We know the story time and time again but it should always highlighted every time it happens
Just over a year ago, Chloe Cheung was sitting her A-levels. Now she’s on a Chinese government list 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 actually 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 bounty!”
Chloe is the youngest of 19 activists accused of breaching a national security law introduced by Beijing in response to huge pro-democracy protests in the former British colony five years ago.
In 2021, she and her family moved to the UK under a special visa scheme for Hong Kongers. She can probably never return to her home city and says she has to be careful about where she travels.
Her protest work has made her a fugitive of the Chinese state, a detail not lost on me as we meet one icy morning in the café in the crypt of Westminster Abbey. In medieval England, churches provided sanctuary from arrest.
Hong Kong police issued the arrest warrant 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 fired back a public response.
“I didn’t want the government to think I was scared. Because if Hong Kongers in Hong Kong can’t speak out for themselves any more, then we outside of the city – who can speak freely without fear- we have to speak up for them.”
Chloe attended her first protests with her school friends, in the early days of Hong Kong’s 2019 demonstrations. Protesters turned out in huge numbers against a bill seen as extending China’s control over the territory, which had enjoyed semi-autonomy since Britain handed it back in 1997.
“Politics were never in my life before… so I went to the first protest with curiosity,” she said.
She saw police tear-gassing demonstrators and an officer stepping on a protester’s neck.
“I was so shocked,” she says. “That moment actually changed how I looked at the world.”
Getty ImagesGrowing up in a city that was part of China but that had retained many of its freedoms – she had thought Hong Kongers could talk about “what we like and don’t like” and “could decide what Hong Kong’s future looked like”.
But the violent crackdown by authorities made her realise that wasn’t the case. She began joining protests, at first without her parents’ knowledge.
“I didn’t tell them at the time because they didn’t care [about politics],” she says. But when things started to get “really crazy”, she browbeat her parents into coming with her.
At the march, police fired tear gas at them and they had to run away into the subway. Her parents got the “raw experience”, she says, not the version they’d seen blaming protesters on TV.
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