From the BBC:
“Hong Kong:
Snitch hotline gets more than 1,000 calls”
Hong Kong's new
hotline to report breaches of the controversial national security law has
received more than 1,000 calls within hours of going live. Residents can
anonymously send in images, audio and videos if they suspect someone has
violated the law. The law, introduced earlier this year, criminalises
secession, subversion and collusion with foreign forces. It has already led to
several arrests of activists, and has silenced protesters. The maximum
punishment under the law is life in prison. Hong Kong police said they had
received more than 1,000 tips via the hotline by Thursday evening, according to
reports in local media. Residents can submit the information via email, text or
WeChat, the mainland's most popular messaging app.
Opposition
politicians and rights groups warn that the service could be used to target
those with opposing political views. "By encouraging people to report on
their friends and neighbours, the Chinese government is replicating in Hong
Kong one of its most successful tools for social control: an informant
culture," senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch, Maya Wang, told
the BBC. “This is one of many chilling recent developments in Hong Kong, where
the authorities are pulling out new tools to punish and tame the city's
pro-democracy movement." Beijing has continued to tighten control of the
city under the national security law. China argues the legislation is needed to
tackle unrest and instability following months of protests demanding more
democracy and less Chinese influence.
But the law has
been widely condemned by western governments and human rights groups, with
critics saying it ends freedoms guaranteed for 50 years after British rule
ended in Hong Kong in 1997. After it was introduced in June, a number of
pro-democracy groups disbanded out of fears for their safety. Last week, teen
activist Tony Chung was charged under the national security law, days after he
was detained outside the US consulate. Mr Chung, 19, had reportedly planned to
enter the consulate and claim asylum. Earlier this week, seven pro-democracy
politicians in Hong Kong were arrested over scuffles that occurred with
pro-Beijing lawmakers in the city's Legislative Council in May.
^ This is just
plain sad. It’s sad to see Hong Kongers turning into Communist snitches for Beijing.
Communist Dictatorships only survive by threatening ordinary people and by
having spies and snitches everywhere (people who report and turn-in their: bosses,
their co-workers, their teachers, their friends, their families, their parents,
their children, etc.) Hong Kong had a real chance to make something great of
themselves and to show the rest of the world that greatness, but now that
greatness is faded and may never return. Hong Kong has just become a puppet-state
of Beijing even though China is breaking the 1997 Handover Agreement and the One
Country, Two Systems Agreement. ^
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