A Family Is Divided by Hong Kong’s Pursuit of U.S.-Based Activist

HONG KONG—At dawn, officers from Hong Kong’s national-security police burst into the apartment of Derek Yuen and Eunice Yung, the son and daughter-in-law of a high-profile pro-democracy campaigner who criticizes China’s Communist Party from perches abroad.

The police seized a laptop and mobile phone in the raid last Monday and took Yuen and Yung, who is a pro-Beijing politician in the city’s legislature, to a police station for hours of questioning about the activities of their dissident relative before releasing them without charges, according to Yung.

Elmer Yuen, the 74-year-old U.S.-based activist who is the focus of the authorities’ ire, is one of eight overseas critics of China who are facing arrest warrants in Hong Kong after being accused of national-security crimes. He appeared at a news briefing in Washington last month and another in London on Tuesday, discussing his plans to form an unofficial government in exile.

Elmer Yuen, who shares his political commentary in lengthy videos posted online, said the authorities’ actions against his family members were intended to pressure him to speak out less and to halt his political efforts. 

“Of course I worry about my safety and that of my family, but our work has a goal, and a price must be paid,” he told The Wall Street Journal. He said he wouldn’t be deterred “even if they arrest my entire family.”

The family and the widely diverging politics of its members have been the subject of public discussion in Hong Kong in recent years. They appeared in a 2020 documentary aired by the city’s public broadcaster RTHK, and their story has resonated with many Hong Kongers in politically divided homes.

Yung is the vice chair of a major pro-Beijing political party. Her husband once joked that their daughters’ crayons at home were missing a yellow one—the color of the city’s pro-democracy movement—because his wife had removed it.

After Yung was questioned, she said she was cooperating fully with investigators and hoped her father-in-law and the other dissidents would be arrested soon. “If I know about his whereabouts, I will without a doubt disclose it,” she said.

Yung and her husband didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Hong Kong’s chief executive, John Lee, has encouraged friends and relatives of the wanted dissidents to share tips and said they were eligible, along with other members of the public, for a reward of about $128,000 for capture of each activist.

Authorities would “go to the ends of the earth” to hunt them down, he said.

Many overseas dissidents, often based in countries that have suspended their extradition agreements with Hong Kong over political concerns in recent years, have publicly distanced themselves from their families in the Chinese city.

When asked about Yuen’s family, police said they took away a man and two women last Monday, and another three people on Thursday, without naming them. All necessary measures would be taken to arrest those accused of endangering national security and cut off their financial support, police said.

Steve Li, a senior national-security police official, said the arrest warrants and the bounties are aimed at helping police prepare and gather evidence to prosecute dissidents if they return to Hong Kong.

The national-security law, imposed by Beijing in 2020, has been used to suppress dissent, with scores of opponents of Communist Party rule locked up, pro-democracy media outlets and groups forced to shut down and public protests effectively banned.

More than 100,000 people have left the city to move to the U.K. and dozens of activists and politicians have fled there and to other safe havens.

The U.S. and U.K. governments have criticized Hong Kong authorities for using the security law to pursue dissidents overseas. Beijing accused foreign countries of “harboring criminals.”

Years of political unrest have caused friction in many Hong Kong households. The divide in the Yuen family, a microcosm of Hong Kong’s political spectrum and one featured in the RTHK program, has become a chasm in the wake of the national-security law.

As views for or against Beijing’s tightening control over Hong Kong hardened in the years running up to massive 2019 pro-democracy protests and a subsequent crackdown, the family would meet up for special occasions.

After Yung’s 2018 marriage to Derek, Yung said she largely avoided discussing politics. “I’d sit aside, take care of the kids, bring out some tea,” she said in the documentary. “There’s a tacit understanding that if you don’t talk about it, I won’t, but if someone does, I’d no doubt speak up.”

The episode ran a few months after the security law took effect, and after Elmer Yuen had left the city. 

Derek Yuen, a scholar and newspaper columnist who considers himself on neither side of the political divide, said at the time it was a tragedy that his father, who didn’t get to spend much time with his grandchildren to begin with, may never return to Hong Kong.

The elder Yuen has doubled down on his activism abroad, lobbying politicians in Washington. Last year, he and other activists called for a sort of parliament-in-exile for Hong Kong, drawing condemnation from the city’s government.

Soon after that, his daughter-in-law Yung cut ties with him, taking out an ad in a newspaper to say she was “a Chinese person with the blood of the great motherland flowing through me.”

Three years since the documentary aired, the stakes are even higher. Anyone charged and found guilty of assisting the wanted activists faces lengthy jail terms.

Yung told a popular local radio program in early July that she had warned her husband about links to his father: “You need to be careful, with things like seeing him and money matters,” she said she told him.

Write to Elaine Yu at [email protected]