Rahul Jacob

May 10, 2001

By Rahul Jacob

Falun Gong practitioner Li Shao had a premonition that he might be deported when he landed in Hong Kong on a Virgin Airlines flight from London on Monday.

Just before he left, the University of Nottingham architecture professor downloaded the phone number of the British Consulate in Hong Kong just in case he needed help. It was a wise precaution but it did not do him much good.

Mr Shao, 37, was not allowed to call the consulate by Hong Kong immigration authorities until it was well after office hours. He and his wife arrived at a little past 5pm on Monday evening but the couple were pulled out of an immigration queue at Chek Lap Kok airport minutes after they had presented their passports for inspection.

Mr Shao says that he was puzzled that Hong Kong authorities were immediately able to identify him and his wife as Falun Gong practitioners merely by looking at the names on their passports. He believes this shows the local government, which denied entry to close to 100 Falun Gong members in the days leading up to Chinese President Jiang Zemin's arrival in the city, were working with a list of the names of practitioners.

"They were operating from a blacklist. The Falun Gong has public web sites where my name is available as a contact person for (Falun Gong) classes," says Mr Shao. He alleges that the Hong Kong authorities could only have received this list from Beijing because his wife, Jane Liang, has never been identified on the spiritual group's sites.

Despite being sequestered separately from his wife for a couple of hours and having been subjected to a body and luggage search, Mr Shao has mostly good things to say about the immigration officials he encountered in Hong Kong. When he protested he was being unfairly deported on the grounds of being a "security risk" that should be reserved for terrorists and criminals, the officers said they sympathized.

After being allowed a couple of phone calls, he and his wife were frog-marched back to a 10pm flight bound for London surrounded by four officers. On Tuesday, both the US and UK consulates protested against the arbitrary denial of entry to Hong Kong of their citizens. His short visit to Hong Kong had escalated into a minor diplomatic incident.