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This Wednesday is a dark day for democracy.
Early in the morning, security officers knocked on doors in Hong Kong.
They arrested 52 pro-democracy activists and politicians in the city - all those who ran as candidates in an election in the pro-democracy camp last July.
They also include the well-known activist Joshua Wong, who writes as a columnist for WELT AM SONNTAG.
Wong is already in custody and now faces another, much more drastic, conviction.
The election in which he and the other politicians stood was a peaceful, democratic and sensible rebellion against the Chinese dictatorship, whose cold fist is gripping Hong Kong ever more tightly.
The aim was to better organize the democratic camp in order to make a majority for the same in the Hong Kong council elections more likely.
The turnout was - for an internal camp code - excessive.
The organizers had expected 170,000 voters, and well over half a million came to the polls.
This is of course not surprising: in Hong Kong even then it was about the freedom of every single citizen.
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In other words, democracy in its purest form, which is exactly why the arrests this Wednesday ultimately come as no surprise.
They are bitter, sad, terrifying.
But not surprising.
Because if there is anything the Beijing regime hates, it is democracy.
Over the past year, the city's head of government, Carrie Lam, who is nothing but a Chinese puppet, has repeatedly announced that the organizers and participants in the election may have violated the new national security law.
This law is an all-purpose weapon that Beijing can use in pseudo-constitutional processes to lock people up in Hong Kong at the convenience of the regime.
The government in Beijing is good at locking up - and it's getting better and better.
Under President Xi Jinping, whose human size is shown, among other things, in the fact that he had the cartoon character Winnie the Pooh banned because she looks like him, people are constantly disappearing.
Rather unknown doctors who wanted to tell the truth about the outbreak of Corona disease, but also famous billionaires such as Alibaba founder Jack Ma, who dared to utter three sentences that were halfway critical of the system.
Jinping has hundreds of thousands of people held in labor camps, and the entire population is digitally spied on.
The targeted lies of the regime have also contributed to the fact that a large part of the world suffers from Corona, while China has long been back on the growth path.
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Criticism of the regime is growing in the West, but it is growing slowly - too slowly.
In Hong Kong, meanwhile, a whole generation of freedom fighters is being crushed before our very eyes.
Courageous people who also fight for us very specifically.
Because our dependence on China is great and it is foreseeable that the country will use it against us.
We shouldn't let the activists down.
The Federal Government and the EU Commission must stand up for them, German and European corporations must rethink their investment strategies, and consumers should think twice about whether they want products that have blood on them.