Saturday, December 7, 2024

Freedom from Assault

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GRAPHIC: Live, fatal organ extraction exposed

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Prepare yourself.

This interview is hard for sun-soaked Australians to comprehend.

It’s a topic most of our politicians avoid. It’s too troubling. It opens a Pandora’s Box of questions, about humanity, ethics, complex interconnections, human rights, our future, and sickening expediency beyond our imagination.

So, before the interview, Liberty Itch will step you through a quick, summarising primer.

There is credible evidence that Australia’s #1 trading partner, the People’s Republic of China, runs the world’s largest forced organ harvesting business.

Australia doesn’t simply buy electronics, steel and machinery from China but, critics assert, the Communist Chinese Party does a roaring trade in human hearts, lungs and kidneys, treated as commodities like any other. It’s a lucrative, bloody business.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/u2bUusvh3c0?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

The China Tribunal, a London-based non-government tribunal which investigated claims of forced human organ harvesting chaired by former lead prosecutor of the Slobodan Milošević trial, Sir Geoffrey Nice KC, has made some shocking findings.

This will give you a feeling for those findings:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/naJFMfDv3Tc?start=425s&rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Its damning final judgment claimed there are over 1.5 million people currently detained in Chinese prison camps, many of them are being brutally killed or operated on, alive, to provide organs for the $1 billion transplant industry.

$1 billion! That’s the size of Australia’s wine exports to China, when the communists aren’t interfering with free trade. This is the scale of the ghoulish business.

If you think the issue of Beijing’s organ trafficking is a far-away problem overseas, you are mistaken. It’s on our doorstep. It’s here.

The China Tribunal discovered a few Australians in the medical profession linked to a Sydney hospital were denying organs were sourced through coercion and human rights abuses.

Further, the Australian reported contentious, CCP-propagandist white-washing of forced harvesting by a former Griffith University academic, Campbell Fraser, who had a history of cooperative association with CCP mouthpiece, China Daily.

Campbell Fraser. Griffith University barred him from trips to China.

Further again, Australia’s SBS reported a complicated fracas between medical practitioners at Westmead Hospital. In that report, Dr Chapman, a staunch defender of Chinese Communist Party organ harvesting practices, had in earlier years reported another physician allegedly being told by a patient of Chinese origin, “I cannot come in for dialysis tomorrow. I have to fly tonight because they are shooting my donor tomorrow.”

Though obviously the Australian and SBS are reputable sources, Liberty Itch wanted to speak directly with other investigators with expertise in China’s organ harvesting practices.

The following interview is with David Matas CM.

David Matas CM is an international human rights lawyer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He is co-author with David Kilgour, a former Canadian Secretary of State and Deputy Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons, of Bloody Harvest: The Killing of Falun Gong for their Organs, 2009 and co-editor with Torsten Trey of State Organs: Transplant Abuse in China, 2012. David is a co-founder with David Kilgour and Ethan Gutmann of the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China, and a member of the Order of Canada.

David Matas CM. International human rights lawyer, author, researcher and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize nominee.

<Interview starts>

LI: Can you give Liberty Itch subscribers a brief overview of the Chinese state’s organ harvesting business? How is it done?

DM: Prisoners of conscience in arbitrary indefinite detention are systematically blood tested and organ examined. The lists of prisoners with blood types and tissue types are circulated to nearby health practitioners and hospitals. When a patient arrives needing a transplant, the blood and tissue typing is matched with that of a prisoner. The matching prisoner is, in detention, injected with anti-coagulants and immobilisers and then taken to a nearby van where organs are extracted. The extraction kills the prisoner. His or her body is cremated on site. The organ or organs are taken by the van to a nearby hospital or to an airport for transport elsewhere in China.

LI: What is the scale? Who are the victims and who are the ‘clients’?

DM: About 100,000 organs a year. The victims are primarily practitioners of the spiritually based set of exercises Falun Gong, also Uyghurs in large numbers, Tibetans and House Christians, mostly Eastern Lightning, in smaller numbers. The clients are transplant tourists, and wealthy or well-connected Chinese.

LI: Who benefits from the Chinese State’s organ harvesting business?

DM: The health system benefits financially. The Communist Party benefits through elimination of those it sees as insufficiently Communist.

LI: You recently visited Australia, late last year, and have gone to Canberra to present the issue of Beijing’s Illegal Organ Trafficking to our elected representatives in the Federal Parliament. What was the response?

DM: There has been significant concern in the Parliament of Australia about organ transplant abuse in China. There have been many petitions in the Parliament of Australia, both in the House of Representatives and the Senate, addressing Falun Gong and organ harvesting, starting in 2006 when the report that I wrote with David Kilgour first came out and continuing to this year. The Parliament, it is safe to say, is well-informed of the abuse and has showed considerable concern about the abuse.

However, the response from the individual elected representatives varied, depending on the representative with whom I met. I would suggest contacting these representatives directly for their response.

LI: What more should the Australian Government do to tackle this crime?

DM: These are 5 suggestions to the Australian government in summary.

1) Improve the Australian Senate procedures. There are several Parliaments around the world which have, through motions or resolutions, condemned the mass killing in China of prisoners of conscience for their organs and called for Government action to avoid complicity in those killings. Australia should follow suit.

2) Adopt mandatory reporting whereby medical professionals have an obligation to report, to an appropriate registry or authority, any knowledge or reasonable suspicion that a person under their care has received a commercial transplant or one sourced from a non-consenting donor, be that in Australia or overseas;

3) Implement extraterritorial legislation. The current Australia’s Criminal Code does not explicitly prohibit organ trafficking. The government has accepted the recommendation to amend it but no amendments have been proposed in reality. As an alternative, private Members and Senators could introduce amendments to prohibit organ trafficking;

4) Become a state party to the Council of Europe Convention on Human Rights and join other nations in a collective effort to combat foreign organ transplant abuse;

5) One last suggestion I would make is the constitution of a friends of Falun Gong Parliamentary group. Australian Parliamentarians, through the many petitions they have presented to Parliament, as well as through the Sub Committee report, and statements they have made outside Parliament, have shown an understanding of the issue of the mass killing.

You can see the full text of my suggestions here.

<Interview ends>

Liberty Itch urges the Albanese Government to take leadership to protect the most vulnerable members of our community. It was promised to us that Australia will ‘cooperate where we can, disagree where we must’ with China.

This is an area that we ‘disagree where we must’ and immediate actions need to be taken.

There’s more you can do:

The International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC) has an Australian chapter that works on a range of initiatives. Apart from legislation change, there is also a need for Australian universities, hospitals and transplant associated organisations to undertake due diligence in their interactions with China in the areas of transplant medicine, research and training.

It’s important that our medical professionals and academics are not unknowingly aiding and abetting China in its illegal organ trafficking practices.

BREAKING: Violent CCP thug convicted in NSW

Ted Hui

This week, a pro-Beijing self-described ‘spontaneous patriot’ was successfully convicted in a Sydney court of criminal intimidation.

Last August 2022, prominent pro-democracy activist and former Hong-Kong Legislative Councillor, Ted Hui, suffered a politically driven assault and intimidation in Sydney.

Chinese Communist Party supporter, Billy Kwok, influenced by the Chinese government’s propagandist apps WeChat and Weibo, was not happy with Mr. Hui’s pro-democracy advocacy. So, he decided to take matters into his own hands and used violence to handle a political difference of opinion.

The police officially charged Mr. Kwok in September 2022, but the case was delayed due to ‘mental health’ grounds.

These delays were overcome and, this week, a Sydney court found him guilty on two counts of criminal intimidation, handing-down both a community service order of 12 months and a $500 fine.

On hearing the verdict, Mr. Hui said, “This successful prosecution sends two important messages to the community. Firstly, all people in Australia have the right to express their political views freely. This must be respected.”

“Secondly, pro-Beijing people need to understand that they cannot use violence against any person, just because they have a different political persuasion. The rule of law underpins the way Australian society is governed”, he continued.

Liberty Itch praises Mr. Hui for his courage and tenacity in defending Australian free speech and fighting for democracy in Hong Kong.

INTERVIEW: Wincing First-Hand Account of Uyghur Concentration Camp Torture

This isn’t easy to read.

Omar Bekali visited Adelaide recently to deliver a series of keynote speeches.

At first glance, a man on a speaking tour seems ordinary enough. However, Omar’s story is anything but ordinary.

A survivor of the Chinese Communist Party’s Xinjiang Camp, Omar Bekali, 46, presents as a courageous but scarred man with first-hand experience of the Chinese Government’s network of concentration camps. He not only saw people being subjected to unspeakable brutality and torture. He was one of them!

The following interview is compelling and especially wincing, coming with a reader warning. Yet his message is of global importance. The dark truth of China’s concentration camps and human rights violations is uncovered in all their gore.

The scene is Chinese occupied East Turkistan, Xinjiang.

The interview begins …


Liberty Itch: How did you end up in a concentration camp in XinJiang?

OB: My family and I lived in Kazakhstan. I went to Urumqi for a Trade Expo on 22 March 2017 for my work. Then on 25 March 2017, I went to Turpan, a City in Xinjiang, to visit my parents, where I was arrested and detained.

That morning, I was at my parents’ house with my brothers and sisters. Suddenly two police cars pulled up outside our house.  Five armed police officers got out from their cars, came into our home, and arrested me. They never presented me with a warrant; they told me that they had one on their computer. I was brought to Dighar Village Police Station where I was made to wait for two hours. Every chance I got, I’d ask to call my parents, a lawyer, the Kazakh Embassy, or my wife, because no one knew where I was and I couldn’t call for help.

LI: On what grounds were you arrested by the Chinese Police?

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OB: It is because I am a Turkic Kazakh. Beijing wants to erase all Turkic people in East Turkistan, a country invaded by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. The land is now commonly known as ‘XinJiang, China’. I was suddenly accused of ‘terrorism’ and ‘smuggling people out of China’. I was targeted and discriminated against for being a Turkic Kazakh.

LI: When and how long did you stay in the camp?

OB: I stayed in the camp from 26 March 2017 to 24 November 2017.

LI: Where was your family at that time?

OB: My family was in Kazakhstan. I have a beautiful family with my wife and 3 children.

LI: How was your family impacted?

OB: The CCP destroyed my beautiful family. My family members including my children are all mentally impacted. My youngest son, who was one year and three month old when I was captured, could not call me dad for nearly a year after I returned. He complains even now that I abandoned him.

The purpose of these concentration camps is to indoctrinate Uyghurs into obeying the Chinese government. They use sophisticated mechanisms to brainwash us. I was told by the guards I had been poisoned by extreme ideologies during my life outside of China and needed to have a proper ‘Chinese Education’.

LI: What activities did they require of you in the camp?

OB: We are forced to study the Chinese language, Marxism, ‘Xi Jinping Thoughts’, renounce our religion and younger inmates worked in factories.

We were denied food for not agreeing to sing anthems that praised the Chinese government, otherwise known as Red Songs. We were told to denounce our Uyghur identity and Muslim faith. I was made to read a list of 60 types of common crimes associated with my ethnic and religious identity, praying to Allah, having a beard, attending a Muslim marriage, and communicating with people outside China.

My personal belief is that they never actually planned on indoctrinating us. The plan was always to exterminate the Uyghur population and harvest our organs.

LI: Did you comply with all the tasks? What would happen if you didn’t do them?

OB: I tried to resist. I denied the Chinese government’s accusations and asked them to show me the evidence. But that led to severe torture as punishment. The police realised they needed to escalate the pressure to get me to say what they wanted me to say.

From the police station I was brought somewhere I didn’t recognise. The police made me take off my clothes and examined my body, making notes about my condition. That’s when the torture started. They transferred me to the police station, in Kelamayi, Xinjiang.

My hands were strapped onto the arms on the chair
and my feet were constrained at the bottom
while needles were gradually slid into my fingers.
That would last four to eight hours every day.

From April 3 to April 7, 2017, they would put me in the ‘Tiger Chair’ to try and extract information from me and compel me to admit to crimes I wasn’t guilty of.

They said I organised terrorist activities, propagated terrorism, or covered-up for terrorists. The police showed me photos of Uyghur and Kazakh people in Kazakhstan and asked me for their information.

I was given a letter accounting for all of my ‘crimes’ and told to sign it as a confession.

My job was used against me. The police claimed I was using my tourism career as a way to smuggle people out of China and into neighbouring countries.

Needles and nails were inserted into my body every time I told them “no” or “I’m innocent”.

An iron wire was shoved into my penis.

Rope was tied to the ceiling and around my wrists so tight that my feet couldn’t touch the ground. The rope ripped through the skin on my wrists while my body weight pulled me down. 

Other days I was put in a “flying plane” position, where both my wrists and feet were tied to the ceiling, pulling my arms and legs out of their sockets while I was left dangling.

The guards would laugh as my body pulled itself apart.

There were five other types of punishment for those who didn’t follow the guards’ orders.

  1. First, they’d make me face a wall for 24 hours without food or drink while they beat me with rubber rods.
  2. Second, we were put in the Tiger Chair where needles were shoved into our fingers and feet.
  3. Third, we’d be left in solitary confinement with no light for 24 hours.
  4. Fourth, they’d put us into scorching hot rooms in the summer or freezing cold rooms in the winter.
  5. Finally, a punishment I thankfully never experienced was called water prison. I heard of many detainees who were put in the water prison, but I don’t know what it is.

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LI: How did you manage to escape? 

OB: To my great surprise on November 24, 2017, I was informed of my release and expulsion to Kazakhstan. I had been detained for eight months. I later learned that my wife sent a number of letters to the UN Human Rights Commission and the Kazakhstan Foreign Minister attesting to my innocence.

The considerable press coverage of my illegal detainment was a major factor in my release.

LI: Where do you live now?

OB: I migrated to the Netherlands with a valid visa. I moved there to provide eyewitness evidence about what is happening in the concentration camps in XinJiang.

LI: How many Uyghur people are in concentration camps in XiaJiang?

OB: It’s always hard to tell, of course. However, while I was in the camp in 2017, my best estimate is that more than a million Uyghurs were in the camps.


Omar’s is a cautionary tale about brutality inflicted by our largest trading partner. He endured trauma and unspeakable pain that no-one should be required to bear.

However, I prefer to see Omar through the lens of unfaltering courage, resilience and the strength to survive. There’s a bravery in telling his painful story again and again on a global stage, a story shared by millions of Uyghurs and other minority groups who are still in the XinJiang camps.

Today, he is bringing his testimony before international human rights bodies.


What can everyday Australians do to help the Uyghur people?

This year the United States used it’s Magnitsky legislation to ban the import of certain Xinjiang products, including cotton, over concerns about forced-labor in the XinJiang region.

Australia has similar Magnitsky legislation but has not used it to sanction companies exploiting Uyghur slave-labour.

Whilst we at Liberty Itch wholeheartedly support free-trade and are against wholesale nationwide sanctions, products manufactured with slave-labour is anathema to free-trade principles and cannot be supported.

While you wait for your Commonwealth Government to take a stand on this, you can take action as an individual and purchase alternatives to brands made with Uyghur slave-labour.

Small acts of defiance in support of human rights go a long way.

BREAKING: Man Who Chanted “CCP, Step Down”, Arrested and Disappeared!

Brave Chinese citizens have yet again risked imprisonment challenging their country’s regime.

They took to the streets to fight the Chinese Communist Party’s prolonged and inhumane lockdown, a policy which caused residents trapped in their high-rise apartment building in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, to be burned-alive.

In scenes from the security state rarely accessible to the world, Chinese people gathered in the Shanghai streets and chanted ‘CCP, step down. Xijiping, step down!’ The chanting showed the citizens’ barely concealed contempt and dissatisfaction with their government, seemingly well beyond just its strict COVID measures.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/NG-91ngQn4E?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

The whereabouts of the protest leader you see in this video is unknown.

His family were eye-witnesses to him being handcuffed and unceremoniously bundled into a van. There is no official paperwork of his arrest. His family reported that three days after the arrest, there is still no trace of the young man.   

He was simply ‘made to disappear.’  

China is the world’s most heavily surveilled country. Intrusive facial recognition software, a tool used to thwart human rights and civil liberties, is now being routinely exploited by the Chinese Police State. Facial recognition systems log nearly every single citizen in the country, with 372.8 cameras per 1,000 people.  

Chinese authorities have reportedly begun tracking-down people who took part in the demonstrations. Students are always the weakest and easiest to pick off. Others who attended the protests are being rounded-up without scrutiny from international media.

This wasn’t sufficient intimidation for the despotic regime. The Chinese Government immediately made its military presence felt more publicly as it rolled-out armoured tanks on the street.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vG6nB_YXPUQ?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0


Unlike the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, the Government now has the technology to corral freedom-activists more secretly to avoid the world’s condemnation. The Chinese Communist Party, with all the apparatus of a surveillance state and growing superpower, seemingly acts in fear of its own defenceless citizens.

These actions are a continuation of well-documented brutality evident in the 2019 Hong Kong protests. (Warning: the next video depicts graphic violence on an unarmed civilian. Viewer discretion recommended.)

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/WSCi38shWxg?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Freedom is worth the fight.

Pray for the Chinese people. 

Stunning Early Victorian Election Prediction

Matthew Guy

To be clear, I don’t know who’s going to win the Victorian election later tonight, 26 November 2022.

How can I or any of us?

However, I’m going to make a prediction as I write this at 3:20pm ACDT 26 November 2022, and have the prediction published just minutes before the polls have closed so you know I’ve not had any input from the counting of the votes. There’s my accountability, dear reader, to you.

Labor will win!

If my prediction is wrong, take all future predictions from me with a grain of salt. Throw tomatoes and rotten eggs at me. I’ll deserve it.

Right now, I’m quietly confident in making this prediction, however ghastly it may be.

And here is my reasoning. Hear it through …

Heavens know, Dan Andrews and the Labor Government he leads in Victoria has been revolting.

Who can forget the litany of failures …

Rubber bullets in the back, pregnant woman arrested in her pyjamas for a Facebook post, the world’s longest lockdown, businesses crushed, women and children manhandled for not wearing masks, family nest-eggs shattered, MPs arrested and denied access to their democratically elected seat in Parliament House itself, elderly citizens having their pelvis fractured as they are slammed to the ground by overzealous police, churches ordered to close at the point of police intrusion into sacred spaces, and a once vibrant city – the envy of the world – hollowed of its sparkle.

There will be a long-tail to this shocking overreach. Early figures are indicating that the rates of men aged 18 to 44 presenting with myocarditis, a long-term heart condition, have doubled. Yes, 2X. Men in their prime, cut low.

Most devastating to the soul was the sight of a young man, hitherto mentally healthy, taking his own life on a Melbourne street by setting himself ablaze whilst in the grip of a lockdown-induced depression. The depravity of this Government’s policies is chilling.

Free people have a right to be free. Free people have a God-given right to practise their religion. It’s part of our Christian-informed civil libertarian culture. And our Faith gives us Grace. It’s who we are. It’s how we cope with a world of sin.

And Dan Andrews failed as a standard bearer of those freedoms.

Why then do I predict this tyrant will be returned to office?

Why do I put my predictive reputation on the line and call the election for Labor even before the polls have closed?

The answer is that people don’t vote for “anyone would be better than” candidate X.

Our good citizens require an informed choice, a differentiation upon which they can decide.

And I’m afraid to say it but the Liberal Party’s leader, Matthew Guy, has failed to differentiate his Party.

How could he?

He’s limp, insipid, hardly the embodiment of inspiration and action!

Beyond the personal characteristics of the leader, the seeds of the Liberal Party’s failure in this election were planted in 2020. Throughout the entirety of the covid pandemic, if that’s what it was and is, the Liberal Party played a small target, Labor-lite game.

The Liberal Party could have weighed multiple harms to the community of Labor’s draconian covid measures, things like job loss, depression and endless racking-up the State debt for future generations to absorb, instead of robotically following bureaucratic health advice to the exclusion of all other considerations.

Liberal MPs didn’t. That would take differentiation, a knowledge of John Stuart Mill, the fortitude to use the minds our Lord gave them, and the courage to avoid groupthink.

The Liberal Party could have heeded the warnings of the worst civil liberty abuses in 100 years, passionately articulated in the Victorian Bar Association’s extraordinary and unprecedented open letter from sixty-four Queens Counsel.

Liberal MPs didn’t. That would take differentiation through a bedrock of principles.

The Liberal Party could have rallied the churches, giving cover and much needed support to pastors and priests throughout the State, stunned that worshipers were to have doors slammed in their faces.

Liberal MPs didn’t. They aren’t Christians, most of them. That would take differentiation through Faith.

At every opportunity, the Liberal Party Opposition Leader has looked politically anemic. You don’t win by hedging. You don’t win by staying small. You don’t win by cloning yourself using a tyrant as the mould.

You win by standing for something. You win by inspiring people for a better tomorrow. You win by giving people hope. You win by serving others in practical, helpful ways. You win by differentiating yourself from the tyrant.

None of this was done by Matthew Guy and his Liberal Party in Victoria.

I therefore don’t need to watch the election coverage tonight.

Labor will be returned.

Lack of differentiation and beliefs will be the reason.

Pray for the people of Victoria.

And if my prediction is wrong, pray for the people of Victoria anyway.

INTERVIEW: The CCP imprisoned him. She got him out!

If you listen to rare public forays by senior members of the security establishment, the spies and their agencies, we in the West are under threat from several fronts. Looming front and centre, they say, is an expansionary Chinese Communist Party.

To be clear, Liberty Itch has no quarrel with the Chinese people.

However, Liberty Itch is sceptical of government of all stripes, whether in the West or the Chinese Communist Party. Government has a nasty habit of suppressing its people, sometimes stripping freedoms one imperceptible step at a time, its citizens in a saucepan of the slow boil kind. Sometimes government makes swift and savage moves against its people. History is replete with examples of both.

So well may we ask: Is the Chinese Communist Party friend or foe, our ally or adversary? We in the West welcome and educate their students. We trade with their corporations. Australia, the United States and indeed the entire OECD are beneficiaries of China’s emergence. Our shared prosperity is enormous as China brings a billion citizens out of agrarian life into a century-delayed Industrial Revolution and today’s Information Age simultaneously. The project is breathtaking.

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But as Liberty Itch discovered, geopolitical relationships are complex. Material wealth is soulless if not accompanied by human rights. We cannot be so naïve or selectively blind as to ignore civil liberties in our estimation. The Dragon we feed and enable today should be ready to take its place on the world stage as a force for good.

With an open mind, Liberty Itch therefore embarked on an investigation, a series of tell-all interviews with people with particular direct experience with the Chinese Communist Party. The stories are real. The events described happened and cannot be ignored. What each does is illuminate, directly and personally, how the Chinese Communist Party acts from a civil liberties perspective.

Our first guest in this series is Fiona Hui.

You can see the former flight attendant in Fiona instantly. Urbane, impeccably-dressed and possessed of a welcoming smile, she possesses a charm hard not to like. She has navigated many of life’s milestones and responsibilities already while retaining her youthful energy.

First impressions rarely tell the whole story. As you peel-away the onion layers of her life, normality gives way to heartache, the collapse of her homeland, the incarceration of a loved one and a fight for survival with lessons for all freedom-lovers who value their civil liberties.

So her story is yours. There are some timely warnings for all of us.

Here’s Liberty Itch’s short interview with Fiona Hui.


LI:          When did you become an Australian citizen?

FH:        Although I have been living in Australia for nearly 20 years, I only became an Australian citizen very recently, in 2021.  I applied for my citizenship in light of the loss of freedom and democracy in Hong Kong in 2019. At that point, I realised that Australia is my only home, so I submitted my citizenship application.

LI:          Prior to this, you were a citizen of which country?

FH:        Prior to 2021, I was a citizen of Hong Kong. I was born and raised under the British rule in Hong Kong. 

LI:          You lived in Hong Kong during which years?

FH:        I lived in Hong Kong since I was born in 1980, until 2004, when I left Hong Kong and came to Australia to pursue a liberal arts education.

LI:          What was life like in Hong Kong in those early years?

FH:        As a successful former British Colony from 1841–1997, Hong Kong is a unique place blending East and West. I always felt free, safe, and connected to the West when I was a child and a young teenager. I enjoyed living in a ‘very Chinese city’ essentially, but also appreciated the opportunities to be exposed to Western literature, music, philosophies and ideologies. It was dynamic, stimulating and exciting.

LI:          Why did you leave Hong Kong?

FH:        I left Hong Kong for a Western higher education. I did not imagine Hong Kong could become what it is today when I left. Like most people. I have taken democracy for granted and couldn’t imagine otherwise.

LI:          From the handover by Britain in 1997 to your departure, what changes did you notice in Hong Kong?

FH:        Since the handover in 1997, there has been a steady and gradual erosion of Hong Kong freedoms. Since the structure of democracy was already in place, Hong Kong people had been asking for ‘universal suffrage’, all adult citizens should be able to vote for their government representatives, as highlighted by the Occupy Central and Umbrella Movement in 2014.

In 2019, 70-80% of the Hong Kong population participated in the largest and longest Hong Kong protests in history, in demonstration of the City’s strong will to safeguard Hong Kong’s declining civil liberties and freedoms. 

Then in 2020, the National Security Law was introduced by the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong. Under this law, any pro-democracy movement was suddenly classified as ‘secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion’. 

2020 was the year when Hong Kong lost its press freedom, the rights to peaceful protests, and the complete collapse of the rule of law.

LI:          I believe this is the time we saw footage of Chinese Communist Party agents breaking into the The Epoch Times and smashing the printing presses with sledge-hammers …

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FH:        Yes. They actually set fire to the bureau. The building was aflame.

LI:          How did these changes impact your family initially?

FH:        My family was fine for many years after the handover. The whole world thought China was opening-up and we could work together for a more prosperous world.

LI:          Your brother was a Hong Kong democratically-elected parliamentarian. How did his status slowly change?

FH:        It was not until 2019 with the breakout of large-scale protests in Hong Kong that it started to seriously impact my family. My brother, Ted Hui, being a vocal pro-democracy legislator, was frequently arrested due to his involvement in mediating the protests, wanting to protect young people and ordinary citizens from being abused and arrested. Like the majority of the population, Ted was pepper sprayed, tear-gassed, abused and arrested many times. In the end, his parliamentarian status was completely disregarded by the Hong Kong Police and the Chinese Communist Party. They just treated him like a ‘criminal’. Democracy had suddenly become a serious crime.

LI:          How did your brother and other democratically-elected parliamentarians reconcile the freedoms bequeathed by British rule and a growing autocratic influence from the Chinese Communist Party?

FH:        They have never reconciled the loss of freedoms. Some of his MP friends are still in prison. Many like Ted, went in ‘exile’ and continued with the movement overseas, lobbying governments of the Five Eyes, warning them of the dangers of the Chinese Communist Party regime. I guess they are now all ‘colluding with foreign forces’, as the Chinese Communist Party would describe it.

LI:          How did things come to a flashpoint?

FH:        The prolonged protests in 2019, combined with the noble and pure intention of democracy-loving Hongkongers, and the Chinese Communist Party led by a psychopathic Chinese President Xi Jinping have all contributed to this flashpoint.

LI:          What role did you play in responding to the loss of civil liberties?

FH:        I was not interested in politics at all prior to 2019, I had a great life in Adelaide. Who cared? However, the 2019 Hong Kong Crisis made me awake. The images and live-streaming of abuse in Hong Kong stunned me. I was in disbelief that freedom could be lost like this overnight. I couldn’t believe that people could be thrown in prison for protesting and speaking. It was all just unimaginable.

So I became a ‘democracy activist’.

Then I discovered CCP activism in my adopted country of Australia. So I exposed the CCP’s interference in Australia and politicians who were working with the CCP for their own self-serving interests.

I joined the Liberal Democrats for a period because I saw that they had good policy in support of libertarianism and humanitarianism principles. I also connected with organisations and communities who cared about our civil liberties.

LI:          How did your brother escape?

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FH:        My brother got ‘invited’ by some young, democracy-loving Danish politicians and libertarians to attend a ‘Climate Conference’. It was staged so that Ted had an excuse to get out of Hong Kong. At that time, his passport was detained by the Hong Kong Court, but the judge decided to release his passport so that Ted could attend this ‘conference’. The judge made a fine decision but, to this day, I don’t know whether he was subsequently imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party!

Ted escaped also because many people around that world have played a part in helping him and praying for him. This includes the Australian Government and many nameless men and women within and outside our government. We have some good people in this country, who have empathy, intelligence, capability and goodwill. God bless Australia.

LI:          What did you leave behind?

FH:        My family and I won’t be able to go back to Hong Kong for a long time. Under the current circumstances, I’ve convinced myself there is not much worth going back for anyway. I miss the mountains. I miss the views. Any love I had of shopping there is tainted by the lack of a free press, no free speech, no rule of law. Home is where the family is. Australia is my only home. Look forward rather than backwards!

LI:          Why choose Australia to live?

FH:        I chose Australia due to its beauty, its reputation in higher education and its proximity to Asia.

LI:          What worrying early-signs in sliding from democracy to tyranny do you see in Australia?

FH:        The early-signs were shown during the last two years: how our governments managed COVID, especially in Melbourne, the prolonged lockdowns, and the mandatory vaccinations in various industries.

Modern technological advancement means that people are more easily monitored. I’m worry about the introduction of My Gov Accounts, facial recognition cameras in our City here in Adelaide, digital IDs and yet more business-crushing IDs for company directors.

We have to be careful how people in positions of power use these mechanisms. They could be used to make us a more effective country, or they could be used as a means of monitoring and control. It all depends on how you view the government and the people holding those powerful positions.

We need to be awake and alert.

LI:          How quickly can that slide happen, in your experience?

FH:        The loss of freedom could happen so quickly that people will be in disbelief. Just look at Hong Kong. A clean, proper judicial system could end so fast. Unimaginable.  

LI:        What can your fellow Australians do to counteract this?

FH:        Stay aware and united with fellow Australians. Unity and helping others in need. Play a part to end the divide and polarisation in society. Be the change you want to see in the world.

LI:          What do you think the outlook is for Australia?

FH:        Australia is a lucky country. I believe that we will continue to be blessed. Be careful of the ‘doom and gloom’ presented in the media. I feel hopeful and positive about our country.

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VIDEO: Doing What’s Right!

A timely reminder about what’s at stake in Victoria …

Dan Andrews: Doing What’s Right