A court in Hong Kong has convicted five speech therapists of producing “seditious publications” in the form of a series of illustrated children’s books that depicted sheep trying to defend their village from wolves.
The convictions are the latest using a colonial-era sedition offence that authorities have deployed alongside a new national security law to stamp out dissent.
Prosecutors said the animals were analogies for Hong Kong residents and mainland Chinese respectively, and were intended to incite hatred towards the latter. The defence argued that the books’ content was open to interpretation and that they did not call for armed rebellion against the government.
But in his verdict, the judge Kwok Wai-kin, who is on a panel of national security judges selected by the city’s leader, wrote that the books were written in a way to guide the mind of readers, and that the publishers did not recognise Beijing’s sovereignty over Hong Kong.
“The seditious intention stems not merely from the words, but from the words with the proscribed effects intended to result in the mind of children,” Kwok wrote. “Children will be led into belief that the PRC [People’s Republic of China] government is coming to Hong Kong with the wicked intention of taking away their home and ruining their happy life with no right to do so at all.”
The case concerned three illustrated children’s books published by the now defunct General Union of Hong Kong Speech Therapists in 2020 and 2021.
One of the books, titled 12 Warriors of Sheep Village, appears to make reference to 12 Hong Kong protesters who tried to flee on speedboats to Taiwan but were intercepted by Chinese law enforcement in August 2020. The book depicts 12 sheep having to flee their village by boat after fighting against invading wolves, only to be captured at sea and put into prison.
The five defendants – Lai Man-king, Melody Yeung, Sidney Ng, Samuel Chan and Fong Tsz-ho, all in their 20s – have been in custody with bail denied since July last year.
Ah To (not his real name), a political cartoonist who relocated to the UK after the national security laws were enacted in June 2020, said the verdict had caused him anguish. “The so-called seditious publication is speech crime, it is an evil law long repealed in the UK,” he told the Guardian.
He said it would be difficult for artists in Hong Kong to judge whether their creations could be deemed seditious because the criteria were subjective.
Amnesty International called for the immediate release of the five, saying the use of sedition laws was a “brazen act of repression”.
It said: “Writing books for children is not a crime, and attempting to educate children about recent events in Hong Kong’s history does not constitute an attempt to incite rebellion.”
