Nowadays, it is difficult to do long-term thinking, especially if you are a Hong Konger residing in Hong Kong. June 30, 2020, @ 11:00pm. The date and time sends a chill down the spine to most Hong Kongers. It was the start of the nightmare: the enactment of the National Security Law (NSL) for Hong Kong. Around 100 Hong Kongers have been arrested, and detained before trial, for violating the NSL. The deadline for this opinion piece was Friday morning that fell by chance on my birthday I was not in the mood for celebrating this year given the uncertain times. But I will tell you my most sincere birthday wish at the end of this article.

To survive and be precise, I think more in terms of how things will spin out in 90 days - a quarter, as everything is so unpredictable. Some people might think that because I am a trader, it becomes second nature to me to think about Hong Kong and the world from a quarterly perspective. Yes and no. Working on today’s article on my birthday, I was thinking more about what else I can contribute to this city, as the Beijing masters are not giving Hong Kongers oxygen and breathing space. Conversations these days with young finance professionals and those engaging in media-related work are quite surreal: staying or leaving, and whether those who have decided to leave will even want to come back.

A financial reporter that I recently conversed with told me that he had safely landed in the United Kingdom. Good for him. He will restart his life. As he is working on the final level of a financial professional designation, I think he will set out to find a job in London soon. As for case two, which I cannot tell much, it is about someone who used to play a part in a “sensitive area” for years. She has recently Signaled me from afar while refraining from telling me where she was. She had her degree from one of Hong Kong’s universities years ago. She was not ranked high in the organization, but had access to a lot of political and business contacts, knew much about dealings in grey areas, above and under the table, and she was worried about just knowing too much. She sought advice from me about registration for a course at some vocational schools in one of the Five Eyes (US, Canada, UK, New Zealand and Australia) and EU, a two-year business administration diploma of sorts, or even an internet security diploma. She already left Hong Kong in a low-profile way. She suspected she had been put on the watch list for the sensitive nature of her work, and she hadn’t been feeling any easy, especially after the enactment of the NSL. She thought she had been given a “death sentence” to her career from within the establishment ̶ she knew “too much”, and her relentless pursuit of drilling deeply for facts could be problematic. She might just as well never come back.

As to the third case, there is a proprietor of a one-man financial public relations firm who will leave Hong Kong for good. For him, he has noticed that the management and corporate culture of many Hong Kong Listcos have been overtaken by leadership and governance by executives from the mainland. The number of mainland firms listed in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange has been on the rise. The focus of their investor relations, marketing and public relations campaign has been moving towards the mainland market and mentality. As such, corporates now prefer to engage public relations consultants who think more like their management that embraces the values and culture of the mainland. My PR friend has decided to say good-bye to Hong Kong.

I am not surprised to see veteran journalist Michael Chugani, who was born in Hong Kong, call it quits for his weekly TV show on political affairs and take a break from writing for two pro-establishment newspapers. Michael is perceived as having changed his political stance after the water cannon incident during the social movement in 2019, in which his elder brother Mohan Chugani was assaulted. The stakes put on writing anything critically are too high now even for someone who works for pro-establishment platforms. More and more people do think that in Q2 and Q3, the political purge will extend to some media outlets including Next Media, journalists, commentators and editors who support free speech, but obviously don’t toe the “party line.”.

In my opinion piece “Anything can happen in Hong Kong now” released two weeks ago, I talked quite vividly about the story of Christianne Ho, a bodybuilding athlete who was questioned by plainclothesmen after she landed at Hong Kong airport. One of the persons mentioned in today’s piece told me something similar, but this applies to outbound travelers going through the immigration checkpoint. He tried to leave Hong Kong through an electronic turnstile for Hong Kong ID holders, but it wouldn’t let him through. So, he had to go to a manned immigration counter. After the immigration officer checked his Hong Kong ID card and passport for a few minutes, he was finally let go, and he rushed to the departure gate.

As far as I have heard from different sources, there are indeed a lot of plain clothes “security officers” patrolling inside the unrestricted departure area, and more so, in the restricted areas as well. It is widely believed that these “non-travellers” inside Hong Kong International Airport are NSL police officers. The government has beefed up the security of the airport, but the atmosphere makes you feel like you are in a war-zone area.

Under the directive from Beijing, the Hong Kong government is in the final stage of amending the city’s immigration laws to enable security personnel to ban a passenger from taking any form of transport, be it flight or vessel, entering or exiting Hong Kong. And with the social credit system probably to be implemented in the near future in Hong Kong, it is very likely that a group of people would not know whether they are free to leave the city until they try their luck at the gate. This is extremely disturbing, and we can forget the “one country, two systems” model completely with regard to the freedom of entry into and exit from Hong Kong.

Seven to ten years from now, the first batch of NSL political prisoners will be released. While living in Hong Kong, they will still be heavily monitored. It might become quite surreal that the activists who have finished their prison sentences might even need special permission to leave Hong Kong every time they want to do so. All the restrictive and extreme measures undertaken thus far by the totalitarian regime does not make Hong Kong look good. My birthday wish and prayer is simple: free all political prisoners, and free Hong Kong.

(Edward Chin (錢志健) runs a family office. Chin was formerly Country Head of a UK publicly listed hedge fund, the largest of its kind measured by asset under management. Outside the hedge funds space, Chin is Convenor of 2047 Hong Kong Monitor and a Senior Advisor of Reporters Without Borders (RSF, HK & Macau). Chin studied speech communication at the University of Minnesota, and received his MBA from the University of Toronto. Twitter: edwardckchin Youtube: Ed Chin Channel Facebook.com/edckchin Email: [email protected])

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