This week’s Australia Letter is written by Isabella Kwai, a reporter with the bureau. Sign up to get it by email.

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Badiucao, the Chinese political cartoonist, decided to unveil his identity on the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in June. Since then the artist, an outspoken critic of the Chinese government, has noticed strange cars parked outside his home in Melbourne and had the sense that he is being watched in public.

Online, trolls have been sending him death threats.

“When I am anonymous, I have a sense of safety. And now this sense of safety has been stripped away,” he told me this week on an encrypted call.

He is not the only one feeling this way. As the movement in Hong Kong calling for democracy continues in the face of warnings from the Chinese government, the conflict is also playing out in Australia. Recent clashes at universities and in major cities between those supporting the movement and those opposing it are raising questions inside the Chinese community — especially those that are not strongly nationalist — about how freely they can speak about Hong Kong.