Hong Kong businesses see political persecution in COVID controls | Business and

Hong Kong, China – In Hong Kong’s bustling district of Mong Kok, patrons flowed in and out of bars and restaurants over a busy summer weekend recently.

But at Shinko, a popular Japanese izakaya restaurant, there was not a customer in sight.

The restaurant had been forced to halt nighttime services for 14 days, after a customer failed to produce a valid vaccination record during a police raid in mid-July.

While other restaurants have received similar penalties under Hong Kong’s pandemic rules, which include restrictive measures long since been abandoned elsewhere, Shinko’s owners are convinced they have received disproportionate scrutiny from authorities due to their political beliefs.

“Hong Kong’s business environment makes me feel helpless, it makes me question if the authorities want to stop us from doing business in Hong Kong,” Hei, one of the restaurant’s co-owners, told Al Jazeera.

Shinko is among the Hong Kong businesses that supported the 2019 mass pro-democracy protests, which began as peaceful demonstrations against plans to allow extraditions to mainland China before morphing into a wider movement that saw violent clashes between protesters and police.

Businesses like Shinko’s are known locally as being part of the “yellow economy” — yellow being the colour associated with pro-democracy sentiment in the Chinese-ruled city.

Once an integral part of the political landscape, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement has been largely silenced since Beijing imposed a draconian national security law on the territory in 2020.

Despite China’s promises to leave the former British colony’s rights and freedoms intact after its return to Chinese rule, most of the movement’s leaders have been arrested, disqualified from office, or forced into exile. Media and civil society, once widely regarded as among the freest in the region, increasingly toe the government line.

For “yellow” businesses, many of which became known for displaying pro-democracy paraphernalia during the 2019 protests, the city’s new reality means navigating scrutiny from Beijing’s acolytes. Those include mouthpiece media, which frequently accuses establishments of defying the government’s COVID-19 restrictions and “spreading separatism” by displaying protest slogans and banners.

Hei, who asked not to use her full name, said her business has adhered strictly to the government’s COVID-19 restrictions to avoid complications, in part because she expects greater scrutiny, going as far as hiring extra staff to check customers’ vaccination records.

But Hei said her restaurant still receives more attention than others in her neighbourhood, with the establishment subjected to five pandemic-related inspections since July alone.

Under Hong Kong’s strict pandemic rules designed to align with mainland China’s “zero COVID” strategy, customers violating the law can face a fine of 5,000 Hong Kong dollars ($637), while the establishment in question…