June 1992: It was the middle of the night on the South China Sea, and a Chinese patrol vessel was approaching a boat en route from the Communist mainland to the then-British colony of Hong Kong. As border troops came on board to talk to the crew, their voices could be heard by a group of people packed into a secret compartment below deck. A few minutes earlier, when the patrol boat was spotted, these secret passengers had been given an urgent order. “I was told to hide,” one of them, Yan Xiong, recalls. “Don’t make any noise!”
Most of those hiding were economic migrants, hoping to find work in Hong Kong – but not Yan.
