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Group members, Lam Chun and Ng Kin-wai - both candidates in the pro-democracy camp's primary legislative elections - told reporters police had asked their volunteers to sign a form admitting to having hung such banners.

Lam said no publicity materials were confiscated and no one was arrested as police only gave a verbal warning: "'Hong Kong independence' has always been a forbidden phrase. We were clear on this bottom line. But now, even 'Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of our times' is banned. The government has interpreted the law. But the courts are supposed to hand down the judgement. [The government] has a biased understanding of the slogan."

The group chanted the slogan several times before answering reporters' questions.

Police also gave a warning to another primary election candidate, Wong Ji-yuet. The activist wrote on Facebook that several officers told her that some of her words were "sensitive."

She asked them to clarify which phrases they were referring to and whether they had any specific requests. The officer did not respond and instead told her to keep her voice down, according to footage she shared online.

On Saturday afternoon, police entered Sha Tin District Councillor Leticia Wong's office as it opened, according to her Facebook live-stream. An officer was filmed saying the black flag in her office - containing the slogan "Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of our times" - intended to secede from and subvert the state.

The district councillor later asked the officer if she was using her power under the national security law to enter her office without a warrant. The officer replied saying Wong's staff had invited the police in - a claim which they denied.

© Guardians of Hong Kong, screenshot

Her gesture, she told a reporter, was inspired by a joke she once heard about the Soviet Union: someone begins to distribute pamphlets at the Red Square; a policemen accosts her, only to discover she is handing out blank papers. The policeman arrests her all the same. "You mean you think I didn't know what you wanted to say?" he bellows at her.

I had to reach back a decade to find an indictment of Beijing as telling as that of the girl's blank placard. In 2010, a full five years after dissident writer Liu Binyan (刘宾雁) had died in exile, the Chinese government finally granted his family permission to bury his ashes in Beijing. It didn't let them carve the epitaph Liu had hoped to put on his gravestone, though. It was supposed to have read: "Here lies a Chinese who did what he ought to have done, and said what he ought to have said." (长眠于此的这个中国人，曾做了他应该做的事, 说了他应该说的话).

Ironically, by refusing to allow Liu's epitaph to appear on his gravestone, the Chinese Communist Party only drew attention to it. I, for one, doubt if I would have remembered the epitaph word for word had it not been for the ban.

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