A Hong Kong man has been jailed for four months under the sedition law after pleading guilty to importing 18 children’s books about sheep and wolves. The publications were said to be filled with “distorted ideas” and to have intended to incite hatred against the local and Chinese governments among young readers.
Chief Magistrate Victor So sentenced Kurt Leung at the West Kowloon Magistrates’ Courts on Friday, after the 38-year-old admitted to breaching the colonial-era Crimes Ordinance by importing “seditious publications.”
Leung was arrested in March and was said to have signed for a delivery containing illustrated books. The parcel included copies of three books that the District Court had ruled as carrying seditious intentions last September in a case against five speech therapists behind the publications.
Set in a village populated by sheep, the series of three books was said to have alluded to the 2019 anti-extradition bill unrest, the detention of 12 Hong Kong fugitives by the mainland Chinese authorities, and a strike staged by Hong Kong medics at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak.
Chinese authorities were portrayed as wolves, while the Hong Kong chief executive was a wolf who “masqueraded as a sheep” and was instructed by the “Wolf-chairman.”
The titles instilled fear, hatred, discontent and disaffection against the Hong Kong and Chinese governments in the minds of children, and were in effect “brainwashing” young readers, District Judge Kwok Wai-kin said at the time.
According to the summary of facts read out in court on Friday, the parcel signed by Leung included copies of three other books based on the storyline of the sheep and wolves. They were released last year by an Instagram account “sheepvillage2.0,” which claimed to be operated by a group of Hong Kong educators now based abroad.
The sequels hinted at other events in the city, including the unofficial legislative primary election organised by the pro-democracy camp, the removal of monuments commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown and the shutdown of pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, prosecutors said.
The prosecution said all six books were seditious publications which portrayed the wolves as “evil” and the sheep as “oppressed.” The epilogue of the six titles compared Hong Kong to the sheep village, while mainland China was likened to the wolf village, which incited hatred against the Hong Kong and central authorities among the readers.
According to the prosecution, Leung told the police that he was informed by an ex-colleague Choi Wing-tat that a parcel addressed to him would arrive. Choi asked the defendant to help him sign for the delivery, and Leung claimed he did not know the content of the publications.
Upon preliminary inspection of Leung’s phones, however, it was discovered that the defendant had spoken with a person called “Pan Choi” on WhatsApp about sending the children’s books to Hong Kong. Prosecutors argued that Leung knew the books were of a seditious nature as early as January when he received a photo of the books to be sent by Choi.
The defendant was also said to have told Choi that he would report him to national security police and have him arrested. Despite being aware of the seditious nature of the books, the pair still arranged for them to be imported, prosecutors said.
Representing Leung, barrister Anson Wong said his client played a “passive role” as he simply signed for the delivery of the books, and there was no evidence to suggest the defendant had distributed them.
Although Leung was aware of the “seditious” intent of the books, he did not personally share that intention, Wong told the court. Leung also penned a mitigation letter telling the court that he sincerely apologised for his “stupid behaviour.”
When handing down the sentence, So said the books targeted young children, which added to Leung’s criminality. There were also “cross-border factors” in the case, So said, as by importing the books, Leung was encouraging people overseas to continue to produce them.
“If those seditious ideas successfully take root and permeate vulnerable young minds, the impact could be inter-generational,” the chief magistrate said in Cantonese.
Taking into the account that Leung was not an “instigator” in the case and did not request the import of the books, So adopted six months as the starting point of sentence. He granted a one-third reduction because of Leung’s guilty plea. Leung, who has been detained for a month pending trial, was eventually sent to prison for four months.
Sedition is not covered by the Beijing-imposed national security law, which targets secession, subversion, collusion with foreign forces and terrorist acts and mandates up to life imprisonment. Those convicted under the sedition law – last amended in the 1970s when Hong Kong was still a British colony – face a maximum penalty of two years in prison.
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