The decision by Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Nathan Law to leave his home to agitate against China from abroad is a reminder that political exile has a long and complicated history, writes Don Murray.
In dark times, exile can be a choice for an individual. It can also be a weapon for a repressive regime.
“As a global-facing activist, the choices I have are stark: to stay silent from now on or to keep engaging in private diplomacy so I can warn the world of the threat of Chinese authoritarian expansion.”
Those are the words of Nathan Law, a 26-year-old Hong Kong activist. He posted them on his Facebook page on July 2 as he announced he was going into exile to an undisclosed location.
The trigger for his decision was the new security law passed by the Chinese National Congress, which sweeps Hong Kong under Beijing’s iron umbrella.
Already, the law is having an effect, with hundreds arrested after protests against it. One of those arrested was a 16-year-old girl. She had been waving a Hong Kong independence flag.
The draconian law makes subversion, collusion with foreign forces and preaching secession punishable with sentences up to life in prison.
WATCH | Hong Kong activist Nathan Law goes into exile:
‘I think the future’s grim,’ Law said, but noted he will continue to voice Hong Kongers’ demands for democracy. 2:09
For activists like Law, that points to a bleak future. Thus, the choice of exile and “private diplomacy.”
The decision to ‘remake your life’
It was a choice that hundreds of thousands were forced to make in the 20th century. Jews and many others fled Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s. Hungarians in 1956 and Czechs and Slovaks in 1968 fled their countries as the Soviet Union crushed attempts at revolt and reform.
Almost 38,000 Hungarians and 12,000 Czechs and Slovaks were received as official immigrants to Canada in the wake of those events.
The Soviet empire started to fall apart 21 years after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, but only a small number of those who went into exile in 1968 returned.
My wife is Czech, and over the years, I have met many Czechs who left in ’68 and never returned.
“It’s very hard in exile to remake your life once,” said one, who preferred for me not to include his name. “But to do it twice in middle age or older, even returning to your own country, was just too much.”
Exile can also be a weapon, one with a long history.
In the fifth century B.C., the city-state of Athens imposed 10-year sentences of exile ― called ostraka, or ostracism ― by a vote of its citizens on people considered dangerous to its democracy.
One of ancient Rome’s greatest poets, Ovid, was sent into exile to a town on the shores of the Black Sea in modern-day Romania by the emperor Augustus. His crime is unknown.
Ovid only referred to it as “carmen et error” – po