No Going Back Part 3: Who is Simon Cheng?

Brendan Duggan
6 min readApr 12, 2021

Simon is not a likely whistleblower, nor is he your average revolutionary. He was a young and successful trade and investment officer for the British consulate in Hong Kong until last year when he taken into custody by the Chinese Secret Police where, he claims, he was tortured. Upon release he decided to flee Hong Kong. Now it was time to speak.

If you Google ‘Simon Cheng Man-Kit’, you’ll find photos of a 29 years old, in a raffish suit with short, boyish dark hair and glasses. Back then the young business executive travelled the world and stayed at expensive hotels.

Speaking today, from his London flat, Simon recounts his experience growing up in Hong Kong, protesting for democracy, his time in custody and his escape to Britain.

Before his arrest, he lived with his parents and even had a girlfriend whom he met when studying in Taiwan. He describes himself as rebellious from a young age with an interest in politics.

Simon’s father had come to Hong Kong from mainland China in the 1970s during the cultural revolution. At the time the British government in Hong Kong needed cheap labour. Doing so his father earned a British Overseas Passport (BNO).

50 years later, Simon would use his inherited BNO to escape Hong Kong with his life, becoming the first Hong Kong asylum seeker in the UK since the beginning of the “Umbrella Movement.”

Despite his job, Simon never forgot his grassroots beginnings, growing up in a poor family in a society he described as unequal and built on “elitism”.

Nearly every Hong Konger I have spoken to has described growing up in Hong Kong as “stressful” that most Hong Kongers were selfish and avaricious.

The pressure to climb up a social and economic ladder was a reflection of the gap between poor and rich in Hong Kong: “I’ve been pushed, you know, to achieve a higher score,” Simon told me.

According to Government statistics released in 2017, the Hong Kong wealth gap widened to a historic degree with the richest household earning 44 times more than the poorest.

Then, in 2019, over a million Hong Kongers took to the streets to protest against legislation that would look to break the “two countries, one-system” relationship, giving China more control over the former British colony. The protests lasted all summer.

Here, Simon saw other young people from different classes and backgrounds, wearing masks and hard hats, helping each other up, applying first aid and fighting for something together. It made him realise a new side of Hong Kong.

“Those people they love values. So I even feel that the impression of Hong Kong’s people could be changed because those people going onto the street for the protest are not selfish.”

Simon took part in several marches and protests over the course of that summer. Simon did confirm that his bosses at the UK Embassy had asked him to monitor the protests, which would later be used against him. But, according to Simon, he volunteered just so he could attend the protest and support the movement.

A few weeks later, Simon travelled over the border into China for a business trip. While there he also took time out to meet the family of a Chinese student who had been arrested in Hong Kong. The family gave him money and asked for help in getting their son back home.

Simon agreed but he wouldn’t make it back to Hong Kong to complete that favour.

At the Chinese border, the passport scanner suddenly stopped functioning. As the border staff examined what the problem was, Simon had a feeling something wasn’t right: “So I start to delete all the sensitive conversations on my phone,” including information about the Chinese family he was helping. Simon’s anxiety rose as he was taken into a police car and driven back into Shenzhen.

“I have no choice but to follow them. I try to calm myself down,” he remembers. The police told him not to worry, that he was being taken to a place with a ‘sunshine judiciary’, meaning it would be in the public.

Simon was then handed over to plainclothes officers: “I know the plainclothes officers definitely know what’s actually going on. I start to be very frightened”

The plainclothes officers were less polite, they strapped Simon to a ‘tiger chair’, designed to force the body into a difficult and aggravating position. They asked him questions about the consulate and his role in the protests.

What scared Simon the most scared was being charged with a political crime. In China, there is no telling how many years could be detained under a political crime. So when they wanted to charge him with soliciting prostitution, possibly because it would allow them to keep him detained whilst also damaging his reputation, Simon saw his chance.

“If you’re not cooperative, to confess that, then you may never ever get a chance to get let out.”

Simon was taken to a detention centre. There he met other Hong Kong protesters. Within the walls of the detention centre, they formed a small community, trading information and asking each other the same favour, ‘if you get out contact this number. Tell them, I’m safe.’

In the detention centre, Simon claims he was taken from his cell every day with a bag over his head to what he would come to call the “secret place” as he was sure only a handful of people in the world knew it existed. And with his family back in Hong Kong filling out a missing persons report, it felt to him that only a handful knew he was still alive.

As his arms were lifted by handcuffs to the ceiling, he cried out: “I’ll confess whatever you want.”

They shouted at him, beat him and let him hang there for hours in a tortuous position. This lasted five days. When Simon returned to the detention centre, a doctor would inspect him.

“When I get back to the detention centre, I can’t even walk,” Simon told me. The doctor would examine his injuries and sigh.

The other detainees avoided Simon now as it was likely they were threatened. He was completely alone.

“I wait for another day for another round of torture interrogations again, so that I’m always in and out of the detention centre to the secret place for torture.”

Simon also said that they tried to turn him against the democracy movement. “When I am facing State Security Police, they’re so surprised. ‘why, with your career, why would you join a protest?’ What they even told me was, ‘those protesters we detained? They’re all scum. At the bottom of society, they have nothing to lose.’” To them, Simon was as unlikely a protester, as he was a whistleblower.

By now, Simon’s disappearance surfaced in the media. A wave of support bolstered by his family, friends and other protesters demanded his release.

On the August 21, nearly two weeks after he was detained, Chinese authorities were forced to acknowledge his arrest for the first time. They released him shortly afterwards but not before they made him confess on camera to charges of soliciting prostitutes. In his confession tape, Simon looks tired and says he was at “breaking point”.

Simon returned to Hong Kong, and after he was reunited with his girlfriend he met with the consulate and asked for a way out to the UK. When he was out of Hong Kong he spoke to The Guardian about his treatment for the very first time.

It has been a year now since he fled Hong Kong and four months since the home office granted him asylum.

Now he is co-founder of “Hong Kongers In Britain”, a project that aims to provide support and build a support network in Britain for Hong Kongers. It works as both a sanctuary and a way of protesting outside of Hong Kong.

“I always remind those if they come to the UK, never ever forget why you come here.”

Simon still has hopes of going home. Like any whistleblower, he did what he did for the love of his country and the people in it. But with China’s ever-growing reach across the world both political and economical, this seems more and more unlikely. I put to Simon, the reality that he may never return.

“I’m an activist, so there is no end of hope for the betterment of human society. I believe there will be a day that democracy will come to China.”

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