These activists are fighting against unfathomable odds. Beijing is willing to use conventional and unconventional tactics with ruthless eagerness to win. While most totalitarian state share this mentality, Beijing is an entirely different kettle of fish, They aren’t just a totalitarian state; they're a devious totalitarian state.

There is no better evidence of Beijing’s creativity than the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong. Unlike the mainland, Hong Kong is inhabited by people who are used to being free. The party’s insiders quickly realized that they couldn’t bring the Hong Kong population to heel with shock and awe. Worried about a popular uprising, they forged deals with the triads to maintain control of Hong Kong with a quid pro quo involving Shenzhen and access to the Chinese market;

> Easily, it turns out. Of all of the treacherous aspects of Hong Kong's reunification with China, the most treacherous--and the least noticed--is that it will seal what amounts to a cooperation pact between the triad societies and the Communist Party. This dreadful alliance, of the world's largest criminal underground and the world's last great totalitarian power, has received surprisingly little attention in this country, even though the U.S. Justice Department has identified triad racketeering as a significant global threat. Even more ominously, this alliance is not accidental. It was part of Deng Xiaoping's reunification plan for Hong Kong from the very beginning, and dates from the early 1980s, when China and Britain were negotiating the return of Hong Kong to the mainland in 1997.

> We know this because this past May, Wong Man-fong, the former deputy secretary-general of Xinhua, China's news agency in Hong Kong (which reputedly acts as a de facto embassy), admitted it during a forum at Hong Kong's Baptist University. Wong said that in the early 1980s, at Beijing's behest, he "befriended" Hong Kong's triad bosses and made them an offer they could not refuse: China would turn a blind eye to their illegal activities if they would promise to keep peace after the handover. "I told them that, if they did not disrupt Hong Kong's stability, we would not stop them from making money," Wong said. No one knows why Wong made this astounding disclosure about China's secret dealings with crime bosses, but there is even more to the story than he acknowledged...

- https://newrepublic.com/article/90738/partners-in-crime

The Chinese Communist Party and the triads are still in bed with one another and share the mutual passion of oppressing others;

> On Feb. 26, 2014, Kevin Lau, the former editor in chief of the Ming Pao daily and a vocal critic of Beijing, was stabbed in the back by two men who claimed they each had been paid $100,000 Hong Kong dollars to “teach Lau a lesson.”

> Later that same year, dozens of masked men physically attacked Occupy Central members and pro-democracy activists and tore down their tents. According to Hong Kong police, as many as 200 gang members from two major triad groups had “infiltrated the protest camps, possibly in order to stir up violence that would discredit demonstrators.”

> Although many suspected who was behind the repression — nobody else had the same motivation to act — the attacks were hard to directly trace back to Beijing. But the circumstantial evidence points strongly in the mainland’s direction. Though the former colony was now under Chinese control, the CCP still needed to exercise some restraint in the use of force against elements in Hong Kong it deemed undesirable. Beijing knew full well that unleashing the People’s Liberation Army or riot police would be too direct an intervention into the affairs of a region that, technically, had retained the right to run its own affairs. Direct assault by the state apparatus would have been counterproductive and likely would have alienated a larger number of Hong Kong residents. Pro-Beijing thugs were easily manipulated, had no compunction in using force, and, more importantly, offered plausible deniability.

- https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/18/nice-democracy-youve-go...

There are rumors that a large stake in Deng's pet project, Shenzhen, was given over to the triads in exchange for their cooperation in Hong Kong. Between this, Chinese social experiments and the deep tech feel of the city, Shenzhen seems to be something straight out of a Gibson-esque cyberpunk dystopia with a healthy helping of shadowy violence on top.

The odds are against those who fight this power. They deserve and need every bit of help that they can get. Back in the 80s, after the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Hong Kong community worked with the CIA, a few smugglers and gangs and MI6 to smuggle wanted dissidents out of China to freedom. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yellowbird Maybe we need more of the same?