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СпутникиРНSpaceXРоскосмосNASAAfter 2019, Taiwan saw an influx of political refugees from Hong Kong. But even self-exile didn't guarantee safety.
On the morning of February 4, 2026, Henry Tong Wai-hung was woken at 5.30 a.m. by an unexpected phone call. “It was the police,” he said. “They told me there had been another attack.”
Arriving at the building where his Muay Thai studio is located in Taipei’s Shilin District, the native Hong Konger – who goes by the nickname Fu Tong – saw a familiar sight: red paint splattered across the front door.
In Hong Kong, red paint has been used by triad debt collectors to indicate the intended target owes money. This incident followed similar vandalism in November 2025.
This time, there was an additional touch: leaflets strewn across the floor, featuring accusations that Fu Tong had absconded. “You bastard,” read the text on one, overlaid across a photo of Fu Tong. “Pay back your debt. Don’t think you can flee to Taiwan to avoid settling the score.”
These baseless accusations that Fu Tong is mixed up with Hong Kong’s triads are part of a broader transnational repression campaign against Hong Kong dissidents in Taiwan – and around the world.
Hong Kongers began arriving in Taiwan in 2019 as political refugees. This exodus followed the crackdown against protesters involved in the anti-extradition bill movement demonstrations of 2019 to 2020 and the resulting National Security Law (NSL) imposed by Beijing. Since then around 50,000 Hong Kongers have arrived in Taiwan.
Two weeks before Fu Tong’s business was vandalized, a dual Hong Kong-Taiwan national suspected of carrying out the previous paint-chucking act had been detained for questioning at the Shilin Prosecutor’s Office after attempting to re-enter Taiwan.
Captured on CCTV, the prior incident had occurred on November 20, 2025 – just three days after Hong Kong’s authorities had issued an arrest warrant against Fu Tong on charges of subversion under the NSL, for his activism in Taiwan. Several prominent Taiwan-based Hong Kongers have been charged with similar offenses. Members of the Taiwan-based Hong Kong Democratic Independence Union were arrested in Hong Kong last year, including a 16-year-old who was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison in December.
The detained individual denied any involvement in the November paint attack. He was released and allowed to return to Hong Kong, with a requirement to present to police in Taiwan on February 5 – the day after the second incident. A female alleged accomplice was also summoned. On the eve of the appointment, they contacted the prosector’s office to say illness prevented them attending.
The pair had arrived at Fu Tong’s gym the day before the first attack and inquired about Muay Thai courses. It’s now suspected that they were aiming to case the premises ahead of the attack the following morning.
“Either that or they were hoping no one was there, so they could damage the gym,” said Fu Tong.
The acts of vandalism were not the first instances of apparent transnational repression that Fu Tong has faced in Taiwan. In October 2024, a pair of Chinese “tourists” confronted Fu Tong and other activists at a protest event in Taipei’s bustling Ximending neighborhood. They shoved demonstrators and grabbed banners, declaring that Hong Kong and Taiwan belonged to China. In a relatively rare response from Taiwan’s immigration authorities, the couple had their entry permits revoked and were deported two days later.
For activists, civil society organizations (CSOs), and government-affiliated agencies, these incidents suggest a concerning change in approach by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“What is significant is the different tactics,” said Hsiao I-min, deputy executive manager of the Association for Victim Support, a quasi-governmental organization established by Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice. “Previously, these actions were by paid gangsters or pro-China, United Front figures. Now, they send so-called tourists directly from Hong Kong or China.”
Tracing this evolving approach, Hsiao gave examples of early transnational repression cases, starting with Hong Kong-born Canadian singer Denise Ho, who had paint flung over her during a 2019 pro-democracy rally in Taipei. The culprit was a member of the fringe Chinese Unification Promotion Party, headed by the notorious organized crime figure Chang An-lo, known as the White Wolf.
In April 2020, bookseller Lam Wing-kee – perhaps the most famous refugee Hong Konger in Taiwan – was targeted while sitting at a café in Taipei’s Zhongshan District. The attack came days before the reopening of his Causeway Bay Books store. Again, the modus operandi involved red paint, and, while no concrete evidence of United Front links emerged, the attackers cited Lam’s pro-democracy leanings as motivation.
In 2015, Lam, whose bookstore sold works criticizing the CCP, had been abducted at the border between Hong Kong and China’s Shenzhen Province. He was held in China for eight months, then released after a scripted “confession” on Chinese state television. Forced to close this store and facing constant surveillance and pressure from the authorities, Lam left for Taiwan in 2019. He has frequently warned of the threat to exiled Hong Kongers and Taiwanese society from Beijing’s transnational repression.
Taiwan started to take such threats seriously under former President Tsai Ing-wen. An early sign was the imposition of longer sentences in the Lam case following a high court appeal. “This was a landmark ruling where the court recognized the attack as an infringement on freedom of speech,” said Hsiao. “Hence the stiffer penalties.”
A third high-profile case occurred in November 2020 at the Aegis, a protest-themed restaurant run by Hong Kongers, when assailants dumped chicken manure on kitchen counters and on staff. Under questioning, the three perpetrators said they had been paid by a Chinese national to carry out the attack.
“These were thugs for hire,” said Hsiao. “And the aim was to close down the business.”
The apparent shift in strategy could be a response to a tougher stance on transnational repression from President Lai Ching-te’s administration, said Hsiao. “First, the Lai government has tightened control of capital flows from China,” he noted. This has made it harder for the CCP to funnel funds to United Front groups. “They’re also prosecuting, suing, and raising the social cost for these actions,” Hsiao added.
In terms of addressing the ongoing threats, Hsiao said the authorities have ramped up counter-surveillance measures and offered around-the-clock monitoring for the most at-risk Hong Kongers. This was confirmed by Fu Tong and others, though many still feel the police are not up to speed.
Speaking at an ad hoc press conference outside Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan on February 5, the day after the second attack, Fu Tong’s wife Elaine To said the police had not inspired confidence in their handling of the crime scene.
“They told us we could clean up the mess [including the leaflets featuring the debt demands],” said To. “The next day, another officer came and realized they hadn’t done a good job. He had to ask us for photos of the scene.”
While some observers suspect a top-down adjustment from the CCP is behind the changing transnational repression tactics, others question how much direct control Beijing is exerting in these operations.
“These actions may have crossed the line of what CCP bosses want,” said Eric Poon Tin-wai, a Hong Kong-born lawyer and political commentator, better known by the moniker Sang-pu. “Doing this stuff under transparent sunlight is not good from a management point of view,” added Sang-pu, who heads the Taiwan-Hong Kong Association.
Speaking to The Diplomat at an event in Taipei’s historic Dadaocheng district to mark the 185th anniversary of Hong Kong’s founding as a free port (known as Hong Kong Day or the Festival of Hong Kong), Sang-pu linked his presence in Taiwan to the waves of CCP repression – and migration – that have marked his family’s history.
“My grandfather had been persecuted by the CCP in Guangzhou,” he said. “At first, he welcomed the Communists, but he soon smelled something was wrong.”
His property and business was absorbed by the state under the Joint State-Private Ownership model of the mid-1950s. The grandfather sent his family to Hong Kong, then under British rule. The plan was for him to follow once he had tied up loose ends. “He never made it,” said Sang-pu.
Based on this experience, Sang-pu’s father intuitively distrusted the CCP as the 1997 handover of Hong Kong loomed, despite the party’s pledges under the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, which guaranteed various freedoms and the separation of state powers. Sang-pu was sent to Taiwan for university ahead of the handover. His father – a retired civil servant – joined him shortly after.
Having graduated from National Taiwan University’s College of Law in 1997, Sang-pu later returned to Hong Kong. He maintained dual nationality, and – following the passage of the NSL in 2020 – he resettled permanently in Taiwan, founding the Taiwan-Hong Kong Association that same year. The association assists Hong Kongers with various aspects of settling in Taiwan, including university fees, health care costs, and applying for citizenship.
Working as a human rights lawyer and political commentator, Sang-pu also hosts a Cantonese-language program on Radio Taiwan International, focused on Hong Kong and Taiwan.
He is unsure how coordinated the CCP’s transnational repression operations in Taiwan are. “In many cases, I think they are just trying to hit KPI [Key Performance Indicators] for the bosses and don’t really care about the results,” he said.
While he suspects the brazenness of recent incidents reveals a more “autonomous,” devolved approach, Sang-pu believes it will take time and scrutiny to confirm whether these are exceptions or the emergence of a new rule.
“If it stops here, then perhaps they don’t really mean it,” he said. “But if the pattern repeats, it could be concerted.” Either way, Taiwan’s authorities “need to keep an eye on this.”
This is what they appear to have been doing since President Lai Ching-te took power in May 2024. His administration’s approach is helping to restore a sense of trust, which had been missing during the initial phases of asylum claims.
“I think the Lai government has been stepping up on this,” said Sang-pu. “The response to Fu Tong’s case showed this.”
Kacey Wong, an artist and activist who helped organize the Hong Kong Day event with Fu Tong, agreed. “Taiwan has been going through a renaissance since the first influx of political refugees arrived,” said Wong, a prominent activist since the 2014 Umbrella Movement against reforms to Hong Kong’s electoral system. “I’ve been an accidental witness and beneficiary to this change of mentality.”
Early arrivals were treated with a lack of understanding and even suspicion, which was understandable because of Taiwan’s historical circumstances, said Wong. He believes the generational trauma of the White Terror – Taiwan’s own experience of “top-down terrorism” – and the collective memory of repression among Taiwanese became “almost like heritage passed down without much thinking.”
This has led some to “bury their heads in the sand” when it comes to unfamiliar political issues. Taiwan’s complex politics have also made dissident Hong Kongers a target for ethnonationalists among the Kuomintang (KMT) faithful.
“The greatest disappointment for these [Hong Kong] street fighters, sacrificing their lives, freedom, and home, was coming to join a resistance in Taiwan and realizing people didn’t want to fight,” he said. “Not only that, to some, we were almost like traitors, which was a shock.”
Guiding visitors around the exhibition he helped curate for Hong Kong Day – which includes the colonial flag, civil service rank insignia from the handover period, and a sculpture featuring a British National Overseas passport – Wong emphasized that activists’ reclaiming of symbols and anthems from the British era has seen them branded hanjian (traitors to the “Chinese” ethnicity.)
“They accuse us of being slaves to British imperialism, but they don’t understand that we have our own unique history,” he said. He gestured to a series of panels along the wall detailing key events from Hong Kong’s past.
The sunset days of British rule, which Wong admitted are sometimes remembered too rosily “compared to the hell we have now,” were further represented at the exhibition in the person of Lim Wing-tat, visiting from the United Kingdom, where he now resides.
A former chairman of the Democratic Party, which was established ahead of the 1995 Legislative Council (LegCo) election – the first and only fully elected legislative poll of the colonial era – Lee has the distinction of having challenged the rule of both Britain and, following the handover, Beijing. At one time, he was himself accused by the DP’s radical faction of being a CCP stooge.
While Lee retired from active politics in 2012 at the end his term as a lawmaker in the LegCo, the DP remained the main opposition in Hong Kong. Beijing’s passage of the controversial 2021 Hong Kong electoral “reforms” led to its dissolution last year.
Reflecting on recent developments and conversations with the Hong Kong diasporic community, Lee said there are good impressions of Taiwan. “There’s a positive change about the administration, how they deal with the diasporic community,” he explained. “Although they must still seek the security of the country, they have slowly built trust through cooperation.”
Tangled up with the pro-China, ethnonationalist sentiment have been legitimate fears of CCP infiltration, Wong acknowledged.
“Of course, they had doubts about identity swap to send in intruders, jeopardizing national security” he said. “And they had to make sure when opening the door through investment channels that these people weren’t fake.”
Perceived attempts to game the system – branded “fake investment, real immigration” in media reports – in the early days of asylum claims stoked concerns over an influx of undesirables. However, such cases revealed little evidence of CCP involvement.
In a 2024 article on the evolution and limitations of Taiwan’s asylum procedures for Hong Kongers after 2019, Candia Tong and Chiang Min-yen noted that some investment immigrants were rejected as “harmful to national interests” or “likely to engage in terrorist activities.”
For Tong, who has lived in Taiwan for 15 years, the trust issue has moved from the sphere of asylum claims to threats to political refugees.
As her article noted, following then-President Tsai’s pledge to welcome asylum seekers ahead of her 2020 re-election, the absence of a mechanism for processing applications left many Hong Kongers disillusioned. For the first two years, CSOs plugged the gap.
“The government didn’t really know what to do at the beginning and civil society had to push them,” she said. “All three sides – asylum seekers, CSOs, and government – had to learn to engage with each other.”
Until recently, there was little understanding of transnational repression, said Tong. She cited a 2024 visit to the Mainland Affairs Council – the body overseeing relations with China – which she attended with representatives from Amnesty International Taiwan, following the publication of an Amnesty report on transnational repression of Chinese and Hong Kong students.
The MAC representatives, said Tong, seemed to view transnational repression as a problem for Western democracies, rather than an imminent threat for Taiwan. Her own experiences, which include break-ins at her home and office and e-mail hacks, gave her the sense that the authorities treat such cases as personal disputes within the Hong Kong community: “It’s our problem, our issue, rather than an issue for Taiwanese society.”
Yet Tong sees signs of a changing mindset. “I do think government officials are now treating this as a threat to national security and Taiwan’s sovereignty,” she said.
Key to tackling transnational repression in Taiwan will be legal reform or at least a wider application of extant laws. In the case of the paint attacks against Fu Tong’s gym, the offense of damage to property was insufficiently grave under Taiwan’s criminal code to warrant extended detention. This meant the dual-national suspect in the first incident had to be released, allowing him to leave the country.
Hsiao said such crimes should be reclassified. “From a legal standpoint, this isn’t just harassment, because the attack happened at a public entrance and transport hub, so it endangers public safety,” he argued.
It can thus be viewed as a violation of Article 151 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of China, covering fear of injury to the public, and Article 6 of the Anti-Infiltration Act, which defines interference by foreign hostile forces. Legislators have previously called for amendments to link these provisions. “This is a clear act of intimidation against Taiwanese society, not just one individual,” said Hsiao.
Monitoring and reporting mechanisms should be a component of the government’s response, say human rights groups, as should the regular publication of statistical data on transnational repression cases.
“We also recommend the strengthening of inter-agency cooperation and the establishment of relief channels and survivor-centered support programs for victims,” said Teo Zhong-cze, deputy director of Amnesty International Taiwan. He was speaking at the February 5 press conference outside the legislature, alongside Fu Tong and other activists. “Raising public awareness that [transnational repression] constitutes a human rights violation is also vital.”
From outside Taiwan, long-time trackers of China’s transnational repression see encouraging signs but more work to be done.
“Having discussed these incidents with political figures, and civil society, during a visit to Taiwan in November, I know they are uppermost in the minds of the public officials I met,” said Benedict Rogers, cofounder of Hong Kong Watch and the U.K. Conservative Party’s human rights commission. “That said, I would urge Taiwan to intensify its efforts to safeguard its freedom and security. Likewise, democracies worldwide should coordinate with Taiwan to more effectively counter transnational repression.”
Any changes may be too late for Fu Tong, whose livelihood is at stake. His landlord had been supportive, but – following complaints from the building’s residents, who mentioned the alleged debt – he is facing eviction. “I’ve closed temporarily while looking for another place, but I hope he can give me more time,” he said.
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