A Hong Kong man has been sentenced to five months in jail after being found guilty of inciting others to wound the city’s police chief.
Wearing an orange down jacket, Chau Kin-kwok appeared at District Court on Wednesday. He was convicted two weeks ago over Facebook comments made in 2020 that suggested people “charge the police headquarters” and referred to the Chinese Communist Party as “tyrants,” and has been in remand since.
Before judge Clement Lee delivered the sentence, Chau’s lawyer said he hoped the court could consider handing down a community service order.
Reading out the reasons for sentencing, Lee said the 53-year-old had written the comments on social media, on which posts can spread quickly and reach a wide audience. But he noted that the comments were deleted within 36 hours. The posting of such comments was also an isolated incident, and Chau was not famous, the judge added.
Lee handed Chau a starting sentence of six months. Considering that he was cooperative throughout the investigation, had no criminal record and had a low chance of reoffending, the judge reduced his sentence by one month, arriving at a five-month jail term.
Chau represented himself during trial last month, telling the court that he wrote the comments out of anger. When Lee delivered the guilty verdict, he said he did not agree with the defence’s “attempt to downplay the inflammatory nature of the comments by saying they were made recklessly.”
Lee added that if Chau had wanted to express his anger, he could have done so privately, such as in a messaging group with friends, instead of in a public setting.
“Anyone who was mentally sound would have been restrained, and would have thought twice before hitting the ‘enter’ key,” Lee said.
‘Violence against violence’
Chau’s case relates to two comments in Chinese that Chau made on Facebook in response to a post about the arrest of media mogul Jimmy Lai just over three years ago.
One read: “If we could gather tens of thousands of people to charge the police headquarters and stab Chris Tang and other senior officers, they wouldn’t be so arrogant anymore. The only method is to use violence against violence.” Currently Hong Kong’s security chief, Tang was at the time the city’s police commissioner.
In the other comment, Chau wrote: “Hong Kong people are too gentle. It is impossible to deal with tyranny via peaceful means, especially the Chinese Communist Party.”
Both comments were left on a December 2, 2020, Facebook post made by ex-lawmaker Lam Cheuk-ting.
In interviews with police before the trial, Chau said that he believed that the charges laid against Lai were a form of political persecution and that he was not happy with the state of Hong Kong. He also said he thought Tang was carrying out then-chief executive Carrie Lam’s “dirty work,” and that other senior officers were “bad people.”
The Hong Kong public’s relations with the police force worsened sharply in 2019, with officers accused of using excessive force to handle the protests and unrest sparked by a controversial extradition bill.
The demonstrations dried up amid Covid-19 and Beijing’s imposition of a national security law, which criminalised secession, subversion, foreign collusion and terrorism. Offenders face up to life in prison if convicted.
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