“We can no longer turn our heads or refuse to acknowledge the pattern of systemic human rights violations by Chinese officials under the ruling Communist Party against ethnic and religious minorities as well as Chinese citizens who stand up for fundamental human rights.
A regime like the CCP should not be allowed to re-define such rights afforded under the U.N. China signed onto every UN human rights convention but the record now shows, they have ignored those treaties at every turn.
They have crushed a once vibrant, free and democratic Hong Kong with little consequence from business and political leaders the world over. Citizens around the world must now stand up to this regime as they spread their tentacles far and wide.”
Dean Baxendale, Publisher and Human Rights activist.
About the Book
On 11 October 2017, I landed in Hong Kong for what I had planned to be a visit to meet old friends and new contacts, to learn about their latest concerns about the situation in the territory.
I joined the line for immigration, and when it was my turn I approached the immigration desk in the usual way, and presented my passport. The young, female immigration officer typed my details into the computer.
Suddenly, her face changed. Her body language changed. A look of terror came across her.
“I will have to call my superior,” she said nervously.
I was taken aside, to an office in a corridor behind the immigration counters, and questioned. And then I was informed that they had orders from Beijing not to permit me to enter Hong Kong.
I was taken in a minibus accompanied by at least half a dozen immigration officers, across the tarmac, and put back on a plane. The city that had once been my home, where I had begun my working life, was denying me entry.
In the mele of it all, I managed to alert a key contact, who put a plan in place. By the time I landed back in Bangkok – where I had flown from and was sent back to – I was inundated by media enquiries. For more than six hours I sat in transit in Bangkok airport giving interviews by phone, ensuring from time to time that I recharged my mobile phone battery and was in a wifi zone. I then boarded a flight back to London, and when I landed home the frenzy began again. I went into the BBC within hours of landing, and a few days later the incident was raised in both Houses of Parliament. The Foreign Secretary – who was Boris Johnson at the time – had issued a statement, and the Chinese ambassador had been summoned. A media, political and diplomatic incident had occurred.
Almost exactly a year later, I sat on a panel at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, alongside the father of Hong Kong’s democracy movement Martin Lee, one of the Umbrella Movement organisers Benny Tai and Nathan Law, who had been both the youngest ever elected legislator in Hong Kong and one of the city’s first political prisoners. Just as we were drawing to a close, I was invited by the chair – a courageous MP, Fiona Bruce, who at the time chaired the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission – to give some closing remarks. Part-way into my brief comments, in which I emphasized that I am pro-China as a country and a people and it is because I love China that I oppose the Chinese Communist Party, a Chinese woman in the second row sprung into a furious rage. Kong Linlin, a reporter for Chinese state media, literally screamed at me for several minutes with a venom I’ve never experienced before. She accused me of being anti-China and of trying to destroy China. When a young Hong Kong activist approached her, with remarkable calm, composure and courtesy, to request her to resume her seat, she slapped him several times.