These Australians appear on a ‘bounty wall’ in a Hong Kong museum exhibit
Hong Kong: Australia’s foreign interference laws once angered China. They are now housed in Hong Kong’s top history museum, where they are used to help legitimize Beijing’s national security crackdown that has led to dozens of democracy activists being jailed and others being pursued abroad.
Those hunted include Australian activists Ted Hui and Kevin Yam, whose names appear on a museum exhibit featuring a wall of “fugitives” with police bounties of HK$1 million ($182,000) on their heads.
The list of awards has been installed as a permanent exhibit over the past few months and carries a warning that the Hong Kong government will pursue them “for life” for national security violations.
“This is ridiculous because the world knows that I am a political refugee who was persecuted for peacefully defending freedom and democracy in Hong Kong,” said Hui, a former Hong Kong politician who was granted asylum by the Australian government last year.
“But the regime has now placed me in a museum exhibit, as if I were somehow the threat. This feels less like history and more like an attempt to produce an alternative reality for the people of Hong Kong.”
The “fugitives” wall, which features the names of more than two dozen activists who fled abroad, is part of a larger national security exhibition that opens as a permanent gallery at the Hong Kong Museum of History in 2024.
The film is dedicated to telling the official narrative of the government’s crackdown following the mass protests that shook the city in 2019, which at times escalated 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 tight grip on the city, but as a devastating “color revolution” fueled 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 this law, as well as a related local law passed in 2024, and many have been sentenced to long prison sentences in connection with their activism.
Last week, two owners of Hunter Bookstore in the city’s Sham Shui Po neighborhood became the latest arrests. The individuals in question were detained and later released on bail for allegedly exhibiting and selling “seditious” publications and receiving funds from foreign political organizations.
The museum’s gallery celebrates the successful prosecutions of high-profile cases to date as a victory for the rule of law and the courts to bring “anti-China destabilizing elements” to justice, framing this crackdown as consistent with legal practice in Australia and elsewhere.
One of the exhibits highlights the “Hong Kong 47” case, in which Australian dual citizen Gordon Ng was sentenced to seven years and three months in prison for subversion for participating in an unofficial primary election. It also includes the case of media mogul and British dual citizen Jimmy Lai, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in February for “colluding with foreign powers” and publishing “seditious” material in his now-shuttered, stridently anti-communist newspaper. Apple Daily.
Their incarceration has been condemned by the Australian government, other Western countries and human rights organizations as an attack on the freedoms Hong Kongers once enjoyed.
A nearby corner of the exhibition is devoted to refuting this criticism.
He cites Australia’s foreign intervention and influence laws (and laws in places like the US, UK and Canada) to support his claim that Hong Kong’s legal framework is “consistent with the practices of countries around the world”.
The exhibition states that “the criticisms leveled by some countries are unfounded, double standards and unfounded political smears.”
These are the same foreign interference laws that infuriated China after they passed the Australian parliament in 2018. When diplomatic relations hit rock bottom in 2020, Chinese officials emphasized that these laws were one of the most important threats. Beijing’s 14 complaints with Australia. A Chinese diplomat told a reporter at the time that if Australia backed off the policies on the list, it would “lead to a better atmosphere”.
Yam, an Australian citizen who worked as a lawyer in Hong Kong for 20 years before leaving Hong Kong permanently in 2022, said it was misleading to equate the city’s national security laws with those in Australia.
“The content of the laws is not the same, the procedural safeguards are not the same, the systemic safeguards are not the same,” Yam said.
“Australia has no appointed national security judges, no deprivation of trial by jury, no presumption against bail in national security cases, no impediment to judicial review and no constitutional challenge to national security laws and decisions.”
Foreign Minister Penny Wong did not comment, but the Foreign Office said in a statement that Australia would continue to object to the broad and extraterritorial scope of Hong Kong’s national security laws and the targeting of pro-democracy advocates in Australia.
Bounties for Hui and Yam were handed out in 2023, and their faces appear on “wanted” posters plastered on billboards across Hong Kong. They were targeted in anonymous poster campaigns distributed in their hometowns of Adelaide and Melbourne.
The museum’s awards board also includes Sydney University of Technology academic Feng Chongyi, an Australian citizen who was hit with an arrest warrant by Hong Kong authorities last year for his pro-democracy advocacy and was awarded a HK$200,000 ($36,000) reward.
A spokesman for the Hong Kong government said the list was first displayed as part of a temporary museum exhibition in 2025, but was later updated and moved to its current location this year to express its “relentless pursuit of fugitives.”
“No person or country should harbor these fugitives or provide them with any form of assistance to evade their criminal responsibility,” the statement said.
Despite its emphasis on the rule of law, the gallery does not mention the mass exodus of senior Western judges from Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal in recent years. Some left, citing national security measures and a deteriorating political environment, while others continued to express confidence in the independence of the judiciary.
The six overseas judges who continue to rotate on the court include three Australians: former Supreme Court justices Patrick Keane and William Gummow and former Federal Court chief justice James Allsop. Overseas judges do not sit on national security cases but have come under heavy criticism from democracy campaigners for legitimizing a broken legal system.
Australian judges either declined or did not respond to a request for comment.
Following Ng’s sentencing in 2024, Wong called on judges to reconsider their stance on the field.
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Lisa Visentin is the North Asia correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, based in Beijing. He was previously a federal political correspondent in Canberra.Connect with: X or email.
