks prowling the waters off the Australian east coast, conducting surprise back-to-back live-fire exercises in busy air traffic space in the Tasman Sea. We can expect more of this as the Chinese military seeks to project its strength far from its shores.

The threats also show China’s nefarious willingness to stoop to exploiting perceived fissures in multicultural Australia’s social fabric for its own transnational repression purposes.

The latest threats against Hui and me have also arisen against the backdrop of an upcoming federal election. Both Labor and the Coalition have in recent months adopted China-friendly rhetoric as part of their efforts to woo ethnically Chinese voters in marginal seats.

Chinese Australians will be crucial to the outcome in seats such as Menzies, which takes in the Melbourne suburb of Box Hill. They comprise 16.5 per cent of voters in that electorate, which swung heavily against the Morrison government in 2022, following its aggressive rhetoric against the Chinese Communist Party.

However, the seat’s margin has halved for the coming election after the Australian Electoral Commission abolished the neighbouring seat of Higgins.

The plight of both me and Hui shows that being China-friendly and being ethnically Chinese-friendly should be kept distinct. Our experience shows that China can definitely be hostile to ethnic Chinese in Australia if they are critical of the Chinese Communist Party.

Further, as much as Australia might seek to shower China with love, China has shown that it will not reciprocate. Instead, it continues to act like an authoritarian bully that will disregard Australia’s sovereignty, democracy, and social cohesion for as long as the Chinese Communist Party remains in power.

But what about China’s economic relationship with Australia? The reality is that China’s economy is in structural decline. Australian companies will need to keep finding new customers for their resources, products and services even if China behaves respectfully towards Australia, let alone when China does not.

As such, there are questions about what Australia can gain by cosying up to China. This is the case even if the United States under Donald Trump is no longer the reliable ally to Australia that it once was. A democratic Australia is not better off by embracing a longstanding authoritarian just because its erstwhile democratic friend has shown signs it might not come to our defence as we long believed it would.

Meanwhile, four retired Australian High Court and Federal Court judges continue to serve on Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal. They have done so despite Hong Kong bounties on the heads of me, Hui and other activists in Britain and the US; Australian Gordon Ng languishing in a Hong Kong jail for his democracy advocacy; and the Australian government asking the judges to reconsider their positions. Might they reconsider in light of the latest threats against Hui and me? Or would it take Hui and me to be kidnapped to Hong Kong or to be harmed in suspicious “accidents”?

Kevin Yam is an Australian citizen and a Hong Kong democracy activist. He is currently a PhD candidate at Melbourne Law School.

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