Hong Kong: Australia’s foreign interference laws once angered China. They are now stored in Hong Kong’s main history museum, where they are used to help justify Beijing’s national security crackdown, which has led to the imprisonment of dozens of pro-democracy activists and the pursuit of others abroad.
Among those hunted are Australian activists Ted Hui and Kevin Yam, whose names are on museum displays with a wall of “fugitives” and police bounties of HK$1 million ($182,000) on their heads.
The bounty list was put on permanent display in the past few months and contains a warning that the Hong Kong government will prosecute them “for life” for breaches of national security.
“It’s funny because the world knows I’m a political refugee being persecuted for my peaceful advocacy of freedom and democracy in Hong Kong,” says Hui, a former Hong Kong politician who was granted asylum by the Australian government last year.
“Yet the government has now put me on display in museums, as if I were the threat. It feels more like history and more like an attempt to create an alternative reality for the people of Hong Kong.”
The “fugitives” wall, which features the names of more than two dozen activists who have fled abroad, is part of a major national security exhibition that will open as a permanent museum at the Hong Kong Museum of History in 2024.
It is committed to telling the official narrative of government repression after mass protests rocked the city in 2019 and, at times, erupted into violent clashes with police.
It describes the protests as a pro-democracy movement in which millions of Hong Kongers took to the streets against Beijing’s control of the city, but a destructive “color revolution” fueled by anti-China Western forces.
This week marks six years since Beijing imposed the National Security Law on the city in July 2020, creating new crimes of secession, rebellion, terrorism, and collaboration with foreign forces. Since then, hundreds of people have been arrested under that law, as well as a local law passed in 2024, with many of them serving long prison terms related to their activism.
Last week, the two owners of Hunter Bookstore in the city’s Sham Shui Po neighborhood became the latest arrests. They were detained, and later released on bail, for allegedly displaying and selling publications with “inflammatory” content and receiving funds from foreign political organizations.
The museum celebrates the successful prosecutions in the high-profile cases to date as a victory for the law and the courts in bringing “disturbing things to China” to justice, while keeping this crackdown in line with legal procedures in Australia and elsewhere.
One show focuses on the “Hong Kong 47” case, where Australian citizen Gordon Ng was jailed for seven years and three months for subversion by participating in unofficial primary elections. Also highlighted is the case of media mogul and British citizen Jimmy Lai, who was jailed for 20 years in February for “conspiring with foreign forces” and publishing “seditious” news in his now-closed, anti-communist newspaper. Apple Daily.
Their imprisonment has been condemned by the Australian government, other Western countries and human rights organizations as an attack on the freedoms Hong Kongers once enjoyed.
A close corner of the exhibition is dedicated to rejecting this criticism.
It cites Australia’s foreign interference and influence laws – and those in places such as the US, UK and Canada – to support its claim that Hong Kong’s legal system is “in line with the customs of countries around the world”.
“Criticisms made by some countries,” the exhibition says, “are baseless, double-edged, and baseless political smears”.
These are the same foreign interference laws that angered China after they were passed by the Australian parliament in 2018. When diplomatic relations collapsed in 2020, Chinese officials insisted on the laws as part of the law. 14 grievances that Beijing had with Australia. At the time, a Chinese diplomat told a reporter that if Australia abandoned the policy on the list “it would be good for the environment”.
Yam, an Australian who worked as a lawyer in Hong Kong for 20 years before leaving for good in 2022, said it was misleading to compare the city’s national security laws with Australia’s.
“The content of the law is not the same, the procedural protection is not the same, the systemic protection is not the same,” Yam said.
“Australia has no appointed national security judges, no immunity from prosecution, no prejudice against bail in national security cases, no barriers to judicial review and constitutional challenges to national security laws and decisions.”
Foreign Minister Penny Wong did not comment, but the Department of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that Australia will continue to oppose the broad and external reach of Hong Kong’s national security laws and the targeting of pro-democracy activists in Australia.
Hui and Yam’s bounty was released in 2023, and their faces are on “wanted” posters posted on billboards across Hong Kong. They have been targeted in anonymous poster campaigns distributed in their hometowns of Adelaide and Melbourne.
The museum’s board of trustees also includes University of Technology Sydney scholar Feng Chongyi, an Australian citizen, who was struck by arrest warrant and $HK200,000 ($36,000) bounty last year and Hong Kong authorities for its advocacy of democracy.
A Hong Kong government spokesman said the list was first displayed in 2025 as part of a temporary museum exhibit before being updated and moved to its current location this year to showcase its “unprecedented fugitive activity”.
“No people or countries should harbor these fugitives, or provide any kind of assistance to them for evading their criminal responsibilities,” it said in a statement.
Despite its emphasis on the rule of law, the gallery makes no mention of the exodus of Western senior judges from Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal in recent years. Some have cited the suppression of national security and the bad political environment for their departure, while others have continued to show faith in the independence of the judiciary.
Three Australians are among the six overseas judges who continue to serve on the court on a rotating basis – former High Court judges Patrick Keane and William Gummow, and former Federal Court chief justice James Allsop. Foreign judges do not serve in national security cases, but have faced strong criticism from pro-democracy activists that they legitimize a broken legal system.
Australian judges declined, or did not respond, to a request for comment.
After Ng was sentenced in 2024, Wong urged the judges to reconsider their positions in court.
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Lisa Visentin is the North Asia correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age based in Beijing. He was previously a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect through X or email address.
