31 January 2023 – The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong (CFHK) Foundation co-signed a letter with 53 NGOs calling on US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to focus on human rights and political prisoners during his upcoming visit to China. Blinken is the first Secretary of State to visit China since October 2018. He plans to meet his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Qin Gang amidst an apparent warming of ties between Washington and Beijing.
As the US State Department works with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to finalize Blinken’s agenda, the CFHK Foundation urges Blinken to focus on the unjust detention and persecution of activists, political dissidents, religious practitioners, and ethnic minorities. In Hong Kong, the US should continue to speak out against the arrest on National Security Law charges of 47 pro-democracy politicians and media tycoon Jimmy Lai, among other political prisoners.
The CFHK Foundation calls for the immediate release of political prisoners and their families in Hong Kong and China. The CCP’s business as usual in Hong Kong and China has violated the basic civil liberties of millions of people. The free world must continue to speak out against the CCP’s blatant disregard of human rights.
The CFHK Foundation’s President, Mark Clifford, said:
“Secretary Blinken must continue to call out the Chinese Communist Party’s practice of holding political prisoners in Hong Kong and throughout mainland China. The United States should insist that the Chinese Communist Party improve the treatment of its own people – consistent with the Chinese constitution and its international promises – as the price of improving Sino-US ties. Every political prisoner represents a life that is stunted, a woman or man cut off from child or spouse. The Chinese gulag has spread across the country like a cancer, even extending to Hong Kong since the introduction of the 2020 National Security Law. Enough is enough. As Secretary Blinken visits China, he must not only shake hands with Foreign Minister Qin Gang but start shaking up the Chinese Communist Party’s ‘prisoner as usual’ approach."
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