Ben Lowry: A young Hong Kong activist who warned Stormont about engaging with China languishes in jail yet local politicians seem indifferent

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​Now that young man languishes in prison, where he has been for years, in a shocking illustration of Chinese repression and how it has destroyed the spirit of the city state of Hong Kong.

It is a saga that illustrates how indifferent, even clueless, Northern Ireland seems to what is happening in the territory, as indeed is most of the western world.

Some NI politicians seem happy to engage with China as if none of this was going on, with our finance minister John O’Dowd having had a meeting with Beijing’s diplomat in Belfast last month, about which he has refused to release minutes.

Back in the summer of 2020, Joshua Wong – now aged 28 and then aged 23 – reacted to news of a meeting between Arlene Foster and Michelle O’Neill and the then Belfast consul. After those talks, the consulate said that the Stormont Executive “understands and respects” what Beijing was doing in Hong Kong (where its recently introduced ‘national security law’, stamping out free politics).

Mr Wong told his 650,000 followers on the social media platform Twitter that it would be “unbelievably scandalous if it is really the case that the First Minister and deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland have said they ‘understand and respect’ Beijing’s human rights abuses under its sweeping national security law”.

The first and deputy first minister then issued belated statements, denying that they had said they had expressed any such understanding.

Mrs O’Neill said: “I made it very clear that I supported the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ international agreement” (the framework for Hong Kong after it passed from British to Chinese control in 1997).

And Mrs Foster said “my position on Hong Kong is the same as that of Her Majesty’s Government” (the UK at the time had condemned the repression).

Joshua Wong has now been imprisoned for more than four years, both serving sentences and awaiting further charges. He is accused of conspiring with other democracy activists to ask foreign nations and groups to impose sanctions on China.

It is a sign of how pampered we are in Europe and North America that there is so little interest in this outrage. Democracy has been entirely snuffed out in Hong Kong, in flagrant breach of the 1984 Sino-British Treaty setting out the 1997 handover terms.

For a while in 2019, massive protests in Hong Kong – on one occasion of half a million people – were such that it seemed like China would be unable to assert its will on the city. The protests were called the umbrella movement because demonstrators used umbrellas to protect themselves from tear gas used by police.

But China used the pandemic the following year to assert full control. Now the legislative assembly there is a joke (manned by puppets of Beijing), the once proud and open courts are toothless, and free speech is impossible. Dissidents risk being taken to the Chinese communist mainland and jailed for many years by kangaroo courts.

I am not aware of a Stormont politician who has repeatedly raised this horror. The main NI-linked politician who has done so is the former Alliance Party leader, later a Fine Gael MEP, John Cushnahan who has often written about it on these pages.

In October he said that Michelle O’Neill and the current deputy first minister, Emma Little-Pengelly, should “hang their heads in shame” for not raising “even a single one of these issues” about repression when they met the Chinese ambassador to the UK Zheng Zeguang in Belfast. He wrote that they “chose instead to discuss the expansion of Chinese banks” to the province.

Ms O’Neill and Ms Little-Pengelly have since met the consul-general in NI Li Nan. The North Antrim MP Robin Swann said that a meeting on February 4 went “far beyond the remit” of Stormont. Only much later was any information on the meeting released, and none was given about a previous meeting. We live in a society in which we have massive transparency as to what happens in government, the courts and more generally in day to day life. We have massive information at our fingertips online and regular elections to different decision-making bodies. We can barely comprehend what it would be like if all that was taken away, as suddenly happened in Hong Kong.

Irish republicans have long found either common cause with anti-western regimes like in Cuba. They are certainly far more likely than the best western democracies such as the UK to give repressive nations like Iran, Russia and China the benefit of the doubt. So it is not so surprising that Mr O’Dowd is happy to build friendly relations with Beijing.

But for other democrats to do so is a betrayal of heroes like Joshua Wong.

Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor