“I was hung … [in] a spreadeagled pose for hour after hour,” said Simon Cheng, a former staff member of the British consulate in Hong Kong, describing how he was tortured after he was detained in August while on a business trip to mainland China. Mr. Cheng said that the police who detained him insisted that he was “a mastermind and British proxy to incite and organize the protests” in Hong Kong.
Beijing has responded to months of demonstrations in Hong Kong not by addressing people’s grievances that their freedoms are being eroded, but instead by claiming that foreign governments were behind the demonstrations.
It’s clear from Mr. Cheng’s account of his abusive interrogations that the police were not interested in the truth, but in inventing a reality that is politically convenient for the Chinese Communist Party.
In her 2016 memoirs How Enemies Are Made, the Chinese disability rights activist and filmmaker Kou Yanding described being secretly detained by the Chinese police for participating in the 2014 Hong Kong Umbrella protests. She said that her interrogators were uninterested in her explanations or her community-based work. Instead, they “not only want to make up stories,” she wrote, they “can even create reality.” As her interrogators reinvented her chance meetings with Chinese dissidents as subversion plots, Ms. Kou felt she was in some kind of “magical realism,” a fiction her captors willed into being.
[…]
See Also:
(2) Hong Kong journalists injured as police fire tear gas to disperse Mong Kok protesters
