Five defendants who had been held without bail in Hong Kong since July 2021 for writing children’s books were convicted of sedition in September 2022. Prosecutors said that the animals depicted in the books, sheep being threatened by wolves, represented Hong Kong being threatened by the Chinese mainland.
The five convicted writers and publishers, all in their twenties, are Lai Man-king, Melody Yeung, Sidney Ng, Samuel Chan and Fong Tsz-ho. They were sentenced to 19 months in prison.
According to the judge in the case, Kwok Wai-kin, “The seditious intention stems not merely from the words, but from the words with the proscribed effects intended to result in the mind of children. Children will be led into belief that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] government is coming to Hong Kong with the wicked intention of taking away their home and ruining their happy life with no right to do so at all.”
After the convictions were announced, Maya Yang of Human Rights Watch observed that “Hong Kong people used to read about the absurd prosecution of people in mainland China for writing political allegories, but this is now happening in Hong Kong. Hong Kong authorities should reverse this dramatic decline in freedoms and quash the convictions of the five children’s book authors.”
We haven’t read the books, but Kwok’s interpretation seems plausible enough. If this is more or less their theme, it is certainly relevant and truthful. In the Hong Kong of today, though, speech critical of the Chinese government’s oppressive policies is deemed criminal per se. And instead of upholding the principles of justice and constitutionality or quitting if doing so is now impossible in Hong Kong courts, judges like Kwok play along.
