Over the past weekend, Hong Kongers have collectively felt a chill down to the bone as we witnessed how three of the largest local banks collaborated with the police to freeze the personal assets belonging to Ted Hui and his family members. The incident took place soon after the former popularly-elected lawmaker declared himself in exile following a business trip to Denmark.

To most Hong Kong citizens, it is now questionable whether their lawful private property is still inviolable as expressly guaranteed by Article 13 of the Basic Law, the city’s mini-constitution. The presumed shield over private property rights, for all practical purposes, had been shattered the moment after the promulgation of the national security law in July. The Beijing-drafted legislation grants enormous power to the local government to freeze or even seize assets owned by individuals being accused of secession, subversion, terrorism or collusion with foreign forces. As a case in point, the police attempted to justify their move to freeze assets belonging to Hui and his family by alleging that he had been colluding with foreign forces to undermine national security while mishandling funds raised in a crowdfunding campaign through his family’s bank accounts. Hiu promptly rebuffed the allegations by making available an audit report, disclaiming any relationships between the funds and the frozen accounts. One should not take the police’s tactic of targeting Hui’s family members lightly for it serves the purpose of retaliating against anyone associated with a dissident. By freezing the bank accounts of Hui’s family, the police are making a bold statement that from now on collective punishment will be deployed against dissent like there’s no tomorrow.

Hui now joins the ranks of a generation of activists-in-exile, including Ray Wong Toi-yeung (convenor of Hong Kong Indigenous), Brian Leung Kai-ping (the unmasked protester who stormed the Legislative Council), Nathan Law (former chairman of Demosistō and disqualified lawmaker), Simon Cheng (former officer of the British Consulate-General Hong Kong), Wayne Chan (convener of Hong Kong Independence Union) and Honcques Laus (former member of StudentLocalism) and Sunny Cheung (former spokesperson of Hong Kong Higher Institutions International Affairs Delegation). They all reluctantly fled the city they love so dearly to seek asylum elsewhere, out of fear of political persecution by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its collaborators in Hong Kong. Unlike his fellow asylum-seeking activists, Hui was able to bring along his family members spanning across three generations while on his way to exile, a rare feat worthy of celebration indeed. At the opposite end of the spectrum is the “Hong Kong 12,” a group of twelve asylum-seeking youths who have been detained in Shenzhen since their unsuccessful attempt to flee by boat in August.

Regardless of what comes next, Hui’s exile to the Free World is a telling to many Hong Kongers who increasingly sense the need to leave the city given its rapidly deteriorating political climate. Hardly a day goes by without the news of arresting yet another group of dissidents by national security police while the United States government stays in limbo awaiting presidential election results, a perfect scenario affirming the saying: while the cat’s away, the mice will play.

It is a matter of time (perhaps counted in months) before Hong Kong becomes the Shanghai at the dawn of 1949 when the metropolitan exodus turned almost overnight from a trickle into a torrent. The heart-wrenching story of people fleeing Shanghai en masse was vividly reconstructed in the book Last Boat Out of Shanghai by Helen Zia, a second-generation Asian American whose parents and relatives were fortunate enough to have boarded the last boat out of Shanghai prior to its “liberation” by the CCP in 1949. Those who failed to catch the last boat soon found themselves caught in numerous rounds of political upheavals in the tumultuous years that follow. In any event, one’s decision to leave versus to stay would produce strikingly different family histories for the subsequent generations to remember. For Hong Kongers living at this critical moment in time, there is certainly much to learn from the lessons of history.

(Dr. Jack Kwan is a MIT-trained consultant based in Boston.)

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