While the world struggled with the COVID-19 pandemic during the holiday season and Americans focused on Donald Trump’s frantic efforts to reverse the election he lost, China ended the year in a typical way. As usual, Chinese officials embarked on their annual Christmas tradition of arresting dissidents and critics when the world was too distracted to pay attention.
Shortly after Thanksgiving Day, Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow and Ivan Lam, young icons of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests in 2014, were all sentenced to prison for attending an illegal assembly in 2019. Three days after Christmas , a Shanghai court sentenced citizen journalist Zhang Zhan to four years in prison for critical reporting on how the government dealt with COVID-19 in Wuhan at the start of the outbreak.
On December 30, 10 Hong Kong activists who were arrested in August while trying to escape by boat to Taiwan and were detained in Shenzhen were sentenced to prison. Tang Kai-yin and Quinn Moon will spend three and two years in a prison on the continent, respectively, for organizing an illegal border crossing. Another eight were sentenced to seven months each, while two minors, aged 17 and 18, were handed over to Hong Kong police.
And on December 31, media mogul and activist Jimmy Lai was put back in jail after being released on bail pending trial for alleged crimes under the new comprehensive national security law, which targets ambiguously defined acts of secession, collusion with foreign forces and other actions, and can be used to suppress all forms of dissent against the Chinese government. On Wednesday, Hong Kong police arrested dozens of pro-democracy politicians and activists for allegedly subverting state power under national security law.
The persecution of dissidents has worsened since President Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, but the festive tradition of activists in prison was inherited by him. In 2009, Liu Xiaobo, a constitutional reform advocate who was involved in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, was sentenced to 11 years in prison on Christmas Day. He won the Nobel Peace Prize the following year and died in custody in 2017. In 2011, dissident Chen Xi was sentenced to a decade in prison on Boxing Day. In 2015, Yang Maodong, Liu Yuandong and Sun Desheng, all activists who protested the censorship, were convicted shortly after Thanksgiving. The list goes on.
In 2020, however, Beijing acted like it was Christmas all year round – trampling freedoms, especially in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, with renewed vigor. Several years ago, about 1 million Muslim members of minority groups, most of them Uighurs, were held in detention camps in Xinjiang. Despite global outrage, these facilities appear to have been expanded in 2020 and surveillance strengthened.
In April, several leaders of the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, including Martin Lee and Margaret Ng, were arrested. In June, the Beijing government imposed national security law in Hong Kong, which effectively destroyed the notion that the territory’s freedoms would be preserved until 2047, as promised in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration.
In July, elections to the Hong Kong Legislative Council were postponed for one year and Xu Zhangrun, a prominent Beijing law professor and open critic of Xi, was arrested and fired from his post at a major university. In September, a former real estate magnate was sentenced to 18 years in prison on charges of corruption after publishing a critical essay by Xi, and authorities approved a bilingual education program in Mongolia that critics called an attempt to dilute Mongolian culture.
Just before the November holiday, the Hong Kong government disqualified four pro-democracy legislators after Beijing’s top legislative body ruled that legislators who threatened national security should be expelled, leaving the legislative council unopposed.
Although it has been a brutal year for rights and freedoms in areas under China’s control, the Beijing government has faced few consequences for its actions. In December, the European Union signed an investment agreement with Beijing after China agreed to seek ratification of the International Labor Organization’s rules on forced labor. In other words, the EU agreed to ignore well-documented forced labor in Xinjiang, the crackdown in Hong Kong and more.
The new year has started with new distractions and more are sure to come. This can be bad news for the millions of oppressed people under Beijing.
Jessie Lau, born in Hong Kong, is a London-based writer and journalist. Jeffrey Wasserstrom is professor of history at UC Irvine and author from “Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink.” Amy Hawkins is a British journalist who conducted research and interviews for “Vigil”.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.