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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/SnabDedraterEdave on 2024-01-11 18:32:31.
Original Title: When China decided to crack down on Hong Kong's civil liberties and I as a citizen still had to pay my taxes to its oppressive government? No problem, I did it so that I actually made them lose money... LEGALLY
Disclaimer: I have long since moved out of Hong Kong, so I guess I'm more or less safe now to share this story from a few years ago.
tl;dr When the CCP started cracking down on civil liberties in Hong Kong, as a form of passive resistance, I took advantage of a loophole an electronic payment service while paying my taxes to make the CCP-controlled government actually lose money prior to deciding to emigrate.
Anyway, much has been said about the Hong Kong protests of 2019-20, so I'll not elaborate further.
In 2020, when the Chinese Communist Party, unable to control the public anger from the protests and increasing police brutality, decided to use the nuclear option of severely curtailing HK's autonomy and basic civil rights that was promised to its people when the city was handed over to China in 1997, that's when I decided it was time to leave.
But in the meantime, a lot of preparation needed to be made for my exit strategy. I was still in a job and still had to pay my taxes. And there was Covid which further delayed my departure by a few years.
Before I finally emigrated (sometime last year), I needed to maintain as low a profile as possible so me and my family could escape from there safely, so tax evasion was a no-no, as much as I no longer wanted to pay my taxes to pay for the salaries of the intransigent officials that were upping the ante in oppressing my fellow citizens.
Instead, I discovered you could pay taxes electronically using an electronic payment service to pay for almost anything, including taxes. You could pay for stuff via mobile phone or on the internet.
For every transaction made, the vendor will be charged HK$2 by the service company. If you're paying taxes, the vendor would be the government.
Now notice here that they did not state a minimum amount for "every transaction". Meaning that if I pay HK$1, and the payment service charges the government HK$2 "per transaction", the government ends up making a net loss of -HK$1.
If I do it multiple times, the CCP government will lose a lot of money. And the fun thing about that (at least when I did it) it was perfectly legal.
Though the main catch was that the service only lets you do up to 50 transactions a day, amounting to HK$50. The CCP government will still lose HK$100.
But that was not going to stop me from sticking the finger to the CCP. So I diligently paid my taxes, dollar by dollar, day by day, using that electronic payment system. I made sure to set aside about half an hour every day after coming home from work, so I could perform 50 transactions for that day.
I lost count of how many months it took for me to completely clear my taxes for that year using this passive aggressive method, and I fully realize this small resistance would barely dent the CCP government's coffers. At least I sleep in the knowledge that the taxes they use to oppress my fellow Hongkongers will not have come from me, as I refused to pay the CCP a single penny anymore.