At the end of last month, 19-year-old pro-democracy activist Tony Chung was arrested in his home and frog-marched into an unmarked car by plainclothes police in the early hours of the morning. “Snatched in the middle of the night” was how one former independence activist described it to me.
Now facing charges that could land him life imprisonment—or even the death penalty in mainland China—the shadowy unit that oversaw and carried out his arrest, by pro-Beijing media’s own admission, has been designed using the former British colonial administration’s elite intelligence and counterespionage unit as a “template.” It’s the same team that just carried out a raid to arrest the pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai and raid his newspaper’s offices. It is a shocking reminder of how Beijing will go to any lengths and co-opt almost anything in pursuit of stamping out what it regards as among the gravest threats to its rule in decades.
