British police have launched an investigation after Hong Kong activists were targeted by a £10,000 anonymous bounty for information.
The bounties, backed by a so-called “anonymous boss”, were posted on popular Chinese social media platform WeChat, and promised £10,000 to anyone able to provide either the home or work addresses of two Hong Kong democracy activists.
Hong Kong activists have been repeatedly targeted by the Chinese Communist Party in the past.
Activists both at home and abroad have been threatened in apparent efforts to undermine the current “one country, two systems” arrangement in the region.
“Anonymous boss offers £10,000 as bounty for anyone who can provide each Simon Cheng or Nathan Law’s residential and work address,” read the WeChat post according to a report from The Telegraph.
The post was followed by a photograph of both men at an event with British MPs, including Labour’s Stephen Kinnock.
The bounty, which was posted in a group containing over 270 members, was reportedly followed by a number of messages regarding building a team to attack pro-Hong Kong independence campaigners in the United Kingdom.
One of the targets of the bounty, Simon Cheng, believes the posts aim at inciting physical attacks against both himself and Law, and has not gone outside since seeing the messages.
“They are encouraging people to hunt me down. I am concerned I will be physically attacked and I am being extremely careful,” Cheng told The Telegraph, also saying that he had received anonymous emails warning that Chinese agents would find him.
Mr Cheng is a former employee in the United Kingdom’s Hong Kong consulate and a vocal supporter of pro-democracy protests in the region.
Cheng was kidnapped from Hong Kong and brought to mainland China in 2019, where he was tortured and interrogated for 15 days.
“I had been stopped and the immigration officers didn’t give me any reasons but they handed me over to a bunch of plainclothes officers and brought me back to Futian, Shenzhen [in mainland China] and what I heard was that they were working for the Public Security Bureau,” Cheng told Breitbart London during an exclusive interview.
“It was a very harsh experience that I went through, I went through rounds and rounds of interrogation, asking me about my roles in the protests [in Hong Kong] and the UK’s roles in the protests,” Cheng continued.
The other man, Nathan Law, helped organise the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement protests in Hong Kong, becoming the youngest person ever elected to the Hong Kong Legislative Council in 2016. He was subsequently removed from the position after pledging his loyalty to the “Hong Kong nation”.
Law left Hong Kong after the arrests of fellow activists Agnes Chow and Joshua Wong, which followed the implementation of the so-called national security law in 2020. He has since been living in exile in the United Kingdom.
“The way that China has been dealing with Hong Kong is to transplant the dominance of all power, so they are crushing the civil society including the rights of artistic expression and all sorts of rights,” Law told Breitbart London during an interview earlier this year. “This is defiantly a demonstration of Hong Kong’s One Country, Two Systems annihilation and turning into One Country, One System.”
The WeChat posts come after a street fight erupted in London’s Chinatown last weekend.
A ‘Stop Asian Hate’ rally devolved into a brawl with counterdemonstrators protesting the alleged genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. The brawl has made headlines in China, according to The Telegraph, despite receiving little to no coverage in Britain.
Cheng, who has been falsely accused of being present at the brawl, despite being sick with Covid at the time, claims that the brawl has been weaponized by pro-Beijing outlets. Accusations have also been made that the Chinese Communist Party is trying to conflate anti-Chinese racism with any criticism of the regime.
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