Giving the Closing address at this year’s 3-day Hong Kong Symposium David Alton (Lord Alton of Liverpool) thanked Finn Lau, the Chair of the Symposium and the Steering committee for organising such a well attended and successful event.
Lord Alton described the British Hongkongers as “the advance guard” in the battle of ideas between the world’s dictatorship and the world’s democracies. He said that, in telling their story about the destruction of Hong Kong’s democracy, this advance corps would wake up a sleeping world to the dangers presented by the Chinese Communist Party.
He said that “the threatening alliance of China, Russia, North Korea and Iran presented the world with the most dangerous, menacing and unpredictable circumstances since 1939.”
He expressed support for home fee status for Hong Kong students; criticised “business as usual” trade focused visits by Ministers, the failure to reduce dependency on China trade and insufficient efforts to promote UK resilience in the face of CCP threats to destabilise the world economy by an invasion of Taiwan.
He criticised the new Article 23 Security Law “which intensified the threat to every human right” and he referred to China’s disregard for the 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. He raised the cases of Jimmy Lai, the 1700 Hong Kong pro democracy prisoners and “Zheng Zhan – who continues to be in prison in Wuhan for asking the right questions about the origins of Covid.”
He referred to the suppression of Tibetan Buddhists, the genocide of Uyghur Muslims and the persecution of religious believers, including Falun Gong and Christians.
David Alton called on participants to get involved “become an activist” saying that at future events he hoped he would meet British Hong Kongers who had been chosen as candidates and elected as councillors and MPs.
