When I hosted a talk by Roman Catholic cleric Cardinal Joseph Zen at Hong Kong’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club in June 2009, it never occurred to me that doing so would one day become a legally perilous act.
In 2018 a Financial Times colleague was refused a work permit renewal after presiding over an FCC event featuring a fringe activist who advocated independence for the semi-autonomous Chinese territory.
Now Zen, 90, has been arrested by officers from the Hong Kong police force’s national security department for alleged “collusion” with foreign powers in relation to his work helping pro-democracy activists.
A national security law, imposed on Hong Kong by President Xi Jinping two years ago, has criminalised what had previously passed as routine speech and political activism in the territory, with potentially severe punishments for those convicted.
Zen had long been an outspoken critic of the Hong Kong and Chinese governments, but he hardly seemed a clear and present threat to either Xi or Carrie Lam, the territory’s chief executive. Zen’s quiet presence at various protests big and small was just part of the rich fabric of Hong Kong’s civil society before it was torn to pieces by the national security law.
The occasion for Zen’s FCC talk was the 20th anniversary of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, which ended weeks of mass protests in the centre of Beijing for a freer political environment in China. Zen, who argued that religious freedoms can only be guaranteed in free societies, was a regular attendee at Hong Kong’s annual candlelit vigil for the victims of Tiananmen. The vigil was the only open remembrance of the tragedy on Chinese soil, until it was banned in 2020.
At the talk, Zen spoke about the biblical Book of Tobit, also known as the Book of Tobias. Despite going to a Catholic high school and 18 years of parentally enforced attendance at mass, I had never heard of Tobit — a virtuous Job-like character who endures hardships he didn’t deserve.
Tobit, according to the book, gave “bread to the hungry and clothing to the naked”. He also buried corpses that had been ignored and left out to rot by others, and it was this act of piety that Zen focused on.
As someone whose studies and work have revolved around China for more than 30 years, I have seen so many pictures and videos of the bloodshed at Tiananmen that even the most gruesome of them hardly faze me. The bodies of many of the dead from that fateful night were stacked like cordwood at hospitals and morgues, and disposed of hastily. For most, there was no Tobit on hand to clean and mourn them.
Zen’s point, as I understood it, was that remembering the victims of Tiananmen every year was a way of righting this wrong — of paying them a respect they were not paid on the night they died.
It says a lot about Zen that he should be able to see a tragedy of such magnitude — a defining event of modern Chinese history — in such stark and simple terms.
Audrey Donnithorne, a Hong Kong-based Sinologist and expert on the Catholic Church in China who passed away in 2020, once told me that while Zen may have risen to a grand rank in the church, he was at heart “a parish priest” focused on the pastoral care of his flock.
As Donnithorne aged and it became difficult for her to get about, Zen would go to her home to check on her. Every week he pays many such visits to the poor, the sick and the imprisoned.
The case against Zen comes under the purview of Hong Kong’s Committee for Safeguarding National Security, which is nominally headed by Lam but in reality controlled by Xi’s representative in the territory, Luo Huining.
Compared to their 90-year-old nemesis, Xi, Luo and Lam have not had nearly as much meaningful contact with the people they purport to serve. But they are still sure they know what is best for the masses, including rigged elections for puppet legislatures and chief executives.
Such arrogance, which Zen can see straight through, is one of the reasons he is not afraid of the Chinese Communist party — or the fate that now awaits him in court.
