Introduction to Hong Kong Repression Monitor
A new series documenting repression in Hong Kong
Over the course of the coming months, I plan to publish my research into repression in Hong Kong. I call this series Hong Kong Repression Monitor.
I’ve been tracking indicators of repression over the past five years. I started in Hong Kong during the 2019 protests. Or actually, I started even earlier, going back to the Umbrella Movement, and many of the essays in my book, As long as there is resistance, there is hope as well as many of my older articles recently imported to Substack document the gradual erosion of freedom in Hong Kong from the time of the Umbrella Movement in 2014 to the book’s publication in 2018. But whereas that 2014-2018 period can be characterized by the phrase, “gradual erosion of freedom,” from 2019 up to now, there’s been a rapid descent, a plunge, a fall off a cliff. Indeed, over the past five years, it would be hard to find another place in the world where the human rights situation has deteriorated as badly as in Hong Kong.
Of course, there are many places, such as China, where the situation was already terrible in 2019. For that reason, in these places, things haven’t gotten that much worse. Hong Kong is rather unique: what is going on there is a kind of great political experiment carried out by the Chinese Communist Party: how quickly can you take a relatively liberal albeit non-democratic society and turn it into a full-blown, thorough-going authoritarian society? All indications suggest the answer is “very quickly.”
The Hong Kong of 2025 is basically run like a kind of evil corporation. Even before the crackdown began in 2019, it was one of the most economically unequal developed societies on earth. More than half of the population lived and lives in subsidized public housing because it can’t afford shelter at market rates. The inequality was partly due to lack of democracy. At a vibrant independent civil society, a free press, and the constant demand of the majority of the people for universal suffrage acted as countervailing forces that also gave hope for a better future. The civil society in general and the diverse and wide-ranging pro-democracy movement in particular also created bonds between people that strengthened communities and bonds between people who existed at sea level, far below the political and economic elites on the Peak. Now all of that is gone. And stripped of all that, Hong Kong is actually more like a corporate subsidiary than a corporation even, for those few elites at the top essentially do little but carry out the CCP’s orders, with police enforcing its rule. Hong Kong is the CCP’s colony; it feels like an occupied city.
As a result, about 300,000 Hong Kongers and counting have left in the past five years. (There will be an upcoming piece providing details an emigration.) That’s nearly one in every 20 people. Just about everyone knows someone who’s left; few are unaffected. Mass emigration from a prosperous, developed society not at war is an almost unheard-of phenomenon. Initial research on Hong Kong immigrants to the UK shows that most are settling for lower incomes than they had in Hong Kong, and unlike the stereotypical immigrant, they’ve come to the UK in spite of the fact that its economy is poor, its outlook far from rosy, and their earning potential lower than at home. This is because they want to live in a free society and give their children an education that is not authoritarian.
To frame the crackdown in the language of human rights, a very wide range of rights has been and continues to be gravely violated, infringed, curtailed, suppressed and, in some cases, all but abolished, but the four overarching ones I cite repeatedly are the rights to freedom of expression, freedom of association, freedom of assembly, and political participation.
Freedom of assembly and political participation are the easiest to track and document because essentially, they’ve simply been wiped out and no longer exist in even residual form.
To put it simply, protests in Hong Kong are no longer allowed. The pro-democracy political party, League of Social Democrats, still occasionally protests in numbers no bigger than five. That’s right, five people. In response, they’ve been targeted by the regime for incessant persecution. (There’ll be a Hong Kong Repression Monitor post specifically about that.) Their treatment is meant to be a loud warning to anyone else who might consider going out to the street. Meanwhile, several thousand protesters from 2019-2020 have been prosecuted, and hundreds have been sentenced to multi-year prison terms.
As regards political participation, all opposition has been entirely excluded from the elected bodies, the Legislative Council and District Councils, which were far from fully democratic to begin with.1 Hundreds of pro-democracy elected officials have been targeted for prosecution, and most are either in prison or in exile. (There’ll be a Hong Kong Repression Monitor entry on this.) After the pro-democracy landslide victory in District Council elections at the height of the protests in November 2019, the government imposed allegiance oaths and rewrote electoral law to ensure that anyone not considered loyal to the regime (ie, any pro-democracy candidate) will be excluded. Currently, there are zero pro-democracy representatives in elected bodies in Hong Kong. Zero. All elections are unfree and unfair.
In contrast to the total abolition of protests and political participation, the story of freedom of expression is one of death by a thousand cuts. By targeting independent media, online speech, books and film, the regime sends an intimidating message about what is acceptable, promoting the self-censorship that now pervades Hong Kong society. Under a colonial-era sedition law, 107 people have been arrested for “sedition.” 15 of them were journalists. 13 were arrested for publishing, possessing, importing and/or selling books; 46 for online speech; 1 for wearing a shirt with a protest slogan. Five trade unionists were sent to prison for 19 months each for publishing a political allegory for children about sheep. The government banned the protest anthem, “Glory to Hong Kong,” through a court injunction, and YouTube complied, blocking access to videos of the song in Hong Kong. Public libraries have removed hundreds of books from the shelves but refuse to say which ones (that’s only been found out by the media and citizen sleuths). Episodes of “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy” were censored. (A full post on this will follow.)
If censorship has been death by a thousand cuts, the demise of freedom of association has been achieved with a bludgeon. The government targeted some prominent independent civil society organizations such as Hong Kong Alliance, best known for organizing the annual June 4 candlelight vigil commemorating the Tiananmen Massacre, and dozens of others were forced to close including Hong Kong’s largest trade union, its largest trade union confederation, most university student unions, and the largest protest organizing coalition, plus dozens of smaller and less-known organizations. A few beleaguered ones remain, like the Hong Kong Journalists Association, but the vibrant civil society that used to exist in Hong Kong is dead (or, if you don’t like the “Hong Kong is dead” language, then moribund, decimated, embattled, etc. (A full post on this will follow.)
Apart from the egregious violations of these specific human rights, the crackdown in Hong Kong has been all-encompassing, affecting every sector of society. It may still be an exaggeration to claim Hong Kong is a totalitarian society, but it is accurate to say that the crackdown employs totalitarian logic, in that it is not confined to politics or specific opponents or enemies identified by the regime nor even to the media but has also occurred in sectors such as education, sport, libraries, museums, cultural organizations, religion and just about everywhere else. Those in leadership positions in such institutions must show loyalty to the regime and carry out its directives. The regime’s priorities, especially in regard to so-called “national security” and its overarching narratives, must be implemented.
This is what is meant when I say that Hong Kong has gone from being a liberal to an authoritarian society in record time. While repression can be documented in concrete and precise detail, doing so can sometimes seem insufficient, as it may fail to capture its full impact on a society. Hopefully, though, it can help people to look at situations or images like the one at the top of this page and see how saturated they are with the lived experience of repression.
Below, by and by, will appear a list of articles in the Hong Kong Repression Monitor series that will be updated as those articles appear.
Timeline of Arrests Warrants and Bounties Issued for Overseas Hong Kongers
Prison Sentences of Hong Kong Pro-Democracy Leaders, Ranked According to Length
The Persecution of Hong Kongers for Commemorating the Tiananmen Massacre
Intense Repression during the June 4 Season of 2025 in Hong Kong
Political Arrests in Hong Kong in 2025 More Than Double Those of 2024
To be fair, by the time the 2019 District Council elections were held, they were nearly in compliance with the principle of genuine universal suffrage, with only a few seats still filled by government appointment or reserved for heads of pro-government bodies. Hong Kong’s parliament-like Legislative Council, on the other hand, only half of the seats were directly elected, with the others being so-called “functional constituencies” which were essentially rigged to ensure a pro-government majority. The “electoral reform” of 2021 actually reduced the number of directly elected seats to from 35 out of 70 to 20 out of 90.