The confederation cited concerns over the personal safety of union leaders such as Lee Cheuk-yan, Carol Ng, and Winnie Yu as a main driver of its decision. Trade unionists around the world working in authoritarian environments, where anti-labor sentiment is laced with the threat of persecution and real violence, will recognize and understand the logic behind the HKCTU’s dissolution. The press conference announcing the HKCTU’s dissolution ended with a rendition of solidarity forever in Cantonese and English. Likewise, the Asia Monitor Resource Centre, a regional organization that has promoted workers’ rights and grassroots unions for more than a half century, recently announced the closure of its Hong Kong office.
One month before the HKCTU vote, its largest affiliate, the Professional Teachers’ Union, also dissolved after forty-seven years following media attacks and ongoing threats of legal prosecution. The latest targets in this crackdown are trade unions and labor rights groups. The legal framework for the assault is the new national security law that was imposed by Beijing on July 1, 2020. The campaign against the HKCTU is part of a broader assault on Hong Kong’s civil society that has resulted in a succession of mass arrests and the dissolution of organizations under the threat of persecution.
The vote was decisive: after thirty-one years, the HKCTU was finished. Months of sustained attacks in the pro-Beijing media and the arrest of HKCTU leaders for their roles in the Hong Kong protest movement of 2019–2020 rendered the dissolution a foregone conclusion. On October 3, the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU) gathered its ninety-plus affiliated unions representing just under two hundred thousand workers in Hong Kong to vote on the dissolution of the confederation.
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