Hong Kong: The A-level student who became an enemy of the Chinese state

Only over a year ago, Chloe Cheung was sitting her A-levels. Today she’s on a Chinese state record of wanted dissidents.

The choir girl-turned-democracy activist woke up to news in December that police in Hong Kong had issued a$ HK1 million ($ 100, 000, £105, 000 ) reward for information leading to her capture abroad.

” I really just wanted to take a gap year after school”, Chloe, 19, who lives in London, told the BBC. ” But I’ve ended up with a reward”!

Chloe is the youngest of 19 activists who are accused of breaking a national security law that Beijing introduced as a reaction to widespread pro-democracy demonstrations in the former British colony five years ago.

She and her home relocated to the UK in 2021 as part of a unique card program for Hong Kongers. She claims she has to be mindful about where she travels and that she can always return to her hometown.

Her opposition work has made her a criminal of the Chinese position, something that I don’t understand when we meet one slushy morning in the cafe in Westminster Abbey’s crypt. In mediaeval England, temples provided sanctuary from imprisonment.

Hong Kong officials issued the warrant for Chloe on Christmas Eve, using the only photo they appear to have on file for her – in which she is aged 11.

“It freaked me out at first,” she says, but then she issued a public response.

” I didn’t like the state to assume I was scared. Because if Hong Kongers in Hong Kong can no longer speak out for themselves, therefore we outside the city, who may speak freely without fear, must speak up for them.

Chloe attended her first demonstrations with her college friends, in the first weeks of Hong Kong’s 2019 presentations. Activists turned out in large quantities in opposition to a bill that is thought to give China more control over the region, which has enjoyed semi-autonomy since Britain restored it in 1997.

” Politics were never in my life before … so I went to the first protest with curiosity”, she said.

She saw authorities tear-gassing protesters and an official stepping on a protester’s chest.

” I was thus stunned”, she says. ” That instant actually altered how I looked at the planet.”

She believed that Hong Kongers may speak about “what we like and don’t like” and” could determine what Hong Kong’s potential looked like” having grown up in a town that was a part of China but had retained many of its rights.

However, the government ‘ violent assault made her realize that wasn’t the event. She began joining demonstrations, at first without her relatives ‘ information.

” I didn’t tell them at the time because they didn’t care]about politics ]”, she says. But when things started to acquire “really crazy,” she browbeat her kids into accompanying her.

Authorities stormed the march and forced them to flee into the train with tear gas. Her kids got the “raw knowledge”, she says, not the edition they’d seen blaming activists on TV.

Pics decades of presentations, Beijing passed the National Security Law in 2020. Immediately, most of the privileges that had set Hong Kong aside from island China- freedom of expression, the right to social gatherings – were gone.

Symbols of democracy in the city, including statues and independent newspapers, were torn down, shut or erased. Those publicly critical of the government – from teachers to millionaire moguls like British citizen Jimmy Lai – faced trials and eventually, jail.

In response to the crackdown, the UK opened its doors to Hong Kongers under a new scheme, the British National Overseas ( BNO ) visa. The first to accept the offer, Chloe’s family settled in Leeds, where they found the cheapest Hotel they may get. During a pandemic shutdown and halfway through the university name, Chloe had to take her GCSEs.

At first, she felt isolated. She claims she had difficulty speaking English and that it was difficult to make companions. There were few additional Hong Kongers present.

She accepted a position with the Committee for the Liberation of Hong Kong, a pro-democracy NGO because she couldn’t afford international student costs of more than £20,000 per month.

When China began imposing sanctions on dissidents ‘ faces in 2023, they targeted prominent opposition politicians and opposition leaders. Chloe at the time, however finishing her A-levels, thought was she to small-fry to ever be a goal.

Her inclusion underlines Beijing’s determination to pursue activists overseas.

She claims that the reward places a target on her and encourages third parties to record on her in-country behavior.

China has been the leading country over the past decade trying to silence exiled dissidents around the world, according to a report this week.

Another Hong Kong rebel who reported being assaulted in London attributed the problems to Chinese government-linked players.

And last May, British police charged three men with gathering intelligence for Hong Kong and breaking into a home. One of the men was soon after found dead in unclear circumstances.

” They’re only interested in Hong Kongers because they want to scare off people”, Chloe says.

She claims that many of those who have relocated in recent years remain calm, partly because they still have relatives in Hong Kong.

” Most of the BNO card recipients told me this because they don’t want to consider hazards”, she says. ” It’s depressing but we didn’t blame them”.

Bounty target

• July 2023: Eight high profile activists are named including: Nathan Law, Anna Kwok and Finn Lau, former politicians Dennis Kwok and Ted Hui, lawyer and legal scholar Kevin Yam, unionist Mung Siu-tat, and online commentator Yuan Gong-yi.
• December 2023: Simon Cheng, Frances Hui, Joey Siu, Johnny Fok and Tony Choi
• December 2024: Tony Chung, Carmen Lau, Chung Kim-wah, Chloe Cheung, Victor Ho Leung-mau

On the day her arrest warrant was announced, Foreign Secretary David Lammy said the UK do not tolerate “any efforts by foreign institutions to compel, scare, abuse or harm their critics elsewhere”. He added that the UK authorities was ready to support Hong Kongers.

But more needs to be done, says Chloe, who’s spent the first months of this year lobbying Westminster.

She and shadow international secretary Priti Patel met with Prime Minister Keir Starmer at a Downing Street Lunar New Year event in the past two weeks, and they eventually exchanged a tweet expressing their condolences for multinational repression.

She wonders, however, if the UK’s new contacts with China will result in fewer privileges for Hong Kongers.

We simply don’t know what will happen to us or whether the American government will stand up for what we do if they genuinely want to defend their business relationship with China.

Does she experience fear in London’s roads? It’s not as bad as what democratic protesters in their own country are facing.

” When I think of what]they ] face … it’s actually not that big a deal that I got a bounty overseas”.