Carmen Lau left her homeland, Hong Kong, in 2021 after her government decided that her pro-democracy activism was a crime under the national security law. Lau moved to the United Kingdom, where she continued to speak out against authoritarian rule over her beloved city. She has dealt with death threats, a bounty placed on her head, and all kinds of harassment one can imagine from a dictatorship’s playbook. But with the Chinese Communist Party being, well, the Chinese Communist Party, it has updated its old tactics of harassing overseas activists with the help of technology. Last March, Carmen’s neighbors received AI-generated, sexually explicit images suggesting she was a sex worker “open for business.” Disturbed and mortified, Carmen knew exactly what this tactic aimed to achieve: to silence her. So she decided to do the opposite—speak out. In this episode, Carmen shares her harrowing experience of transnational harassment and discusses the psychological impact of such...

At 4 a.m. local time on Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump announced on his social media platform, Truth Social, that his administration had “carried out a large-scale strike” against Venezuela. Trump said the U.S. military had also captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife and flown the couple out of the country. What does this mean for the millions of Venezuelans who fled the Maduro regime? In this episode, Valentina Aguana, a digital rights activist who tracks censorship and information controls in Venezuela, reflects on her reaction to the news from exile, how she views the political discourse surrounding the attack, and how a cautious sense of hope for a better Venezuela continues to sustain her.

As we wrap up 2025, we are taking a moment to return to the conversations that challenged us, informed us, and reframed how we think about power, accountability, and the people caught in between.  Throughout this year, The Divide has sat down with voices who lived these tensions every day, from Mark Clifford's reflection on press freedom and the cost of speaking out to Chien Chi-sheng's account of pushing back against institutional harm in sports, and Simon Chang's warning that development without guardrails can reshape entire communities. This episode shares the moments that lingered long after the microphones were turned off, along with clips that never made it into the original broadcasts.

On December 15, 2025, a three-judge national security panel in Hong Kong found pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai guilty of conspiring to publish seditious materials and colluding with foreign forces. Police arrested Lai in August 2020 and shut down his newspaper the following year. In the verdict, one name is mentioned 160 times and vaguely accused of being the “foreign force” Lai was allegedly colluding with: Luke de Pulford. In this episode, Luke discusses Lai’s conviction, explains why he is baffled by the verdict given his minimal personal connection to Jimmy Lai, and what he believes the international community should do to advocate for human rights in Hong Kong.