My Fase idea stems from my group project, combined with my personal experience. Since our theme was surveillance and voyeurism, and I was born in China but immigrated to Hong Kong for junior high school, I wanted to talk about surveillance and voyeurism in China. My father was a businessman in mainland China who dealt with the government. He was very busy, so we rarely saw each other after I immigrated to Hong Kong. I remember in 2022, he suddenly came to Hong Kong to visit me. I was puzzled, but he told me this story. My father’s hometown is Liaoyang, a small city in Liaoning Province. There was a very famous company there called Zhongwang Group, which was the largest aluminum company in Asia at the time. However, Zhongwang Group was not satisfied with their legitimate sources of income. They used local power to illegally raise funds and embezzle, appointing their secretary as the president of a local bank, controlling almost all the resources of the city, and ultimately embezzling a total of 310 billion RMB, equivalent to 33 billion pounds.

When President Xi Jinping visited the area to inspect a new type of tunnel boring machine, Zhongwang Group, to avoid future trouble, spent 100 million yuan to change his itinerary, sending them to inspect their company instead. However, President Xi discovered the deception and they were caught red-handed. My father, as one of the shareholders and a partner at the time, was arrested and interrogated even though he was unaware of the situation. My father told me he couldn’t have any activities in mainland China because once the government targeted him, his movements would be constantly monitored. After enduring some painful ordeal, he had no choice but to come to Hong Kong to hide with me for a while. But even in Hong Kong, he couldn’t completely escape; he still received daily calls from various governments inquiring about his whereabouts. It took about six months for the situation to subside somewhat. Another thing that impressed me was when I was in high school. My Global Politics teacher asked me to research a topic about Uyghur concentration camps in Xinjiang, China.

I was initially reluctant, but then I thought that being in Hong Kong meant it wouldn’t matter, so I started searching on Google. I was wrong. The next morning, my mobile phone number in mainland China started receiving a barrage of calls from Xinjiang. I didn’t answer them, thinking it was just a coincidence. But then my mother’s phone also started receiving similar calls. I was terrified and shocked, so I asked my professor to change my research topic. These are all my personal experiences, and they all happened recently. It proves that we are constantly being monitored; we just haven’t realized it. We see other people’s worlds through electronic devices every day, while being seen by others in return. There’s a saying, “When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” In China, you’ll find that under normal circumstances, the phenomena I mentioned above don’t occur. But when you enter politically sensitive areas or operate on the fringes of the law, you’ll discover how intimately the government and those monitoring you know your every move. I hope this statement only exists in my submitted file and doesn’t reach a wider audience. Thank you.