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Fourteen people have been found guilty in Hong Kong’s largest national security trial, the prosecution of the so-called “Hong Kong 47” pro-democracy campaigners.
Sixteen of the cohort had pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit subversion for organising pre-election primaries, and were among those detained in mass dawn raids by national security police in January 2021. Most have been in jail awaiting trial ever since.
Among the guilty are former lawmakers and activists including Helena Wong, veteran campaigner Leung “Long Hair” Kwok-hung, journalist Gwyneth Ho, and dual Hong Kong-Australian national Gordon Ng.
The charges of “conspiracy to subvert state power” were laid against them under the national security law which had been introduced seven months earlier.
Hopefully some .ml users can show up and explain to us why this is actually good and freedom, because it looks like authoritarian bullshit to me. “Conspiracy to become members of the legislature by receiving votes,” life in prison.
Better tHaN supporting gEnOciDe!
I guess…
THE BIZARRE TALE of a 10-step plot to escalate chaos in Hong Kong until there was blood on the streets and destruction of the economy came to an end this morning.
And the care taken by the judges shone a positive light on the Hong Kong judiciary – as did their openness in releasing their paperwork to public scrutiny.
Most participants (31) in this important subversion case had already pleaded guilty—and a court this morning found the same was true for the majority (14) of the remaining ones. Two were acquitted.
Details of the case are below—and read to the end for five important conclusions you won’t read anywhere else.
BLOODY SUPRRESSION The plotters aimed to use loopholes in the city’s governance system to create what they called “a constitutional weapon of mass destruction” that would paralyze Hong Kong.
A specific step in the plan was to side-line pro-peace opposition members in favor of pro-violence radicals.
Participants were asked to sign a pledge (titled “Inked Without Regret”) that if they got into the Legislative Council they would follow instructions to act as a bloc to veto the city’s budget and freeze all government spending: the money that kept schools, hospitals and utilities working.
This would create a state of emergency, escalate violence, and cause so much chaos on the streets that it would force China’s leadership to take control of Hong Kong in what organizers hoped would be “a bloody suppression”.
WE BURN, YOU BURN This in turn would enable the US to declare that Beijing had ended “one country two systems” which the west could use to justify hitting Hong Kong and mainland China with political and economic sanctions.
The resultant destruction of Hong Kong’s economy would cause immense harm to the population of the city, but thinking was that it would be worth it under the “we burn, you burn” principle, which saw economic catastrophe as a desirable step towards political goals.
The court heard that the scheme evolved from initial plans in December of 2019. It was then outlined in detail by academic Benny Tai in a plan entitled “10 steps to real mutual destruction”.
Various versions were printed between April and May 2020 in Apple Daily, a newspaper run by anti-China campaigner Jimmy Lai and his right hand man Mark Simon, a former US intelligence officer.
AWASH WITH CASH, AS USUAL But Hong Kong investigators became suspicious about mysterious sums of money moving around among individual political activists, with sums ranging from HK$4,000 to HK$290,000.
In the end, judges agreed to freeze more than HK$1.6 million of unexplained cash.
During the opening steps of the plan, a public popularity contest to select candidates, arrests were made and 47 participants charged with conspiring to commit subversion. Thirty-one pleaded guilty and 16 denied the charges.
Today, 14 of those were found guilty, while two were acquitted.
ANALYSIS ONE: Western media reports say the arrests were for “organizing primaries”. This is not true. They were detained on suspicion of “conspiring to subvert state powers”, a crime recognized worldwide, and used thousands of times MORE in western countries than it has been in Hong Kong.
TWO: The case is difficult for the west to use against China. That’s because most of the people arrested pleaded guilty, including the prime mover, Benny Tai. This meant the facts were not in dispute.
Furthermore, four of the people gave evidence for the prosecution, which meant that there was no shortage of detailed evidence confirming the prosecution’s case.
THREE: The mixed verdicts—with two people acquitted—are also a problem for Hong Kong’s critics, including Jimmy Lai, Mark Simon, and much of the western press, who have repeatedly said that the city no longer has a rule of law, and no one can win national security cases.
Indeed, one of the men who was acquitted, Lawrence Lau, stood outside the court today and praised the judgment. “If there is any star in this case, this judgement should be the star,” he told the scrum of reporters.
The judgment, a huge document of almost 300 pages, was made publicly available. What comes across in the document is just how much care the judges took in defining every term used, and the wealth of references to other cases around the world.
FOUR: In terms of timing – 2019 and 2020 – this Hong Kong scheme coincides with a long list of anti-China activities which involve east-west politics, anti-China activism, and lots of unexplained cash.
The Hong Kong people are rightly concerned about the involvement in the city of numerous “three-initial” pro-western groups, including OTF, NED, and RFA, contributing millions of dollars for anti-government activism in Hong Kong.
The U.S. strictly bans overseas political interference in its own country, but has spent massively, for decades, on sponsoring political interference around the world.
FIVE: But here’s the biggest irony of all.
Another attempt to organize a series of steps that would bring legal government processes to a complete halt took place from 3 November 2020 to 6 January 2021 in the United States, culminating in the storming of the Capitol Hill building in Washington DC on the second of those dates.
The international media uniformly see that as a bad thing.
It appears that from most western journalists’ point of view, violent insurgency in the US is bad, violent insurgency in Hong Kong is good.
LOL there you are. Another fan of state capitalist China’s authoritarianism. Shameful that people like you cheer over what China does to Uyghurs.
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I miss when we were all backing Hong Kong:( 2020 feels so far away
People were and still are, but unfortunately nations broke their promises and turned a blind eye.
And once news stopped covering it, that’s when shit hit the fan.
I mean, what could the rest of the world reasonably do aside from starting a world war over it? Sanctions might punish the Chinese economy, but they won’t un-occupy HK.
You don’t have to start a war against China to defend the people of Hong Kong and openly help evacuate them against an oppressive invasive force. Let China be the one to take aggressive action.
UK: We’re giving you back Hong Kong but you need to behave or there will be consequences
China: Doesn’t behave
UK:
I mean, what is a minor country going to do?
Traditionally either invade the world, or sulk on their rainy little island(s)
And they’ll probably be killed and that’ll be that. Yay, China… /s
It should be crossposted to the other worldnews community, imo.
You can click the button and do that.
It should be crossposted to /news too. Since it isnt’ Joe Biden doing fascism against protesters you won’t get banned for posting it there.
I’ve been informed that we should tolerate Joe Biden’s creeping fascism over Donald Trump’s ultra-fascism, and that any attempt to criticise the entire system for giving us only an option between fascism lite and full-fat fascism is both-sidesing and will definitely usher in the ultra-fascism.
Any attempt to explain that I advocate strategically voting for fascism-lite whilst working to free ourselves from this dystopian fucking nightmare appears to mean that I secretly want ultra-fascism which doesn’t make sense to me but they’re very confident about it.
Don’t worry, I’m sure they were all secret CIA agents /s
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Sixteen of the cohort had pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit subversion for organising pre-election primaries, and were among those detained in mass dawn raids by national security police in January 2021.
Among the guilty are former lawmakers and activists including Helena Wong, veteran campaigner Leung “Long Hair” Kwok-hung, journalist Gwyneth Ho, and dual Hong Kong-Australian national Gordon Ng.
Thursday’s judgement said the cohort’s plan to gain a majority in the LegCo in order to block budgetary bills and force the resignation of the chief executive if she didn’t agree to the pro-democracy movement’s demands was a violation of Hong Kong’s mini constitution, the Basic Law.
Most of the 47 had been denied bail, including Jimmy Sham, who was labelled a “determined and resolute young man” for continuing to insist on the five demands of the pro-democracy protesters, and 65-year-old former legislator Claudia Mo, whose WhatsApp messages with western journalists in the preceding years had been cited as evidence she was a national security risk.
Prosecutors had argued Tai’s plan for the primaries to gain a majority in parliament and eventually force a dissolution and the resignation of the chief executive amounted to an abuse of powers and a subversive conspiracy.
Days prior, Hong Kong minister Erick Tsang warned in an interview that the primaries could violate the national security law (NSL), which had been active for a bit more than a week.
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