Hong Kong: Australia’s foreign interference laws once enraged China. Now they are enshrined in Hong Kong’s top history museum, where they are used to help justify Beijing’s national security crackdown, which led to the jailing of dozens of democracy activists and the pursuit of others overseas.
Among the hunted are Australia-based activists Ted Hui and Kevin Yam, whose names are on a museum exhibit featuring a wall of “absconders” with police bounties of $HK1 million ($182,000) on their head.
The bounty list was installed as a permanent exhibit in the last few months and carries the warning that the Hong Kong government will pursue them “for life” for breaches of national security.
“It is ridiculous because the world knows I am a political refugee persecuted for my peaceful advocacy of freedom and democracy in Hong Kong,” says Hui, a former Hong Kong politician who was granted asylum by the Australian government last year.
“Yet the regime has now placed me in a museum exhibit, as if I am somehow the threat. It feels less like history and more like an attempt to manufacture an alternative reality for Hong Kong people.”
The “absconders” wall, which contains the names of more than two dozen activists who have fled overseas, is part of a bigger national security exhibition that opened as a permanent gallery in the Hong Kong Museum of History in 2024.
It is dedicated to telling the official narrative of the government’s crackdown after massive protests rocked the city in 2019 and, at times, erupted into violent clashes with police.
It frames the protests not as a pro-democracy uprising in which millions of Hong Kongers took to the streets to resist Beijing’s tightening grip on the city, but a destructive “colour revolution” fuelled by anti-China Western forces.
This week marks six years since Beijing imposed the National Security Law on the city in July 2020, creating new crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces. Since then, hundreds of people have been arrested under that law, as well as a related local law passed in 2024, with many of them serving lengthy jail sentences connected to their activism.
Last week, two owners of the Hunter Bookstore in the city’s Sham Shui Po neighbourhood became the latest prominent arrests. They were detained, and later bailed, for allegedly displaying and selling publications with “seditious” content and receiving funds from foreign political organisations.
The museum’s gallery celebrates successful prosecutions in high-profile cases to date as a triumph of the rule of law and the courts in bringing “anti-China destabilising elements” to justice, while framing this crackdown as consistent with legal practices in Australia and elsewhere.
One exhibit highlights the “Hong Kong 47” case, in which Australian dual citizen Gordon Ng was jailed for seven years and three months for subversion for participating in an unofficial primary election. Also featured is the case of media mogul and British dual citizen Jimmy Lai, who was jailed for 20 years in February for “collusion with foreign forces” and publishing “seditious” materials in his now-shuttered, stridently anti-communist newspaper Apple Daily.
Their imprisonment has been condemned by the Australian government, other Western countries and human rights bodies as an attack on the freedoms that Hong Kongers once enjoyed.
A nearby corner of the exhibit is devoted to rejecting this criticism.
It cites Australia’s foreign interference and influences laws – and those in places such as the United States, Britain and Canada – to support its claim that Hong Kong’s legal framework is “consistent with the practices of countries around the world”.
“Criticisms levelled by some countries,” the exhibit states, “are baseless, double-standard, and unfounded political smears”.
These are the same foreign interference laws that infuriated China after they passed the Australian parliament in 2018. When diplomatic ties plummeted in 2020, Chinese officials highlighted the laws as one of 14 grievances that Beijing had with Australia. At the time, a Chinese diplomat told a reporter that if Australia backed away from the policies on the list it “would be conducive to a better atmosphere”.
Yam, an Australian citizen who worked as a lawyer in Hong Kong for 20 years before leaving permanently in 2022, said it was misleading to equate the city’s national security laws with those in Australia.
“The contents of the laws are not the same, the procedural safeguards are not the same, the systemic safeguards are not the same,” Yam said.
“Australia has no designated national security judges, no depriving of trial by jury, no presumption against bail in national security cases, no bars to judicial review and constitutional challenges against national security laws and decisions.”
Foreign Minister Penny Wong did not comment, but the Department of Foreign Affairs said in a statement that Australia would continue to object to the broad and extraterritorial reach of Hong Kong’s national security laws and the targeting of pro-democracy advocates in Australia.
Hui and Yam’s bounties were issued in 2023, and their faces are on “wanted” posters pinned to noticeboards around Hong Kong. They have been targeted in anonymous poster campaigns circulated in their hometowns of Adelaide and Melbourne.
The museum’s bounty board also includes University of Technology Sydney academic Feng Chongyi, an Australian citizen, who was hit with an arrest warrant and a $HK200,000 ($36,000) bounty last year by Hong Kong authorities for his pro-democracy advocacy.
A spokesperson for the Hong Kong government said the list was first displayed in 2025 as part of a temporary museum exhibit before being updated and relocated to its current position this year to convey its “unrelenting pursuit of absconders”.
“No persons or countries should be harbouring these fugitives, or providing any forms of assistance to them for evading their criminal responsibilities,” it said in a statement.
Despite its emphasis on the rule of law, the gallery makes no mention of the mass exodus of top Western judges from Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal in recent years. Some have cited the national security crackdown and worsening political environment for their departure, while others have continued to express confidence in the independence of the judiciary.
Three Australians are among the six overseas judges who continue to serve on the court on a rotating basis – former High Court justices Patrick Keane and William Gummow, and former Federal Court chief justice James Allsop. The overseas judges don’t serve on national security cases, but have faced heavy criticism from democracy campaigners that they are legitimising a broken legal system.
The Australian judges declined, or did not respond, to a request for comment.
After Ng’s sentencing in 2024, Wong urged the judges to reconsider their positions on the court.
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Lisa Visentin is the North Asia correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age based in Beijing. She was previously a federal political correspondent based in Canberra.Connect via X or email.
