The first escalation came through her neighbors' letterboxes. Anonymous letters carrying Carmen Lau (劉珈汶)'s personal details, urging whoever read them to deliver her to the Chinese embassy and collect the bounty on her head. The second batch, late last year, contained something else: sexually explicit images of her, generated by AI.
"As far as I know, this was the first time it happened to an activist in the Hong Kong community," Lau told Storm Media in late July. Chinese women dissidents had been targeted with deepfake pornography before, she said; her reading is that the tactics are sorted by community and by gender, and that this particular one is aimed almost entirely at women.
Lau, a former Hong Kong district councillor elected during the 2019 protest movement, fled to Britain in 2021 and has lived under a HK$1 million national security bounty since Christmas Eve 2024. What she wanted to talk about was not the tactics themselves, which are by now well documented, but what living inside them does to a person — and why people in her position so rarely say so.
What the campaign looks like when it moves online
After her address first circulated, Lau moved repeatedly. She has tightened her data security and no longer has a settled home.
"I keep moving, so it's probably harder for them to harass me in the physical world or find where I live," she said. "So now most of the harassment is online." Phishing attempts arrive in volume — "almost every day there's a huge amount of phishing email, pretending to be Meta, pretending to be other companies, trying to get my information." Her email account came close to being forcibly breached, after which she paid for stronger protection. The wall keeps having to be built higher.
The abuse that outsiders assume is the worst of it barely registers with her now. Troll comments, insults, coordinated pile-ons: "That kind of thing doesn't really affect me any more." She was a district councillor in Hong Kong; she has been receiving that for years.
What has not become routine is the vigilance. She rarely goes out. Her current home has CCTV and a domestic security system, and it makes less difference than it should. "When I hear a car passing outside, or hear someone approaching, I'm on alert," she said. "The mental strain is quite heavy."
She has also come to dread her phone. Calls and message alerts have become a source of stress in themselves — even the vibration. Her phone sits permanently on Do Not Disturb.
Why activists don't talk about the psychological cost
When the conversation turned to mental health, Lau hesitated, and then explained the hesitation.
"People who are more active in the democracy movement don't really want to talk about the psychological harm transnational repression causes," she said, "because it makes people think the repression is working. Talking about it looks like showing weakness. So a lot of the time we just don't discuss it. And then when you don't, people think — oh, you're so strong, you're so brave. But there are emotions and psychological pressures you actually have no way of discharging."
Then she set the calculation aside.
"I'm saying it now, and I don't think that's weakness," she said. It is something that has to be faced, and something to be resisted. "I have to deal with it seriously, so that I can keep going with day-to-day work and with the advocacy I'm doing now."
She has sought help, including medical care. Reading is the other thing that steadies her — partly for itself, partly as a substitute. "Getting into the world of the written word lets me detach from real life," she said, and it keeps her off social platforms, where she has cut back sharply. On X in particular, she said, there are so many coordinated accounts that you cannot tell whether a real person is behind a post.
The pressure is not confined to people with bounties on them, she noted. Organizers of ordinary Hong Kong community events — not rallies or protests, just events — worry about who might turn up to disrupt them.
Isolation as the objective, not the side effect
Lau argues that removing people from the movement does not require arresting them.
Beijing's aim, as she reads it, is not only to bring wanted exiles back to China but to leave those it cannot reach with less influence in the diaspora and less capacity to organize. The second half of that is achieved through everyone else. "They also want other people in the community to stay away from us, because they're afraid too," she said. Many have family in Hong Kong or expect to travel back, so they avoid contact.
Her account of the effect is measured rather than bleak. Immediately after the bounty was announced, some people told her privately that they supported her but could not attend her events because of relatives at home. Over time, she said, the community has largely adapted to the fear, and she sees less hesitation now than she did. It is at the personal level that the damage persists — the ordinary business of building a social network.
She was also careful to register the other side of it: there are a lot of people in the community who support one another, and on that count, she said, she is doing all right.
Why a stranger offering friendship is a security question
Lau's caution about new people is not abstract. It rests on a case that concluded in a London courtroom in June.
On June 18 at the Old Bailey, Mrs Justice Bobbie Cheema-Grubb sentenced two Chinese-British nationals for assisting a foreign intelligence service — the first convictions of their kind in Britain. Bill Yuen Chung-biu (袁松彪), 66, a retired Hong Kong police superintendent who worked as office manager at Hong Kong's Economic and Trade Office in London, received eight years. Peter Wai Chi-leung (衛志樑), 41, a security company operator and former UK Border Force officer who had previously served with the Metropolitan Police, received 10 years, having also been convicted of misconduct in public office for using a Home Office immigration database to look up pro-democracy activists and their families. The judge described their conduct as deliberate, concerted and serious. A third man charged in the case, Matthew Trickett, was found dead in a park in May 2024.
What stayed with Lau was one detail about the man who received eight years. Among his tasks, she said, was infiltrating the Hong Kong community in Britain and getting to know its organizers — and she has heard from people who did have contact with him. "Before he was arrested, not many people knew his background," she said.
"It confirms that Beijing, or Hong Kong, is very active in infiltrating overseas communities," she said. "So when we work with people, or even just get to know someone as a friend, we have to be very careful."
The practical result is a narrowed life. Beyond people she knew before, she has not made new friends, and she is barely in contact with the ones she had. It is not only Hong Kongers she is wary of: recruitment has extended to local British nationals, so an unexpected offer of friendship is something she treats with real caution and usually does not respond to. At events with no political dimension she introduces herself under a false identity.
She knows what the alternative costs. Looking after her own condition, she said, is what makes it possible to do this work over the long run.
Triads as proxies, and what governments can actually do about it
In Taiwan in early July, the Japanese-born commentator Akio Yaita was punched in the face in a Taichung hotel lobby by a man travelling on Hong Kong documents. Taiwanese media reported that the attack was traced to the Hong Kong triad society Wo Shing Wo (和勝和), whose members were among the men in white who assaulted commuters and protesters at Yuen Long (元朗) MTR station in July 2019.
For Lau, the pattern is familiar rather than novel. People with triad backgrounds have turned up to harass demonstrations in London, she said. Whether the arrangement raises the risk for exiles elsewhere "really depends on the local law enforcement agency, or the response."
Britain's strict firearms controls lower the ceiling somewhat, she said. The United States is a different proposition — and not only because of guns. She described a 2023 protest in San Francisco against Xi Jinping's visit, held alongside Tibetan and Uyghur groups, where counter-demonstrators included men wearing gloves fitted with studs. Several protesters were injured.
Because collusion between triads and the state is almost impossible to prove, she argued, the realistic defence is administrative: border and visa screening, backed by a police force that understands what it is looking at. On that, she gives Britain qualified credit. Officers' awareness has improved over the past year, and the government published guidance on transnational repression — very basic, she said, but progress. The espionage prosecutions have taught the courts a good deal as well.
Where Britain's defences stop: a register without China, and an embassy
The gap she keeps returning to is a scheme that came into force on July 1 last year. Britain's Foreign Influence Registration Scheme requires arrangements directed by foreign powers to be declared, with an "enhanced tier" for higher-risk states. Russia and Iran were specified. China was not, and still has not been, though ministers have said they are considering designating selected Chinese state-linked bodies rather than the state as a whole.
Lau reads the omission commercially. Britain wants more trade with China, and "Beijing is best at using money or trade to control things, to shape geopolitical positioning." Faced with that, she said, Britain chose to give ground.
She is correspondingly pessimistic about the other London flashpoint. In January the government granted planning permission for China to redevelop the former Royal Mint Court, beside the Tower of London, into what will be its largest diplomatic mission in Europe — a decision ministers defended on the grounds that consolidating China's premises from seven sites into one carried clear national security advantages. Critics, including exiled Hong Kongers who have protested at the site, argue the opposite: that it will become Beijing's largest surveillance base in Britain, and in Europe.
The Royal Mint Court Residents' Association took the decision to judicial review, arguing among other things that the government did not properly weigh the risks of transnational repression and of restrictions on protest. A two-day High Court hearing concluded on July 15 with judgment reserved. Lau's expectation, when we spoke, was a ruling late this year or early next — and she is not optimistic about the outcome.
Set against that, she is not indiscriminate about democracies. Established ones still assess extradition requests case by case and against their own law, she said, and she trusts them comparatively more. Where the exposure lies is elsewhere.
What the new law tells Beijing's partners
Which is how she reads China's Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, in force since July 1. It does not, in her view, change the behavior so much as formalize it: "It institutionalizes what they are already doing." Its content, she said, is barely distinguishable from Hong Kong's national security law and its Article 23 ordinance, extraterritorial jurisdiction included. "For the Hong Kong community, honestly, it makes little difference."
The audience that matters is foreign. The law tells Beijing's partners: "I have already legislated, so now you have to cooperate with me" — permission for allies to align with Chinese requests more openly than before.
She also thinks the framing is doing deliberate work. National security is legible everywhere as a political category; ethnic unity is not. Countries where national or ethnic sentiment runs high, she said, will not read this as a political statute at all — the same technique Beijing has long used at the United Nations, where economic and cultural language is deployed to hollow out human rights obligations. In her current research on Chinese influence in Latin America, she has found governments aligned with Beijing already borrowing the vocabulary of ethnic and national unity.
Her warning is aimed at the places where that vocabulary lands without resistance. Developing countries, and states that already back Beijing openly, are where people wanted by China face the highest risk.
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