2023-12-03 23:40:11
Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Chow Ting-yuan left for Canada. (Photo: Stand News/File Photo)
Agnes Chow, the former Hong Kong deputy secretary-general of Demosisto, who was imprisoned for participating in pro-democracy protests, revealed on the 3rd that she had moved to Canada and would not return to Hong Kong in compliance with her bail conditions, Agence France-Presse reported.
Once dubbed the “goddess of the student movement,” Chow Ting was one of the most prominent young faces in the 2012, 2014 and 2019 protest movements once morest Beijing’s increasingly authoritarian rule in Hong Kong.
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She was jailed for regarding seven months for her role in protests outside Hong Kong’s police headquarters in 2019, when large crowds gathered weekly in the most serious challenge to Chinese rule since the city’s 1997 handover.
December 3 was Zhou Ting’s 27th birthday. She published two posts to break the silence she had maintained for more than two and a half years following her release.
Zhou Ting said that she no longer wanted to be forced to do anything, and she no longer wanted to be forced to go to mainland China.
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Zhou Ting said that following careful consideration and considering the situation in Hong Kong, her own safety, physical and mental health, she “decided not to go back to report, and probably will never go back in her lifetime.”
Zhou Ting announced in mid-September that he was going to study in Toronto. She stated that she would not return to Hong Kong to report to the police in December as required by her bail conditions.
Zhou Ting is one of nine people arrested in 2020 on charges of “colluding with foreign forces to endanger national security.” Others arrested include pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai.
She was later released on bail, with conditions including surrendering her passport and reporting regularly to police.
However, in early July, the Hong Kong police proposed that if her passport was to be returned, Zhou Ting must first return to Shenzhen with the police.
Zhou Ting agreed, and spent a day in Shenzhen in mid-August with five members of the Hong Kong Police National Security Division, where she visited an exhibition on China’s reform and opening up, went to Tencent’s headquarters to learn regarding technological developments, and was asked to Take photos locally.
Zhou Ting said she might feel she was being watched throughout the trip.
Most of Hong Kong’s democratic leaders have been arrested, imprisoned or fled overseas under a national security law imposed by Beijing that criminalizes much dissent.
Joshua Wong, one of Zhou Ting’s pro-democracy partners and the former secretary-general of the defunct Hong Kong Demosisto, was arrested and imprisoned for “subversion of state power”; the pro-democracy movement leader Luo Guancong, who fled abroad, was offered a reward of 100 Thousands of Hong Kong dollars.
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