Hong Kong unionists pleaded not guilty to publishing “seditious” material as a five-day trial began on illustrated children’s books.
The case revolves around a series of books published by the now-defunct General Union of Hong Kong Speech Therapists that included sheep and cartoon wolves, which prosecutors said were analogies to residents of Hong Kong and the mainland Chinese who were meant to “incite hatred” towards the latter.
On the first day of the trial on Tuesday, prosecutor Laura Ng said the books characterized the two groups as hostile to each other.
“Hong Kong residents are vulnerable minorities, Chinese rulers are cold-blooded, totalitarian and brutal, and mainland China is thugs,” Ng said.
The alleged Ng defendants openly admitted that they based these books on the political unrest and street protests that began in 2019 on a contentious draft on extradition.
One of the books, entitled The 12 Warriors of Sheep Village, was linked by the prosecutor to the capture of 12 fugitives from Hong Kong by Chinese authorities in 2020.
She alleged that one of the books called for Hong Kong residents to take up arms and use violence against the authorities, while another called for foreign interference in the territory’s judicial process.
The third book has been blamed on mainland China for the Covid pandemic, portraying them as “selfish, uncivilized and unhygienic”, which could incite separatist sentiments among Hong Kong residents, he said. Ng.
The unionists were arrested by the national security police in July last year and have been in custody ever since, with applications for bail denied.
The defendants, two men and three 20-year-old women, were members of the union’s executive committee.
They face the charge of “conspiracy to print, publish, distribute, display and / or reproduce seditious publications” under the colonial-era crime ordinance, with a maximum sentence of two years in prison.
