Under watch Exiled activist still fears China’s surveillance

In August this year, Agnes Chow crossed into mainland China filled with fear. The young activist was in the company of five national security police, taking her from her home in Hong Kong, on what she said was a “propaganda tour” organised by authorities in return for her being allowed to study overseas.

- Helen Davidson

Police had told her the tour was mandatory if she wanted them to return her passport, which was confi scated years earlier as part of her bail conditions. Chow is a key fi gure in Hong Kong’s most signifi cant pro-democracy movement in the past decade, pushing back against Beijing’s increasingly authoritarian rule in Hong Kong.

Chow said she was informed of the alarming demand to cross into mainland China – made outside any known regulation or law – in July and was banned from telling her lawyer. “For that month I was really afraid that I wouldn’t be able to get back to Hong Kong,” she said. “If anything happened in mainland China no one would know, no one would come to rescue me. ”

Chow spoke to the Guardian from Toronto, just days after revealing in an Instagram post that she had moved there to study, but had decided not to go back to Hong Kong, perhaps ever.

In 2020 she was jailed for seven months on convictions related to the 2019 protests that swept Hong Kong, and then arrested again in 2020 on accusations of “colluding with foreign forces” under the controversial national security law