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.
This story is from the December 15, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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This story is from the December 15, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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