Brave Chinese citizens have yet again risked imprisonment challenging their country’s regime.
They took to the streets to fight the Chinese Communist Party’s prolonged and inhumane lockdown, a policy which caused residents trapped in their high-rise apartment building in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, to be burned-alive.
In scenes from the security state rarely accessible to the world, Chinese people gathered in the Shanghai streets and chanted ‘CCP, step down. Xijiping, step down!’ The chanting showed the citizens’ barely concealed contempt and dissatisfaction with their government, seemingly well beyond just its strict COVID measures.
The whereabouts of the protest leader you see in this video is unknown.
His family were eye-witnesses to him being handcuffed and unceremoniously bundled into a van. There is no official paperwork of his arrest. His family reported that three days after the arrest, there is still no trace of the young man.
He was simply ‘made to disappear.’
China is the world’s most heavily surveilled country. Intrusive facial recognition software, a tool used to thwart human rights and civil liberties, is now being routinely exploited by the Chinese Police State. Facial recognition systems log nearly every single citizen in the country, with 372.8 cameras per 1,000 people.
Chinese authorities have reportedly begun tracking-down people who took part in the demonstrations. Students are always the weakest and easiest to pick off. Others who attended the protests are being rounded-up without scrutiny from international media.
This wasn’t sufficient intimidation for the despotic regime. The Chinese Government immediately made its military presence felt more publicly as it rolled-out armoured tanks on the street.
Unlike the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, the Government now has the technology to corral freedom-activists more secretly to avoid the world’s condemnation. The Chinese Communist Party, with all the apparatus of a surveillance state and growing superpower, seemingly acts in fear of its own defenceless citizens.
These actions are a continuation of well-documented brutality evident in the 2019 Hong Kong protests. (Warning: the next video depicts graphic violence on an unarmed civilian. Viewer discretion recommended.)
To be clear, I don’t know who’s going to win the Victorian election later tonight, 26 November 2022.
How can I or any of us?
However, I’m going to make a prediction as I write this at 3:20pm ACDT 26 November 2022, and have the prediction published just minutes before the polls have closed so you know I’ve not had any input from the counting of the votes. There’s my accountability, dear reader, to you.
Labor will win!
If my prediction is wrong, take all future predictions from me with a grain of salt. Throw tomatoes and rotten eggs at me. I’ll deserve it.
Right now, I’m quietly confident in making this prediction, however ghastly it may be.
And here is my reasoning. Hear it through …
Heavens know, Dan Andrews and the Labor Government he leads in Victoria has been revolting.
Who can forget the litany of failures …
Rubber bullets in the back, pregnant woman arrested in her pyjamas for a Facebook post, the world’s longest lockdown, businesses crushed, women and children manhandled for not wearing masks, family nest-eggs shattered, MPs arrested and denied access to their democratically elected seat in Parliament House itself, elderly citizens having their pelvis fractured as they are slammed to the ground by overzealous police, churches ordered to close at the point of police intrusion into sacred spaces, and a once vibrant city – the envy of the world – hollowed of its sparkle.
There will be a long-tail to this shocking overreach. Early figures are indicating that the rates of men aged 18 to 44 presenting with myocarditis, a long-term heart condition, have doubled. Yes, 2X. Men in their prime, cut low.
Most devastating to the soul was the sight of a young man, hitherto mentally healthy, taking his own life on a Melbourne street by setting himself ablaze whilst in the grip of a lockdown-induced depression. The depravity of this Government’s policies is chilling.
Free people have a right to be free. Free people have a God-given right to practise their religion. It’s part of our Christian-informed civil libertarian culture. And our Faith gives us Grace. It’s who we are. It’s how we cope with a world of sin.
And Dan Andrews failed as a standard bearer of those freedoms.
Why then do I predict this tyrant will be returned to office?
Why do I put my predictive reputation on the line and call the election for Labor even before the polls have closed?
The answer is that people don’t vote for “anyone would be better than” candidate X.
Our good citizens require an informed choice, a differentiation upon which they can decide.
And I’m afraid to say it but the Liberal Party’s leader, Matthew Guy, has failed to differentiate his Party.
How could he?
He’s limp, insipid, hardly the embodiment of inspiration and action!
Beyond the personal characteristics of the leader, the seeds of the Liberal Party’s failure in this election were planted in 2020. Throughout the entirety of the covid pandemic, if that’s what it was and is, the Liberal Party played a small target, Labor-lite game.
The Liberal Party could have weighed multiple harms to the community of Labor’s draconian covid measures, things like job loss, depression and endless racking-up the State debt for future generations to absorb, instead of robotically following bureaucratic health advice to the exclusion of all other considerations.
Liberal MPs didn’t. That would take differentiation, a knowledge of John Stuart Mill, the fortitude to use the minds our Lord gave them, and the courage to avoid groupthink.
The Liberal Party could have heeded the warnings of the worst civil liberty abuses in 100 years, passionately articulated in the Victorian Bar Association’s extraordinary and unprecedented open letter from sixty-four Queens Counsel.
Liberal MPs didn’t. That would take differentiation through a bedrock of principles.
The Liberal Party could have rallied the churches, giving cover and much needed support to pastors and priests throughout the State, stunned that worshipers were to have doors slammed in their faces.
Liberal MPs didn’t. They aren’t Christians, most of them. That would take differentiation through Faith.
At every opportunity, the Liberal Party Opposition Leader has looked politically anemic. You don’t win by hedging. You don’t win by staying small. You don’t win by cloning yourself using a tyrant as the mould.
You win by standing for something. You win by inspiring people for a better tomorrow. You win by giving people hope. You win by serving others in practical, helpful ways. You win by differentiating yourself from the tyrant.
None of this was done by Matthew Guy and his Liberal Party in Victoria.
I therefore don’t need to watch the election coverage tonight.
Labor will be returned.
Lack of differentiation and beliefs will be the reason.
Pray for the people of Victoria.
And if my prediction is wrong, pray for the people of Victoria anyway.
If you listen to rare public forays by senior members of the security establishment, the spies and their agencies, we in the West are under threat from several fronts. Looming front and centre, they say, is an expansionary Chinese Communist Party.
To be clear, Liberty Itch has no quarrel with the Chinese people.
However, Liberty Itch is sceptical of government of all stripes, whether in the West or the Chinese Communist Party. Government has a nasty habit of suppressing its people, sometimes stripping freedoms one imperceptible step at a time, its citizens in a saucepan of the slow boil kind. Sometimes government makes swift and savage moves against its people. History is replete with examples of both.
So well may we ask: Is the Chinese Communist Party friend or foe, our ally or adversary? We in the West welcome and educate their students. We trade with their corporations. Australia, the United States and indeed the entire OECD are beneficiaries of China’s emergence. Our shared prosperity is enormous as China brings a billion citizens out of agrarian life into a century-delayed Industrial Revolution and today’s Information Age simultaneously. The project is breathtaking.
But as Liberty Itch discovered, geopolitical relationships are complex. Material wealth is soulless if not accompanied by human rights. We cannot be so naïve or selectively blind as to ignore civil liberties in our estimation. The Dragon we feed and enable today should be ready to take its place on the world stage as a force for good.
With an open mind, Liberty Itch therefore embarked on an investigation, a series of tell-all interviews with people with particular direct experience with the Chinese Communist Party. The stories are real. The events described happened and cannot be ignored. What each does is illuminate, directly and personally, how the Chinese Communist Party acts from a civil liberties perspective.
Our first guest in this series is Fiona Hui.
You can see the former flight attendant in Fiona instantly. Urbane, impeccably-dressed and possessed of a welcoming smile, she possesses a charm hard not to like. She has navigated many of life’s milestones and responsibilities already while retaining her youthful energy.
First impressions rarely tell the whole story. As you peel-away the onion layers of her life, normality gives way to heartache, the collapse of her homeland, the incarceration of a loved one and a fight for survival with lessons for all freedom-lovers who value their civil liberties.
So her story is yours. There are some timely warnings for all of us.
Here’s Liberty Itch’s short interview with Fiona Hui.
LI: When did you become an Australian citizen?
FH: Although I have been living in Australia for nearly 20 years, I only became an Australian citizen very recently, in 2021. I applied for my citizenship in light of the loss of freedom and democracy in Hong Kong in 2019. At that point, I realised that Australia is my only home, so I submitted my citizenship application.
LI: Prior to this, you were a citizen of which country?
FH: Prior to 2021, I was a citizen of Hong Kong. I was born and raised under the British rule in Hong Kong.
LI: You lived in Hong Kong during which years?
FH: I lived in Hong Kong since I was born in 1980, until 2004, when I left Hong Kong and came to Australia to pursue a liberal arts education.
LI: What was life like in Hong Kong in those early years?
FH: As a successful former British Colony from 1841–1997, Hong Kong is a unique place blending East and West. I always felt free, safe, and connected to the West when I was a child and a young teenager. I enjoyed living in a ‘very Chinese city’ essentially, but also appreciated the opportunities to be exposed to Western literature, music, philosophies and ideologies. It was dynamic, stimulating and exciting.
LI: Why did you leave Hong Kong?
FH: I left Hong Kong for a Western higher education. I did not imagine Hong Kong could become what it is today when I left. Like most people. I have taken democracy for granted and couldn’t imagine otherwise.
LI: From the handover by Britain in 1997 to your departure, what changes did you notice in Hong Kong?
FH: Since the handover in 1997, there has been a steady and gradual erosion of Hong Kong freedoms. Since the structure of democracy was already in place, Hong Kong people had been asking for ‘universal suffrage’, all adult citizens should be able to vote for their government representatives, as highlighted by the Occupy Central and Umbrella Movement in 2014.
In 2019, 70-80% of the Hong Kong population participated in the largest and longest Hong Kong protests in history, in demonstration of the City’s strong will to safeguard Hong Kong’s declining civil liberties and freedoms.
Then in 2020, the National Security Law was introduced by the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong. Under this law, any pro-democracy movement was suddenly classified as ‘secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion’.
2020 was the year when Hong Kong lost its press freedom, the rights to peaceful protests, and the complete collapse of the rule of law.
LI: I believe this is the time we saw footage of Chinese Communist Party agents breaking into the The Epoch Times and smashing the printing presses with sledge-hammers …
FH: Yes. They actually set fire to the bureau. The building was aflame.
LI: How did these changes impact your family initially?
FH: My family was fine for many years after the handover. The whole world thought China was opening-up and we could work together for a more prosperous world.
LI: Your brother was a Hong Kong democratically-elected parliamentarian. How did his status slowly change?
FH: It was not until 2019 with the breakout of large-scale protests in Hong Kong that it started to seriously impact my family. My brother, Ted Hui, being a vocal pro-democracy legislator, was frequently arrested due to his involvement in mediating the protests, wanting to protect young people and ordinary citizens from being abused and arrested. Like the majority of the population, Ted was pepper sprayed, tear-gassed, abused and arrested many times. In the end, his parliamentarian status was completely disregarded by the Hong Kong Police and the Chinese Communist Party. They just treated him like a ‘criminal’. Democracy had suddenly become a serious crime.
LI: How did your brother and other democratically-elected parliamentarians reconcile the freedoms bequeathed by British rule and a growing autocratic influence from the Chinese Communist Party?
FH: They have never reconciled the loss of freedoms. Some of his MP friends are still in prison. Many like Ted, went in ‘exile’ and continued with the movement overseas, lobbying governments of the Five Eyes, warning them of the dangers of the Chinese Communist Party regime. I guess they are now all ‘colluding with foreign forces’, as the Chinese Communist Party would describe it.
LI: How did things come to a flashpoint?
FH: The prolonged protests in 2019, combined with the noble and pure intention of democracy-loving Hongkongers, and the Chinese Communist Party led by a psychopathic Chinese President Xi Jinping have all contributed to this flashpoint.
LI: What role did you play in responding to the loss of civil liberties?
FH: I was not interested in politics at all prior to 2019, I had a great life in Adelaide. Who cared? However, the 2019 Hong Kong Crisis made me awake. The images and live-streaming of abuse in Hong Kong stunned me. I was in disbelief that freedom could be lost like this overnight. I couldn’t believe that people could be thrown in prison for protesting and speaking. It was all just unimaginable.
So I became a ‘democracy activist’.
Then I discovered CCP activism in my adopted country of Australia. So I exposed the CCP’s interference in Australia and politicians who were working with the CCP for their own self-serving interests.
I joined the Liberal Democrats for a period because I saw that they had good policy in support of libertarianism and humanitarianism principles. I also connected with organisations and communities who cared about our civil liberties.
FH: My brother got ‘invited’ by some young, democracy-loving Danish politicians and libertarians to attend a ‘Climate Conference’. It was staged so that Ted had an excuse to get out of Hong Kong. At that time, his passport was detained by the Hong Kong Court, but the judge decided to release his passport so that Ted could attend this ‘conference’. The judge made a fine decision but, to this day, I don’t know whether he was subsequently imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party!
Ted escaped also because many people around that world have played a part in helping him and praying for him. This includes the Australian Government and many nameless men and women within and outside our government. We have some good people in this country, who have empathy, intelligence, capability and goodwill. God bless Australia.
LI: What did you leave behind?
FH: My family and I won’t be able to go back to Hong Kong for a long time. Under the current circumstances, I’ve convinced myself there is not much worth going back for anyway. I miss the mountains. I miss the views. Any love I had of shopping there is tainted by the lack of a free press, no free speech, no rule of law. Home is where the family is. Australia is my only home. Look forward rather than backwards!
LI: Why choose Australia to live?
FH: I chose Australia due to its beauty, its reputation in higher education and its proximity to Asia.
LI: What worrying early-signs in sliding from democracy to tyranny do you see in Australia?
FH: The early-signs were shown during the last two years: how our governments managed COVID, especially in Melbourne, the prolonged lockdowns, and the mandatory vaccinations in various industries.
Modern technological advancement means that people are more easily monitored. I’m worry about the introduction of My Gov Accounts, facial recognition cameras in our City here in Adelaide, digital IDs and yet more business-crushing IDs for company directors.
We have to be careful how people in positions of power use these mechanisms. They could be used to make us a more effective country, or they could be used as a means of monitoring and control. It all depends on how you view the government and the people holding those powerful positions.
We need to be awake and alert.
LI: How quickly can that slide happen, in your experience?
FH: The loss of freedom could happen so quickly that people will be in disbelief. Just look at Hong Kong. A clean, proper judicial system could end so fast. Unimaginable.
LI: What can your fellow Australians do to counteract this?
FH: Stay aware and united with fellow Australians. Unity and helping others in need. Play a part to end the divide and polarisation in society. Be the change you want to see in the world.
LI: What do you think the outlook is for Australia?
FH: Australia is a lucky country. I believe that we will continue to be blessed. Be careful of the ‘doom and gloom’ presented in the media. I feel hopeful and positive about our country.
In a quiet moment today or even right now if that’s possible, read the lyrics below whilst watching this clip … and tell me this doesn’t make you more determined politically.
“We’re not gonna sit in silence, We’re not gonna live with fear” could well apply to the last two and a half years. So, are you going to “Make a noise and make it clear”?
We have the chance to turn the pages over We can write what we want to write We gotta make ends meet, before we get much older We’re all someone’s daughter We’re all someone’s son How long can we look at each other Down the barrel of a gun?
You’re the voice, try and understand it Make a noise and make it clear Oh, whoa We’re not gonna sit in silence We’re not gonna live with fear Oh, whoa
This time, we know we all can stand together With the power to be powerful Believing we can make it better Ooh, we’re all someone’s daughter We’re all someone’s son How long can we look at each other Down the barrel of a gun?
You’re the voice, try and understand it Make a noise and make it clear Oh, whoa We’re not gonna sit in silence We’re not gonna live with fear Oh, whoa
Ooh, we’re all someone’s daughter We’re all someone’s son How long can we look at each other Down the barrel of a gun?
You’re the voice, try and understand it Make the noise and make it clear Oh, whoa We’re not gonna sit in silence We’re not gonna live with fear Oh, whoa
You’re the voice, try and understand it Make a noise and make it clear Oh, whoa We’re not gonna sit in silence We’re not gonna live with fear Oh, whoa
You’re the voice, try and understand it Make a noise and make it clear Oh, whoa We’re not gonna sit in silence We’re not gonna live with fear Oh, whoa
You’re the voice, try and understand it Make a noise and make it clear Oh, whoa We’re not gonna sit in silence We’re not gonna live with fear Oh, whoa
