China Tortured Me over Hong Kong, Says Former British Consulate Employee | Hacker News Reader

China Tortured Me over Hong Kong, Says Former British Consulate Employee

nytimes.com

293 pointskerng38 comments

I suggest you to read the first hand report of the tortured Employee of the British Consulate. https://www.facebook.com/notes/cheng-man-kit/for-the-record-...

It's far more detailed and interesting than the article, and it clearly exposes the mindset of a 21th century secret police.

Torture, threats, solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, and when he gets home to Taiwan he is followed. The detail he puts into describing how they manipulated forms to start his prison stay to be contributed, to the number of times they took prison photos, makes it a crazy read. It reads like science fiction as an American - I hope he is able to hide out and find a job in a new country.

Nytimes is paywlled, here is Cheng's own account of the events:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/cheng-man-kit/for-the-record-...

Edit: archive link for the above https://archive.is/LWyz2

(I guess I'm on some kind of list now)

Bypassed paywall: https://outline.com/kXyWwy

This was extremely hard to read... I cannot imagine what is happening to other people similarly detained or who got arrested for worse reasons...

Absolutely horrifying read. I couldn't help but think about Julian Assange going through similar treatment in the UK. Just goes to show: All governments are criminal and terrorist organizations, oppressing and enslaving the people.

Edit: sources for perennate

> Two medical experts accompanied Melzer when he visited Assange at Belmarsh prison in the UK, he said on Tuesday. "We came to the conclusion that he had been exposed to psychological torture for a prolonged period of time. That's a medical assessment." Melzer’s message fell largely on deaf ears, as only a handful of reporters attended Tuesday’s press conference at the UN headquarters in New York.

https://www.rt.com/news/471016-assange-torture-violations-un...

Physically and mentally his condition has gotten pretty bad. He could barely speak in front of the judge recently. Listen to John Pilger who met him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLXzudMCyM4

Please provide sources for describing incidents where the UK government physically tortured Julian Assange by forcing him to stay awake, or strapped him to a chair so he couldn't move his limbs, or hung from a crossbar and forced into an eagle pose, etc.

I doubt there are sources though since I'm pretty sure you just made this up.

Perhaps it is time for the citizens of the Western liberal democracies to stop doing business with Chinese interests.

I've been watching both For All Mankind (Ronald D. Moore, in which the Soviets beat the U.S. to the moon) and The Man in the High Castle (based on the P.K. Dick novel in which the Axis powers win WW II), and have generally always enjoyed alternate history fiction.

So, I find myself wondering how this would have all played out if the Cold War hadn't ended and Soviet Union hadn't fallen apart before 1999 when Britain was required to turn HK over to the PRC.

Do you mean that it's reasonable to assume that the USSR wouldn't have backed China? Or what's the "alternate" part of this history?

> Or what's the "alternate" part of this history?

I'm not sure what you are asking. The alternate part is the part where the Soviet Union doesn't collapse a half decade before the handover of HK back to China.

Would a Cold War Britain have really handed over HK? What does China look like without the West's influx of money for manufacturing? (Maybe that still happens.) If it leads to war, how does that play out? Is it another Korea/Vietnam or does it blossom into WW III? Does it end with a new lease or an armistice? If 9/11 still happens during this crisis, how does a Cold War world respond to it?

A major part of such works is that they allow us to look at ourselves and our real history through a different light.

I just think you're vastly overestimating the impact a still standing Soviet union would have on Hong Kong. My personal guess is that it would play out in about the same way.

Western investment in China started in the ‘70e and ‘80s, led in part by Hong Kong firms. Negotiations over the Hong Kong handover were started by Margaret Thatcher in the ‘80s. The Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed in 1985. The Basic Law was ratified by 1990.

The Cold War was not over when Hong Kong’s future was being negotiated.

China and the Soviet Union were almost at war during the late 70s. Western relations with China were much better than today precisely because the Soviet Union was a common enemy.

For all those that say "I have nothing to hide" wrt privacy issues, Chinese people thought so too. Now they can't even afford to care about such horrile things because lack of privacy means all dissent will be crushed.

The best smartphone security doesn't help when you are forced to unlock your phone.

I wonder why the embassy did not remotely wipe his phone, since this was his work phone.

With that said, I don't understand how he could not have expected that when visiting China.

> With that said, I don't understand how he could not have expected that when visiting China.

He was employed by the British consulate in Hong Kong. Generally it's not a good idea for countries to torture people working for foreign consulates given that it's sure to spark huge diplomatic crises. The level of physical abuse forced on him is despicable, hopefully the EU will have the guts to impose strict economic sanctions on China to deter the Chinese government from taking insane actions like this again.

He was employed by a foreign consulate but, in the mind of the Chinese government, he is a Chinese and therefore belongs to China.

Until the "best smartphone security" is two passwords: The second you enter when under duress, and it populates your phone with pro government content based on your current location. Or just wipes your phone. Or permanently locks, encrypts, and sends decryption key to some trusted source.

At which point your captors just beat or murder you because they know that feature exists.

Sure, unless they actually want the information. So you'd' have to choose which outcome would be better for you and / or your cause. But that's the point, at least you'd still get to choose. For the sake of argument, imagine the dual password is a bit more intelligent about what it displays and hides based on what you've entered.

And then we beat you up for deliberately sabotaging our investigation. If you didn't have anything to hide why would you wipe your phone? Clearly you must be a spy or worse so we have no choice but to send you to the re-education camp.

The action should be indistinguishable from a remote-wipe if possible.

So it was working right up until you put in the special password? How would you make it look like a remote wipe?

Also, keep in mind, remote wiping your phone after the police take it is evidence tampering. In the US, that alone can get you imprisoned.

Well yes, it's not trivial. The lock screen would have to remain unaffected and the filesystem would have to look like it was rebuilt a few hours ago.

I was wondering for a while why such a feature doesnt yet exist.

In the US, such a feature could be used for evidence tampering. Very illegal.

The Xiaomi phones have this. You can create a "Second Space" with a different PIN (or using a different fingerprint to unlock it) from the first. When you use the second PIN it unlocks a completely separate environment which is not aware of the other one.

They didn't really need his phone though. They were never actually trying to get information from him, just forcing him to say certain things.

From his FB post, they got him to give information on the org structure of the protest groups he was in.

How should the rest of the world explain to China that being evil is bad, and they should stop being evil?

Part of the issue is that the chinese people literally don't see what the world is saying, the only information they get is constantly filtered and developed by the state. Really the state has created a perfect machine to control the thoughts of the population, its a very scary situation. So we'd maybe be able to conduct some information warfare involving full blown cyber war of unknown proportions attempting to hack into the chinese internet, I think things like starlink are going to make it harder for the chinese gov to implement the great firewall, however maybe they will just launch their own starlink...

Being evil by western standards is a small price to pay for huge quality of life improvements - from going to sleep hungry to central European wages, from dirt roads to biggest (if not best) rail and highway network in the world, from planting rice knees deep in mud to nice city apartment and office/engineering job. To Chinese population this rhetoric might sound like F you I got mine.

HK and Taiwan both don't like torture and political persecution. Not a "western standard". Plus CCP government ideas of communism is a west/Russian idea. I would say the CCP that destroyed its own Chinese history is more western than Taiwan

The problem is that moral outrage like this is used to justify war.

Nothing justifies war. Please remember that. War is innocent people mass murdering other innocent people.

The problem is that you want to look the other way. What could ever justify that?

I did not say that we should just look away.

I am saying the answer is not to have millions of Chinese and American innocents engaged in slaughtering each other or activities that support that.

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