Infernal blunder: Hong Kong movie stars Andy Lau and Chow Yun-fat wrongly listed as ‘Xinjiang cops’ who helped ‘round up thousands’ by US activist group
- Activist list brands local superstars Andy Lau and Chow Yun-fat as Xinjiang province police officers responsible for wrongful incarcerations
- Online observers across China mock the mistake by using famous lines and themes from movies
An activist group has become a laughing stock in China for listing famous Hong Kong film stars Andy Lau Tak-wah and Chow Yun-fat as police officers responsible for rounding up “thousands of documented victims” in Xinjiang province in northwestern China.
The list was published by Xinjiang Victims Database on its Twitter account on January 6.
Together with a link to a list of “over 2,000 Urumqi police officers”, the post featured a gallery of the officers’ profile photos – including those of the two superstars.
As the mistake was spotted and spread on Twitter and later Chinese social media, it attracted a host of funny comments and memes from people familiar with the two actors, each of whom has played a number of roles as Hong Kong police officers in their careers.
“Sorry, I’m a cop,” one online observer joked, referencing a famous line said to Lau by fellow actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai in the classic Hong Kong thriller, Infernal Affairs, which starred both men.
“The life of Hong Kong actors must be so difficult that Andy Lau and Chow Yun-fat decided to become Xinjiang police officers,” another mocked.
Chinese state media CGTN journalist Anna Ge also joined the chorus of sarcasm: “When popular singer/actor Andy Lau and Chow Yun-fat became the ‘Xinjiang police officers’, I think Jackie Chan won’t be happy about being left out!”
The Xinjiang Victims Database later responded that all the information was sourced from the file cache of a Urumqi database obtained by the US news organisation The Intercept, which included Lau’s photo.
It claimed that the validity of the cache it used had been “corroborated thousands of times over in practice”, adding that the photos of police officers “aren’t always of themselves”.
Apart from Andy Lau and Chow Yun-fat, the gallery also contained a cartoon portrait, which aroused further suspicion about its authenticity and that of a list of more than 49,000 people allegedly incarcerated, detained or unaccounted for in Xinjiang.
The Xinjiang Victims Database was founded by Gene Bunin, a dual US and Russian national, in 2018.
It was previously cited by the International Labour Organization and the UN Human Rights Council in their Xinjiang reports.
In 2021, Xinjiang government spokesperson Xu Guixiang told Global Times that the victims listed on Xinjiang Victims Database were mostly “living normal lives” while others had been “charged with terrorist acts and other criminal offences”, and a number of names that were “completely fake who do not even exist”.
The Chinese government has consistently denied accusations from Western countries and human rights groups that it detained Uygurs and other ethnic minorities in internment camps for political indoctrination and forced labour.
Instead, it released a white paper in 2020 claiming to have provided “vocational training” to nearly 1.3 million workers a year in Xinjiang from 2014 to 2019.
In 2021, Bunin slammed a BBC report alleging “systematic rape” in the re-education camps in Xinjiang for lack of evidence, and argued that the testimony of abuses will lose credibility and “be disastrous and harmful to all of us” if media and activists run with sensational headlines without proper fact-checking.
