Benedict Rogers: Let’s buy only Australian wine this month

The sentencing of Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow and Ivan Lam this week was, in the words of the last Governor of Hong Kong Lord Patten, “a grim example of China’s determination to put Hong Kong in handcuffs”.

That vivid description captures all too starkly the tragic reality of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s rapid dismantling of Hong Kong’s liberties.

Only hours after their sentencing, Jimmy Lai, the proprietor of this great publication, was arrested again, and Hong Kong Baptist University student union leader Keith Fong Chung-yin was also arrested.

And the previous day, 155 Parliamentarians from 18 countries published an Open Letter to Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam calling for her intervention to seek the release of the 12 Hong Kongers detained in Shenzhen, 100 days after they were arrested.

Handcuffs are everywhere.

And yet while handcuffs can restrain the body, they cannot control the heart or mind.

I know from my own conversations with Joshua and Agnes how true that is. I have had the privilege of meeting Joshua and Agnes several times. It was Joshua’s first imprisonment three years ago that inspired me to mobilize a global campaign and sparked the idea to establish Hong Kong Watch. His book Unfree Speech: The Global Threat to Democracy and Why We Must Act Now sits on my bookshelf, well-read and thoroughly highlighted.

When he was in jail the first time three years ago, I not only organized global statements calling for freedom for him, Nathan Law and Alex Chow, but I wrote to them in prison. I still have the small piece of paper on which Joshua wrote back to me: “Thank you for continuing prayer and support. I believe we are not alone. Global civil society stand firm on our side with political prisoners. Look forward to meet you again in London next year.” That was three years ago, and although he’s now back behind bars, I believe Joshua’s spirit is unchanged and undefeated.

I last spoke with Jimmy Lai exactly a week ago, when I interviewed him for my online interview series “In Conversation with Benedict Rogers”. In that interview he made so many profound remarks, but these words from that conversation echo right now in my spirit: “Our fight has to go on. It is my home here. How can I leave my home? I’ve been making trouble all these years by opposing evil, by opposing the dictatorship. How can I jump ship when it’s in trouble? When it’s in trouble, my role is more important than ever. The greater the danger I am in, the more effective my role is to bring people’s attention to Hong Kong and to help Hong Kong people uphold the value – and not give up. The greater the crisis, the more important it is to hold on. There’s no backing out … There’s never an option to leave … To back out is to defeat myself.”

When I look at people like Joshua, Agnes, Ivan, Jimmy and the 12 Hong Kongers in jail in China, while of course I feel deep sadness that people who should be honored are arrested, people who deserve respect are mistreated, people who are my friends are jailed, at the same time I feel hope. Sorrow for the travesty of injustice in which they find themselves, absolutely, but hope that they and people like them offer humanity a vision and an example of how we as people should live.

We face a choice in life: to compromise our values, kowtow to pressure, sell out our soul in exchange for an easier life in the short term, or stand true to ourselves and our values, make sacrifices – sometimes unbelievably heavy ones – in exchange for inner peace and the knowledge of being on the right side of history.

And so when one takes that as a barometer, the person I feel sorry for is not Joshua, Agnes, Ivan or the 12 Hong Kongers in jail, or Jimmy facing constant arrests and smears on his character, but Carrie Lam and her masters in Beijing.

I don’t feel at all sorry for Ms Lam that she now can’t get a bank account – but I feel sorry that she feels the need to tell the world that she has ‘piles of cash’ at home. I feel sorry that she is so self-absorbed that she lacks the emotional intelligence to know that such a comment is profoundly foolish. I feel sorry that she lacks any ounce of self-awareness or humility such that she feels she has no regrets about her conduct over the past year. I feel sorry that her conscience has so evaporated that she thinks investigating the police for its conduct would be wrong. I feel sorry that she admits in a recent interview that she has no hobbies, that she works all the time, that she doesn’t have time for her husband or family. I feel sorry for her husband. And let’s be clear – I don’t feel sorry for her as such, for she has chosen to sell out, chosen to act as Xi Jinping’s ventriloquist puppet, chosen to be the CCP’s proxy in Hong Kong instead of Hong Kong’s representative to Beijing. She made those choices and must live with the consequences. But I feel sorry for the state of her soul.

In a sense, Ms Lam is more a prisoner than those who have been jailed. For their hearts, minds and souls are free and can never be locked up. But Ms Lam has emptied herself of hers, and is a prisoner of her own making. She’s not even a captive of her masters in Beijing. She sold out to them.

And so those of us who still enjoy freedom need to learn lessons from this. For those in Hong Kong reading this, you face a tough choice: to speak out and risk being locked up physically, to sell out and risk being locked up spiritually, or to get out and continue the fight for freedom in exile, locked-out from the city that is your home.

As I have said before, no Hong Konger should ever be told what to do. Every person has a choice to make and I understand and respect the tragic calculations that every family faces. Those who stay and speak out directly, those who stay and try to continue to resist more subtly and creatively, those who opt for the good of their families to keep their heads down and those who choose to leave: I respect your choices entirely. The only choice I cannot respect is those who sell out – and end up boasting of their piles of cash at home in a ridiculous and misplaced plea for sympathy.

To those who choose to get out – the options are increasing. Not only is there the United Kingdom’s generous British National Overseas (BNO) offer which opens for applications at the end of January, but Canada and Australia have opened their doors to a lifeboat scheme after months of advocacy from Hong Kong Watch and others. We hope other countries will soon open up too.

In addition to the options Hong Kongers face, there’s a choice facing the free world itself. We could continue the failed policy of past years: of appeasement and kowtow. We could go for a mélange of half-baked piecemeal ideas that show rhetorical and moral support but without much strength. Or we could stand together, robustly, as countries that value freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law, and say enough is enough.

In my view the free world is already shifting away from the kowtow demeanor. The only question is how far we are prepared to go. And that depends on how much we are willing to stick together.

So my message to my own country, the new United States President, the European Union, Canada, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Australia and other democracies is this: the imprisonment of Joshua, Agnes, Ivan and the 12 in Shenzhen is not just an attack on Hong Kong’s freedoms. It’s an attack on us all. China’s trade assault on Australia is not just an attack on Australia, it’s an attack on us all – which is why, as I have argued this week, we should all buy only Australian wine this month.

And in response to those attacks, the free world needs to stand up, stand firm, stand tall and stand together. After all, as Jimmy Lai told me just a week ago, “The reason we fight is because we share the same values of the free world … Hong Kong matters because we are in the frontiers fighting for the values that the free world shares with us.”

Joshua, Agnes, Ivan, Andy Li, all the 12, Jimmy and all Hong Kongers: I will keep fighting with you, alongside you and for you, to help break those handcuffs for everyone.

Benedict Rogers is co-founder and Chief Executive of Hong Kong Watch. This article was published in Apple Daily on 4 December 2020. (Photo: Apple Daily)