Democracy activist savours life in ‘free and safe’ country

Joseph Cheng, a senior figure in the Hong Kong democracy movement, fled Xi Jinping’s crackdown on the city for safety in Canberra, becoming one of Australia’s most distinguished political refugees.

Joseph Cheng. Picture: Rohan Thomson

Joseph Cheng is a rare species in the Xi Jinping era: a senior figure in the Hong Kong democracy movement who this Friday will be able to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre from outside a prison cell.

Last July, weeks after the introduction of the sweeping Beijing-authored National Security Law, the key organising figure in the Hong Kong democracy movement became one of Australia’s most distinguished political refugees.

The 71-year-old and his wife escaped to Canberra just in time. Since then the Hong Kong police force’s National Security Department has arrested more than 100 people.

“Most of those people who have been arrested are my friends. Some of them are my closest friends,” Professor Cheng says in his first interview with Australian media since fleeing Hong Kong.

“I feel sad. I feel depressed. And of course there’s a bit of anger,” Cheng tells The Australian, referring to the latest wave of prison sentences on Friday to fellow legends of Hong Kong’s democracy scene, like Albert Ho and “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung.

“They certainly do not deserve that.”

Most of the arrests have been for peaceful political acts, the type Cheng helped co-ordinate for decades. Others have been more spurious, like the teenager who had an inappropriate sticker on his mobile phone.

Despite his searing experience with the sharp edges of Xi’s China, the softly spoken democracy campaigner was mostly in defiantly good spirits when he met The Australian over coffee last week near his city-fringe apartment in Canberra.

“My wife and I enjoy Canberra and Australia very much. It’s very quiet and peaceful,” he says.

“We enjoy all the nice things of a free country.”

That includes going for walks around Lake Burley Griffin without the fear of being arrested and using the library at the Australian National University, where he had a sabbatical year in the 1980s and has begun work on a history of Hong Kong’s democracy movement.

Many of that fledgling work’s subjects are currently in prison, like Martin Lee, Hong Kong’s 82-year-old “Father of Democracy”, 72-year-old media tycoon Jimmy Lai, who was given another prison sentence last Friday, and 24-year-old Joshua Wong, whose family has also quietly fled for sanctuary in Australia.

Criminalising HK

More than 100,000 Australian citizens and permanent residents remain in Hong Kong, each weighing up their future.

“Everyone has their own cost-benefit analysis,” Cheng says.

Families with small children have been the most common profile of those who have left the city in recent years. Many parents are worried about Beijing’s creeping influence on Hong Kong’s school curriculum.

Cheng belongs to a smaller group to whom the Chinese Communist Party has directed explicit, personal threats if they remain.

Since early in the Xi era, multiple front-page stories in the city’s Communist Party-controlled newspapers – Ta Kung Pao and Wen Wei Po – made it clear Cheng was high on Beijing’s list of troublemakers.

So after conversations with his wife, his elderly mother, his children, and his fellow pan-democrats, Cheng decided to leave the city in which he was born in 1949.

In Cheng’s assessment, the prospect he will ever be able to return has become even dimmer since he left.

“On one hand you feel a bit relieved that at least I’m in a safe and free place,” he says. “It’s a bit depressing, but you try to look forward. You try to understand that one should not be too sentimental about it.”

Beijing’s slaughter of hundreds, perhaps thousands, in the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4, 1989, still haunts the regime. So does Hong Kong’s insistence on remembering it.

For 30 years Hong Kongers gathered at Victoria Park for a vigil to remember that tragedy, which the Communist Party has tried to scrub from the mainland.

A record of almost 200,000 people turned up in 2019 for its 30th anniversary, but the National Security Law and Beijing’s obsession with the city’s “patriotism” make the public memorial’s future uncertain.

Last week, organisers were denied permission to host this Friday’s vigil. Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s administration cited Covid-19 precautions, as they did last year.

“This exactly explains the difference between Hong Kong now and before,” says the retired professor.

Drums of war

Since Cheng arrived in Canberra, alarm has risen in pockets of Australia’s capital about the prospect of military conflict in the Taiwan Strait.

This was vividly captured in Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo’s “drums of war” all-staff email a month ago over the Anzac Day weekend.

Cheng – an expert on China’s foreign policy, who got his PhD and Australian citizenship after studying at Adelaide’s Flinders University in the 1970s – sees a clear link between the Xi administration’s increasingly bellicose rhetoric on Taiwan and Beijing’s swift discrediting of Hong Kong’s “One Country, Two Systems” model.

“It is amply clear that the Chinese authorities can no longer have any appeal to the Taiwanese people and, therefore, there is the resort to military threats. It is a symbol of weakness and failure, rather than strength.”

Beijing’s extreme political crackdown on Hong Kong, including the locking up of more than 100 of Cheng’s friends and fellow pan-democrats, demonstrates its increased assertiveness.

A Beijing-imposed law passed by Hong Kong’s government last week has further limited the independence of the city’s already ­pliant legislature.

But he thinks the threat of large-scale military conflict in the Taiwan Strait is exaggerated.

“If there is a war, China’s modernisation efforts will go. It will be a tremendous, tremendous setback for China. And the implications for China’s leadership will also be very, very significant.”

Launching war on more than 20 million Han Chinese is a huge leap from passing a draconian security law or demanding Hong Kong politicians pledge loyalty to Beijing. “The military option is unthinkable. You are dealing with a civil war situation,” he says.

“What do you do if you conquer Taiwan? Imagine, what do you do with over 20 million people? Do you send them to concentration camps?”

More than Canberra

When Cheng emerged from hotel quarantine in Sydney last year, Xi’s administration was just beginning its extraordinary campaign of trade retribution on Australia that has since spread to exports worth more than $20 billion a year.

“It is a very sad situation,” he says, noting it has completely undermined China’s efforts to promote itself as a champion of free trade.

“The arrogance of the Chinese authorities and their lack of understanding of Australian culture has resulted in totally unnecessary difficulties in the bilateral relationship.”