When good Samaritans have money

For decades, the cliché around Hong Kong has been that it is an ‘economic’ city. Its people, especially its business and educated middle class and elites, are said to be interested only in making money and not in universal values like democracy, human rights and the rule of law. In the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) narrative, activists, protesters and pro-democracy politicians are supported and funded by ‘foreign forces’, while the middle class and elites stay away.

There’s one problem with this analysis: it’s not true. In my nearly twenty years as a member of Hong Kong’s professional and business circles, I’ve encountered countless middle class and elite Hongkongers who didn’t just have pro-democracy sympathies; they actively funded, participated in and sustained the movement.

There was Liz*, a senior banker who worked in a Chinese state-owned bank. Outwardly, she presented herself as apolitical. But there was another side to her. During a round of high-profile online crowdfunding efforts for a pro-democracy initiative, she donated US$6,500. For the donation not to be traceable to her—she worked in a Chinese bank, after all—she went to more than twenty convenience stores to buy stacks of US$65 prepaid credit cards. She then spent hours donating online, one set of US$65 credit at a time, using virtual private networks (VPNs) to cover her digital tracks.

There was also John. He was a successful entrepreneur with a collection of luxury cars, who lived in a large, upmarket apartment with Victoria Harbour views. Dinners with him mostly involved discussing the finer things in life, not politics. But during the 2019 protests, he became one of an army of rich people driving expensive European cars to protest areas to pick up young protesters fleeing from police tear gas, beatings and arrests.

Then there was Daisy, the well-connected senior auditor who frequently travelled to China for work. People broadly knew that she was pro-democracy, but it was actually more than that. Privately, she actively arranged drinks and dinner gatherings among rich Hongkongers, where they passed her jaw-dropping sums of cash to support the democracy movement.

And there was me. Save for a two-year stint as an in-house lawyer at a Big Four accounting firm, my entire career in Hong Kong was in private practice, working for international law firms. My financial and commercial sector–focused practice areas had nothing to do with human rights or democracy. My professional contacts and friends were all middle class or well-to-do lawyers, bankers, accountants and businesspeople, many of whom worked with or for mainland Chinese entities. Living in a nondescript middle class part of the city, I was not rich, but I was never short of a buck either during my time lawyering in Hong Kong.

People like Liz, John, Daisy and me were considered winners in Hong Kong society. If the narrative of a profit-obsessed Hong Kong was accurate, things like democracy, human rights and the rule of law ought not to matter to us, so long as there was plenty of money to be made.

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People like us were regularly wooed by the pro-Beijing camp. We would be invited to networking lunches, drinks and dinners hosted by pro-Beijing professionals and businesses organisations. We would be invited to ‘National Situation’ seminars run by Beijing officials or pro-Beijing academics or think tanks. We would be approached to run for positions in this committee or that, on the pretext of community participation and business opportunities, with the unspoken understanding that we would advocate Beijing’s position.

Some professionals and businesspeople embraced such ‘opportunities’ and were fabulously rewarded financially. Others, like my friend Liz, had no choice but to attend the bare minimum due to pressures from her employer. But they would sneer at such events in private (“they’re all dodgy idiots” and the like), and publicly play dumb with the “I really don’t understand politics and I only care about money” line when asked to support Beijing’s authoritarian agenda.

There were also lots of people, like me, who politely declined such invitations. I had plenty of opportunities to become a pro-Beijing lawyer. In 2012, I was invited to run for the Election Committee for selecting Hong Kong’s chief executive as part of a ticket of pro-Beijing lawyers. I declined. Instead, within a few years, I became a democracy, human rights and rule of law activist and commentator who nonetheless maintained a financial and commercial law practice in my day job.

But even with this, I still got approached occasionally by pro-Beijing contacts. Whenever I said anything publicly that was critical of the direction of the pro-democracy movement, pro-Beijing contacts would ‘coincidentally’ start inviting me to their events. As recently as late 2021, well after Beijing imposed the national security law on Hong Kong, which led to mass arrests and incarceration of dissidents, I was still approached by both of the pro-Beijing candidates for the now ‘patriots only’ Hong Kong legislature’s legal sector seat to support them publicly.

I turned them all down, and eventually returned to Melbourne, where I grew up, in 2022. Moved (and traumatised?) by the courage shown by activist friends and contacts who have been, and are still, harassed, jailed or exiled by Hong Kong’s CCP puppet regime, I decided to speak out again on Hong Kong’s predicament. For my troubles, the Hong Kong regime put me on a wanted list in July this year, with a US$130,000 bounty on my head.

Clearly, people like Liz, John, Daisy and me had more to gain financially by siding with Beijing. But to varying degrees, we refused and decided to fight for Hong Kong democracy instead. What drove millions of middle class and elite Hongkongers down this path? Some of the motivations are, paradoxically, financial. We knew that Hong Kong’s prosperity is dependent upon it remaining a free and fair city that’s distinct from the opaque authoritarianism that the CCP imposes on China. If Hong Kong became authoritarian like China, then the city’s raison d’être would be gone. Why would businesses operate in Hong Kong then, when operating in China itself is cheaper and closer to one’s target customers?

Nonetheless, our fundamental motivations went beyond monetary considerations. We are grateful for the opportunities, prosperity and freedom to be who we are that Hong Kong gave to us. If we sell out on the very things that made Hong Kong what it was for us, if we profit off the back of an increasingly authoritarian Hong Kong, how can we face our children? Can we live with the fact that our own children (but not those children whose parents refused to sell out) might be materially wealthier, but have to live in constant fear? No, we can’t. That is why lots of middle class and elite Hongkongers quietly or loudly supported the democracy movement. We put in both effort, through attending protests and volunteering for pro-democracy activist causes, as well as money.

I don’t want to overstate the impact of elite contributions on elite lives: for many of the Dom Pérignon–swilling, fine-food eating Hongkongers who poured funds into the cause, this money was just loose change, such was the wealth that existed in the city. For many middle class and elite Hongkongers, supporting and funding the democracy movement merely meant fewer business-class plane trips, or fewer Louis Vuitton handbags, or less expensive hi-fi systems. In this regard, Margaret Thatcher once said, in relation to a well-known biblical parable about a good Samaritan who helped out a robbed man: “No one would remember the good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions: he had money as well.” The Hong Kong democracy movement was helped by many such ‘good Samaritans’.

[dropcap]Despite its ‘foreign forces’ rhetoric, the CCP must have known the truth. They must have seen those images from November 2019, when well-heeled professionals and businesspeople in Hong Kong’s central business district publicly drank bottles of expensive champagne to celebrate the pro-democracy camp winning more than per cent of the seats in local council elections. The CCP had assumed that the middle classes and elites would turn against the democracy movement after months of disruptive protests. They didn’t, and instead stuck to their principles. If Hongkongers who benefit most from social stability had turned against the CCP, there was no going back.

The stories of Liz, John, Daisy and me are just the tip of the iceberg. I have so many more stories about how professionals, financiers and businesspeople—who typically would not take media interviews, and might therefore be less represented in media representations of the pro-democracy movement—reacted to and involved themselves in Hong Kong’s political developments. Maybe I can write a book about it someday.

* The stories told in this essay are true to the best of my knowledge and belief. However, to protect individuals’ identities, personal attributes such as names, gender and professions have at times been changed.