Hong Kong youth activist Joshua Wong said on Monday he has been subjected to “intensified” surveillance since he filed his candidacy for a seat in…
Hong Kong youth activist Joshua Wong said on Monday he has been subjected to “intensified” surveillance since he filed his candidacy for a seat in the Legislative Council.
Wong said he was shadowed by multiple suspicious vehicles before and after he submitted his application for the election, a clear and possibly deliberately intimidating escalation of the surveillance commonly directed at pro-democracy leaders.
“Everyone should be careful and avoid being out and about alone,” he warned, having previously told a press conference that he worried about being “extradited to China” and tossed into a “black jail in Beijing” under Hong Kong’s new national security law.
Coconuts Hong Kong translated Wong’s Facebook post about the suspicious vehicles that followed him around on Monday:
Wong compared the situation in Hong Kong with Taiwan’s “White Terror,” an era of political repression that began in 1949 and lasted for decades.
Wong and other Hong Kong democracy activists have long invoked the White Terror in comparisons with their own increasingly repressive government, but the comparison became even more popular after the imposition of Beijing’s draconian national security law, in part because dissidents came up with a clever way of expressing their opposition without risking arrest for “subversion” under the law: they hold up blank white pieces of paper to evoke the memory of the White Terror.
