Opinion | How jailed Hong Kong protesters are subjected to ‘thought work’

In the past three decades, the Chinese Communist Party has spent immense sums on “stability maintenance,” a budget item for funding not only police and prisons but also a legion of “thought workers” who blanket the country to nip in the bud any possible threat to CCP authority. A comment that isn’t “correct” can trigger an invitation for a “chat”: Are you sure you want to say that? Wouldn’t your life be better if you did not? You do want your little daughter to get into that neighborhood school, don’t you? And so on.

Mainland dissidents, accustomed to such chats, can become adept at sparring with thought workers. But they need to learn the rules of the game as they go; the regime does not publish them. In Hong Kong, the Correctional Services Department does.

In a budgeting document for the fiscal year ending in 2023, the department describes how prison authorities work on “persons in custody” (abbreviated as “PICs”), who are not famous dissidents but ordinary protesters, most of them young, who have been charged with political offenses.

At the end of 2021, Hong Kong prisons held 1,787 PICs between the ages of 18 and 30 and nearly 200 more under 18. They have been subjected to standard CCP thought-work techniques such as these:

We are pinning a negative but unclear label on you. During huge street demonstrations in Hong Kong in 2019, some young protesters began wearing black outfits; this led the Correctional Services Department to inaugurate the term “black-clad violence.” The color black has a storied CCP history. During the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the most politically despised people were classified into “Five Black Categories.” In 1989, leaders of the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations were labeled “black hands.” There are many other examples. And what exactly are “black” characteristics? You needn’t ask. All you need to know is that black = wrong and that you are on the defensive.

If you oppose us, you are by definition a minority. PICs are described in the Correctional Services document as “radical” lawbreakers who are “extreme” in their “anti-social” mind-set. Never mind that they marched in demonstrations that brought more than a quarter of the city’s entire population into the streets. In police rhetoric, they were at the fringes. During the equally immense demonstrations in Beijing in spring 1989, CCP media stalwartly held that “a tiny minority” was causing all the trouble.

The regime occupies the moral center. The question for “extremists” is always whether they will choose to return to the mainstream. It is the right thing to do. Just…