In the six months that I have been writing this column, one rule that I have held to is not writing about myself. I leave that to the losers at Wen Wei Po, to help boost their sagging sales.

But this week I am on vacation and have not been following the news terribly closely. I read that there have been growing power shortages in China: a completely predictable result of communist mismanagement and politicization of economics. And there has been another HK01 “exclusive” suggesting that Beijing is planning to disqualify hundreds of district councilors. But of course!

So, what is there to write about? With the end of the year rapidly approaching, I may as well write a year-end piece, reflecting on some of my own experiences in the hope that they have some broader relevance for others’ experiences.

One year ago last week, I was departing Hong Kong for what appears to be the last time for a long time. I had planned to meet a friend whose flight was arriving in Hong Kong the evening of my departure, but her flight arrived a bit early and it took me longer to get to the airport than I had expected. As a result, our paths did not cross.

I did not think much about it at the time. After all, I would be back in February 2020, I thought, or perhaps March at the latest. We could meet and talk then.

As I have proceeded through this year, however, I have repeatedly thought of that moment to which I did not give even a second thought at the time: the product of a far simpler times.

A few weeks after my departure from Hong Kong, I began to see online discussions about the pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan: my short-term plans for visiting Hong Kong were obviously going to be delayed.

Yet a major reassessment of my future travels to Hong Kong only arrived in late June, as a result of the legally baseless National Security Law(NSL).

As you may know, I have been a target of PRC(People’s Republic of China) state harassment for years. Starting from 2018, for example, some guy has emailed me from multiple anonymous accounts multiple times a day, violently threatening me and denouncing me as a Hong Kong independence activist.

At first, I thought this might be someone working for the Liaison Office, as the emails started soon after the Liaison Office’s pathetic paper Wen Wei Po stalked me. Seeing the endless stupidity of the emails, however, I gradually came to think that the writer might just be some loser living in his mom’s basement: a truly sad state of affairs.

Yet as time passed and the emails continued, I returned to my original guess about their provenance. The sheer insistence of the stupidity bore the indelible marks of Chinese officialdom: only someone working in the Liaison Office could be so reliably and incurably brainless.

To provide an example, one email in 2019 told me that because I had advocated Hong Kong independence, I would thereafter have my Hong Kong permanent residence stripped and I would be unable to access my Mandatory Provident Fund.

The only problem with this big-brain argument was that I have never had permanent residence in Hong Kong, nor any Hong Kong-based retirement fund.

In fact, all that I ever had in Hong Kong was freedom of speech and rule of law to support it.

It was this freedom and rule of law that enabled me to take some of the steps that subsequently made me a target of the Liaison Office and its sad minions who have no respect for freedom or the law: doing interviews on sensitive subjects, holding seminars on controversial topics, writing Hong Kong Watch reports on academic freedom and the national anthem law, and of course speaking at the Hong Kong National Party’s 2017 gathering mourning two decades of Chinese colonization of the city.

Some people told me that I was insane to do any of these things, but everything that I ever did in Hong Kong was legal, and all of the way until 2019 or so I was always confident that Hong Kong had genuine freedoms and a rule of law system to maintain these freedoms, despite Peking’s earnest efforts to harm both.

With the NSL, however, this all changed: if all that I ever had in Hong Kong was free speech and the rule of law, the NSL managed to take all of that away.

As 2020 draws to an end, I thus face the bizarre situation of knowing that I have never done anything illegal in Hong Kong while at the same time being concerned about the possibility of political persecution-cum-prosecution were I to return to the city. It is disheartening yet also tactically very easy for me to not have to set foot in occupied Hong Kong: many with deeper roots and closer ties face far greater dilemmas.

That missed encounter that I barely thought about at the time has thus been the object of constant thoughts this year for two reasons. On the one hand, I regret taking that meeting for granted, insofar as I now do not know when there will be another opportunity to meet. On the other hand, however, in December 2020 I yearn for the simplicity of being able to take anything for granted: international travel, the chance to meet up with a friend to chat on a whim, the confidence that even if one misses this meeting there will be another, and perhaps most importantly the certainty that one could spend time in Hong Kong without being persecuted for one’s political beliefs.

Yet just as I have learned that I should never take anything for granted, I take comfort in the fact that Peking and its servants in Hong Kong might make the same mistake of taking things for granted: the situation today is not the end of the story. It is not even, in my reading, remotely sustainable.

As the year draws to an end, whether we are in Hong Kong or abroad, those of us who care about freedom can find comfort in the fact that repressive regimes do not last forever. The yearning for freedom can be chased away or tear gassed or beaten or imprisoned or placed under ridiculous bail conditions, but it cannot be eliminated.

I look forward to the chance to visit again sometime, to make up for that missed meeting, when Hong Kong’s situation has changed for the better, as we all know it inevitably will: the only question is how.

(Kevin Carrico is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Monash University)

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