Hong Kong prisons work to compel loyalty to China among young activists

HONG KONG —

The day begins with goose-stepping. In the prison yards of juvenile facilities across Hong Kong, young men and women practice the form of marching used by the Chinese military, kicking their legs up high as guards yell out commands.

In their mud-colored uniforms, the prisoners look almost indistinguishable from military recruits. But before they were detained, these inmates were foot soldiers in Hong Kong’s fight for greater democratic freedoms.

Arrested for their involvement in the 2019 mass protests that saw almost a third of the population take to the streets, the detainees are now the latest subjects in China’s decades-long experiment in political control. The goal is to “deradicalize” them, echoing efforts honed by Beijing from the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters up to the forced detention and reeducation of Uyghur Muslims, though the Hong Kong version is not on the industrial scale of the repression in Xinjiang.

The deradicalization program includes pro-China propaganda lectures and psychological counseling that leads to detainees confessing to holding extreme views, and it is accompanied by a system of close monitoring and punishment, including solitary confinement, inside the juvenile facilities, former prisoners and guards said. As of April 30, 871 juvenile inmates had participated in the program, the Hong Kong Correctional Services Department (CSD) said, about 70 percent of them charged in connection with the 2019 protests. Some are as young as 14.

Hong Kong officials have refused to provide any specifics about what deradicalization — or “targeted rehabilitation,” as they call it — entails. But The Washington Post spoke to 10 former juvenile prisoners and three prisoners formerly held in adult facilities, all arrested in connection with the 2019 protests, as well as two former employees at the CSD who described the program and how it has evolved over the past year. All spoke under the condition of anonymity or only wanted their first name used for fear of repercussions, including additional prison time or retaliation from the authorities.

The ultimate objective, according to a former prison guard, is to create a feeling of hopelessness among prisoners, deterring the youngest former protesters from activism or even seeing a future in Hong Kong.

“It was explicitly said to us that by the end of their sentence, the goal is to ensure the desire of these inmates to continue doing political stuff is less and less, and that they instead look for ways to leave Hong Kong,” said the former prison guard.

One former prisoner, Leo, said: “What really slowly wears down your will to fight is the everyday living in prison … [being] targeted, oppressed, silenced.”

“This is the brainwashing that happens 24 hours a day,” he said.

The CSD said in an emailed statement to The Post that it “will not comment on any individual case.” Wong Kwok-hing, the head of the CSD, has said there is no “brainwashing element” to the program.

“These prisoners joined because they saw the plan can help them correct their wrong values,” Wong said at a February news conference. In the CSD’s 2021 annual report, the most recent available, the program is referred to as a targeted rehabilitation program focused on “Disengagement from Radical Thoughts and Instillation of Correct Values.” It has produced “ideal results,” Wong said in a response to questions from Hong Kong legislators, as “participants felt deep regret for past illegal actions.”

Those who study or run deradicalization programs — interventions, for example, to stop young Muslims from joining the Islamic State or White men online from being indoctrinated in white-supremacist thinking — say the concept of deradicalization has been co-opted by authoritarian states.

“For democracy to happen, you need people to confront their government, to be angry … that is sometimes inconvenient, but it is not radicalization,” said Louis Audet Gosselin, the scientific and strategic director for the Center for the Prevention of Radicalization Leading to Violence, a Montreal-based nonprofit. “Imprisoning and brainwashing is not deradicalization.”

The focus on young detainees is part of a broader suppression in Hong Kong of any political speech that challenges the authorities, advocates for democracy or criticizes China. Dissent has been criminalized as extremist and can lead to sentences of life in prison. The authorities, for instance, have used a colonial-era sedition law to target a group of speech therapists who wrote a children’s book about sheep and wolves, a parable on China’s control, and two men who possessed the children’s book. An ex-editor of an independent news outlet on trial for sedition was cross-examined about an opinion piece that compared Hong Kong to George Orwell’s “1984.” Ahead of the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, crackdown on protesters at Tiananmen Square, libraries have removed books on the subject — including one that argued the Chinese Communist Party enforced collective amnesia after the massacre.

[Nine books that have been taken off library shelves in Hong Kong]

“The tactics as a whole are directly imported from what the Communist Party has done in other places,” said Perry Link, professor emeritus of East Asian studies at Princeton University. “It is a system that has been used and practiced, sharpened and created many times over since the early 1950s inside China.”

Malicious work

More than 10,000 people were arrested in connection with the 2019 protests and about a third of those were charged with various crimes, including about 250 under a national security law, which was imposed by Beijing in 2020. The law criminalizes four vaguely-worded offenses “subversion,” “secession,” “collusion with foreign forces” and “terrorism.” The colonial-era sedition law, unused for half a century, has been revived in the wake of the national security law to criminalize other speech.

Though public dissent has been neutralized and virtually all opposition leaders are in jail or exile, the authorities have repeatedly raised the prospect of further unrest to justify the continued erosion of freedoms. In a speech on April 15, a day set aside by authorities to promote the security law, the director of Beijing’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong, Zheng Yanxiong, said the territory’s “anti-China” defenses are not “at a point where vigilance against war can relax.”

“Stubborn people are still putting up stiff resistance; some foreign forces will not disappear and are still stirring the pot,” said Zheng. “Some rioters who have escaped abroad or gone underground are still doing malicious work.”

Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee in May chided a reporter who used the term “2019 protests” to ask a question, insisting that what occurred was “black violence” with the aim of making Hong Kong “independent.” Independence was only a fringe demand among the protesters, and early demonstrations were overwhelmingly peaceful until the police started to use tactics like deploying tear gas, according to advocates and human rights groups.

“We lived through that, and don’t forget it. We have to bear that in mind so as to ensure that in the long run, the system will protect us” from chaos, Lee said.

Beijing-linked think tanks in Hong Kong, including one affiliated with the city’s former chief executive Leung Chun-ying, in 2021 started pushing for the city to work on “de-radicalizing” its youth. Leung compared Hong Kong’s front-line pro-democracy protesters to drug addicts and commissioned an 83-page report that drew parallels between what it describes as violent radicalization in Hong Kong and Islamist militancy in Nigeria and mass murder by far-right figures in Norway and New Zealand.

The number of protest-related arrests has led to a growing population of inmates spread across Hong Kong’s 24 correctional institutes, both on “remand” — awaiting trial and denied bail — and sentenced. Some of the Hong Kong inmates intended to commit violent, potentially deadly crimes, like the few arrested for possessing bombmaking materials. But the overwhelming majority have been charged with lesser offenses such as vandalism, assaulting a police officer, arson, or holding weapons such as sticks or molotov cocktails. Others were sentenced for nonviolent actions at unauthorized assemblies.

In its report, the CSD said the average daily prison population increased by 10 percent to 7,616 people in 2021, posing “formidable challenges.”

From the start of their detention, inmates are subject to Beijing’s narrative that the protests were a product of foreign manipulation, rather than an organic pro-democracy uprising. One former prisoner in a facility for adults said a guard, holding a checklist in his hands with several questions, asked him whether he had received funding to protest. Several others in juvenile prisons said guards also asked them if they had been paid.

Hong Kong authorities have more broadly redirected prison staff — therapists and guards alike — to focus on monitoring political prisoners and share information on them with the Hong Kong Police Force, according to the two former CSD employees.

Every morning, guards are tasked with sending reports on the daily activities of high-profile prisoners arrested under the national security law or for the 2019 protests. These reports, the former prison guard added, reach the top management of the CSD and the police department, and are produced with the help of counterterrorism teams established before the upheaval.

“There was no such watch list before” the protests, he added.

The CSD annual report said the department has enhanced its intelligence network and system of monitoring, a “pre-emptive” strategy to prevent “radicals” from “building up forces.”

Public apologies

The deradicalization program, steadily rolled out since last year, has so far been targeted at detainees under 21. They include a former prisoner who joined the 2019 protests at the urging of his father and who wanted to be referred to by part of his name, Man. He was 17 at the time and marched in the million-strong peaceful mass protests in early June, which, he said, prompted him to learn more about Hong Kong’s pro-democracy struggles. Man said he came to believe he was in a generational fight, and that it was every young person’s responsibility to take a stand.

As that belief intensified, Man and some of his friends felt “standing at the back was quite useless.” They looked into buying hard-hats, gas masks and other protective gear.

“Once we had more, we moved from the back to the middle, and then the front line,” he said.

In July, Man joined a protest that was later classified as a riot. He hit a police officer with an umbrella; carried to protect protesters from the police use of pepper spray, umbrellas became a symbol of resistance in Hong Kong. Man was arrested a few months later as he was about to go to school. He pleaded guilty to assault and rioting, and was sentenced to just over two years in a juvenile correctional facility.

The prison system replaced British-style marching with goose-stepping in 2022, part of a slew of new political propaganda programs. Man and others had to adapt to the new drills and were told to stop calling guards “sir” in English, switching instead to the equivalent in Cantonese.

Inmates were made to watch Chinese propaganda films later that year, including “The Battle at Lake Changjin,” released in 2021. It had a $200 million budget and was commissioned by the Central Propaganda Department as part of celebrations marking the 100th year of the Chinese Communist Party. The movie shows China’s army bravely fending off U.S. troops in a bloody battle during the Korean War, but it has been criticized for whitewashing Beijing’s role in dividing the Koreas.

[Americans vanquished, China triumphant: 2021’s hit war epic doesn’t fit Hollywood script]

Some said they watched the film multiple times over the course of weeks and had fill out worksheets to say who their favorite character was.

The CSD has also launched what it describes as an “educational program,” titled “Understanding History is the Beginning of Knowledge.” The program, according to the department, is meant to “assist the young people in custody to learn Chinese history, enhance their sense of national identity … and get back on the right track.” Since July 2022, prisons have also started playing videos each day promoting the national security law.

Photographers were present at the lectures, and the rooms were also fitted with video cameras trained on the inmates. “In promotional videos issued by the [Correctional Services Department] you can see that we just sit there like pieces of wood,” said Leo, a former prisoner.

In addition to the films, the prisons have introduced a group psychological program known as Youth Lab, according to CSD reports. The program resembles cognitive behavioral therapy. After icebreakers like board games, psychologists lead the juvenile prisoners — overwhelmingly those convicted of protest-related offenses — in sessions where they watch television programs and analyze fictional scenarios including conflict between family members.

“They stressed that if we think [twice] we won’t be so impulsive and angry,” Man said. His takeaway was that he was immature before he was imprisoned. “I realized there are many things I cannot avoid, and so I should use a different way to deal with it.”

In separate sessions, inmates can invite a parent to join them in some activities. At one of these, officers made inmates write a letter apologizing — whether to their family or the nation — and had them read it out aloud in front of the prison guards, other detainees and their parents.

A former prison psychologist said evaluations have long been compulsory for young inmates, originally designed to determine whether they show signs of self-harm or suicidal ideation. Rehabilitation was a serious effort to steer inmates away from drug habits or gangs and help them reintegrate into society. With the influx of political prisoners and pressure from the prison authorities, psychological sessions have become “like confession,” said the former prison psychologist who was part of the rehabilitation unit, with the detainees pushed to express remorse over their political actions and acknowledge that their views were extreme.

Link, the Princeton University professor, said the Chinese Communist Party’s “technique of making you feel like you are the minority is very tried and true.”

“At Tiananmen — most of the city was out on the streets, in Hong Kong in 2019, 2 out of 7 million were on the streets, and yet, when they grab you and get you in jail, they psychologically engineer it for you to feel like you are in the minority, and ‘we, the party, we are the mainstream,’ ” he said.

A sense of hopelessness

Being identified as “problematic” can lead to retribution. Former prisoners said the withholding of letters from family and friends was a common punishment, leaving prisoners feeling isolated. Others were put in single cells for infractions like holding up five fingers during court appearances — a reference to “five demands, not one less,” one of the mantras of the protests. One 20-year-old juvenile detainee said some officers hit the soles of their feet with a wooden stick if they could not accurately recite a list of 19 prison regulations. He said he was hit several times and received some 40 strikes in total. He also witnessed guards using their elbows to hit prisoners at an especially sensitive part of their back, a move the guards called “doing the chicken wing,” and kneeing inmates in their thighs.

“I accepted my punishment with a smile,” the detainee said.

Former prisoners said they sometimes told guards what they wanted to hear to avoid additional punishment. All but one of the former prisoners said they did not regret their actions at the 2019 protests — only getting arrested for them. “I am very stubborn, you won’t affect me with any words,” said another former prisoner, arrested for arson. “But for appearances, I will pretend to agree with you to save trouble.”

Yet almost all also expressed a sense of hopelessness and a desire to retreat from politics. Their lives have been altered and redefined by the protests, their arrests and imprisonment — but the people around them have largely moved on. The narratives drummed into them inside jail have been reinforced by propaganda outside that promotes the national security law with board games, competitions and cute mascots directed largely at children and preteens, alongside the shrinking space for criticism.

Man said he despises the Chinese Communist Party more than he did before he entered prison. His feelings, he says, have “deepened.” But he is also fearful of authority now, looking away every time he sees a police officer. He said he found it hard to sleep when he first got out of prison. Man still reads news about what’s happening with democratic rights in Hong Kong, but he tries not to dwell on it.

“There’s nothing I can do,” he said.