Hong Kong Will Become Chinese Again
Crossing the Red Line: Behind China's Takeover of Hong Kong
One twelvemonth ago, the city's freedoms were concise with scenic speed. Merely the clampdown was years in the making, and many signals were missed.
Hong Kong'south march toward an disciplinarian futurity began with a unmarried phrase in a dry policy paper. Beijing, the document declared, would wield "comprehensive jurisdiction" over the territory.
The paper, published in June 2014, signaled the Chinese leader Xi Jinping's determination to tame political defiance in the onetime British colony, which had kept its own laws and freedoms. But the words were dismissed by many as intimidating swagger that the city's robust legal system and democratic opposition could face down.
Hong Kong at present knows Mr. Xi'south ambitions with a stunned clarity. The paper marked the opening of a competition for command in the metropolis, culminating in the sweeping national security law that few saw coming.
Since that law took force one year agone, Beijing has unleashed a stampede of deportment to bring Hong Kong into political lock footstep with the Chinese Communist Political party: arresting activists, seizing assets, firing government workers, detaining newspaper editors and rewriting school curriculums.
While the clampdown seemed to arrive with startling speed, it was the culmination of yearslong efforts in Beijing. Interviews with insiders and advisers, as well as speeches, policy papers and state-funded studies, reveal Chinese officials' growing alarm over protests in Hong Kong; their impatience with wavering amidst the metropolis'south pro-Beijing ruling elite; and their growing conviction that Hong Kong had become a oasis for Western-backed subversion.
In the years post-obit the white paper's release, Beijing laid the groundwork for a security counteroffensive. Officials attacked the supposition that Hong Kong'south autonomy was fix in stone under the framework negotiated with U.k. nigh the finish of colonial rule. They pushed back against demands for autonomous rights, while influential advisers audaciously proposed that Beijing could impose a security law if Hong Kong legislators failed to human action.
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There were clues to indicate that positions in Beijing were hardening. It was only the final push, in the months earlier the security law came down, that was deadened in near-total secrecy.
Those signals, often conveyed with the Communist Party'south usual calculated opacity, failed to cut through the political tumult in Hong Kong. The city's opposition had envisioned grinding, shifting political battles against Chinese government inroad over decades, non a lightning war. Given the run a risk of a global backlash, and the territory's vital financial role, many causeless that Mr. Xi would motility cautiously. Fifty-fifty Beijing'southward closest loyalists in Hong Kong underestimated how far he was ultimately willing to go.
People's republic of china'due south offensive has dramatically accelerated its assimilation of Hong Kong, portending deeper changes that could terminate the urban center'due south status equally Asia'due south cosmopolitan capital.
"The whole procedure developed or evolved gradually, until a couple years ago, then information technology sped upward very quickly," said Lau Siu-kai, a Hong Kong scholar who advises Beijing on policy. "The problem is that the national security law came almost very suddenly and many people were caught by surprise, including the so called pro-Beijing people in Hong Kong."
A firewall vanishes
Paradigm
Mr. Xi came to power in 2012 amid expectations in Hong Kong that he might be a pragmatic overseer, content to rely on the politicians and tycoons who had long served as Beijing's surrogates.
His father had been a liberalizing leader in neighboring Guangdong Province, and Mr. Xi at first cultivated a relatively mild prototype. He told Leung Chun-ying, then Hong Kong's top official, that China's approach to the territory "volition not modify."
Just as he settled into ability, Mr. Xi revealed an iron-fisted ideological agenda. In mainland Cathay, he stifled dissent and denounced ideas like judicial independence and civil society — values that to many defined Hong Kong.
The 2022 policy paper signaled Mr. Eleven's rejection of the idea that laws and treaties insulated Hong Kong from Chinese state power. Many in Hong Kong had long worried that the urban center's autonomy was breakable, but previous Chinese leaders had preferred to exercise influence indirectly and covertly.
The paper's new phrase, "comprehensive jurisdiction," suggested that Beijing no longer saw a legal "firewall" encasing Hong Kong, said Michael C. Davis, a former professor of law at the University of Hong Kong and author of "Making Hong Kong China."
While the term ignited protest by lawyers in Hong Kong, many considered it an intimidating political argument without legal foundation, one that would goad the opposition rather than deter it.
"This avowed posture of 'burdensome a crab to expiry with a bedrock' is a foolish motility," Chan Kin-man, an bookish at the forefront of Hong Kong'due south pro-democracy campaign, said at the time. "It will only prompt an even bigger social reaction."
Beijing before long made clear that it was serious about setting new rules for Hong Kong.
Mr. Xi's predecessor, Hu Jintao, had raised the possibility of fulfilling Prc'south repeatedly delayed promise to allow the public straight elect the primary executive, Hong Kong's top official. In August 2014, the Chinese authorities revealed a narrow proposal to permit a direct vote starting in 2017, but merely from among a handful of candidates approved by Beijing.
Tens of thousands of people responded by occupying major streets for two and a half months. Chinese leaders began to worry that Hong Kong had become an ideological abscess that would need lancing.
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Chinese media and pro-Beijing politicians began calling the protests a "color revolution," the party's term for Western-sponsored coup. Chinese officials intensified calls for the territory to pass security legislation, a commitment demanded by the Basic Law, Beijing's framework of rules that requite Hong Kong its special condition.
The government began dismissing as a relic the joint annunciation with United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland that laid out conditions for Hong Kong's render to Mainland china in 1997. A Chinese diplomat in London said the announcement was "now void," co-ordinate to a British lawmaker.
But Mr. Eleven was non yet ready to make dramatic incursions into Hong Kong. His policy shifted between warnings and reassuring economical gestures, lulling some into thinking that the party'southward political bite would not match its rhetorical bawl.
Mr. Xi's concord over China's own security apparatus was incomplete. Beijing also wanted to proceed tensions with the United States in cheque and give Hong Kong fourth dimension to repair its economy after the demonstrations, said Tian Feilong, an associate professor of police at Beihang University in Beijing who became a supporter of a tougher approach to protesters.
Given those considerations, he said, Chinese leaders "didn't immediately set to work on solving the national security effect."
'Grab this hot potato'
Epitome
Curtailing opposition in Hong Kong was more than complicated than in other tense areas on Cathay's periphery, like Tibet and Xinjiang.
Hong Kong had its own British-derived legal system, a popular and well-organized autonomous opposition and far greater global economic exposure. Bringing out Chinese troops to quell protests could spook financial markets.
Pro-Beijing politicians in Hong Kong were reluctant to push button for national security legislation. A previous attempt had failed in 2003 after a massive protest.
"Nobody was willing to take hold of this hot potato," Professor Tian said. "No ane, including the Western countries, truly believed that Hong Kong locally had the power to complete this legislation."
After 2014, Mr. Xi'southward calls for resurgent party power emboldened policy advisers to await for new ways to break the impasse over Hong Kong. Hawkish voices began advancing arguments that Mainland china could impose a security law on the city by constitutional fiat.
"Some people think that the central government tin't do annihilation," Mo Jihong, a law professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a state think tank, said at a 2022 meeting about security legislation for Hong Kong. "The primal government has the power to bargain with these matters."
Some Chinese academics published studies arguing that the mainland's own national security law could be extended to Hong Kong. Others proposed that Mainland china pass a constabulary tailor-made for Hong Kong, bypassing political obstacles in the urban center.
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It was widely thought in Hong Kong that Mr. Eleven would non go that far. When Red china adopted its own security law in 2015, the top security official in Hong Kong, Lai Tung-kwok, said the responsibleness to enact laws in the urban center against crimes similar treason and subversion would be "fulfilled by local legislation." The administration, he said, "has no programme to enact" such laws. Insiders shook their heads at the idea that Beijing could impose ane.
"I had never imagined that you could employ this approach," Tam Yiu-Chung, the sole Hong Kong member of the acme commission of China'due south legislature, said in a recent interview. "I'd heard about it, but there were and so many difficulties with information technology."
By July 2017, when Hong Kong'due south aristocracy gathered to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the territory'due south return to Chinese sovereignty, Mr. Xi was ready to enhance the stakes.
Information technology was his first visit to Hong Kong as China'due south elevation leader. Hours before tens of thousands kicked off an annual protest for greater democratic rights, Mr. 11 inserted a steely warning into his celebratory speech.
Threats to "national sovereignty and security," or challenges to the cardinal government's dominance in Hong Kong, "would cross a red line and will never be permitted," Mr. Xi said.
In Cathay'south top-downwards system, Mr. 11's words galvanized policymakers to look for new ways to defend that "cerise line."
Ane influential adviser, Chen Duanhong, a professor of law at Peking University, submitted several internal reports about Hong Kong to Communist Political party headquarters, including one about adopting security legislation. Around that same time, he wrote publicly that in a dire crunch, Chinese leaders could "take all necessary measures" to defend sovereignty, casting aside the fetters of lesser laws.
"The will of the land must constantly reply to its environment of survival," he wrote, "and then have decisive measures at crucial moments."
'Nobody in their wildest imagination'
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For Beijing, the crucial moment appeared to arrive on the nighttime of July 21, 2019. Hundreds of protesters besieged the Central Liaison Role, Red china's primary arm in Hong Kong, and splattered blackness ink on the red-and-gold Chinese national emblem over the entrance.
The demonstrations had begun in June every bit a largely peaceful outcry against a bill that would accept allowed extraditions to mainland China. Within weeks they had become a massive movement, venting years of pent-upwards discontent over Beijing's encroachments. Some radical protesters began calling for independence.
For many Hong Kongers, resistance was necessary even if victory was unlikely. "Nosotros had thought it would exist a slow strangling," said Jackie Chen, a social worker who supported pro-democracy protests in 2019. "Nosotros were thinking about how to deadening their strangling, stop it, and so turn for the better."
To Beijing, the national emblem's defacement confirmed that the protests had become an assault on its very claim to Hong Kong.
Official media, mute on the protests for weeks, erupted. People's Daily, the Communist Political party'due south master paper, said the incident "brazenly challenged the primal government'due south authority" and "crossed a cerise line," echoing Mr. 11's alert ii years earlier.
"Enough is enough," Regina Ip, a pro-Beijing legislator in Hong Kong, said in a contempo interview, recalling the authorities' reaction to the vandalism.
"And the slogan of Hong Kong independence," she added. "That'south gone too far."
The clearest sign of how Beijing would respond came in Oct 2019. State television showed hundreds of top officials at a closed-door meeting, raising their easily to endorse a move to tighten law and order across China. The program, published days afterwards, proposed a "legal organisation and enforcement machinery for national security" in Hong Kong.
Paradigm
That warning was widely misconstrued. While many Hong Kongers figured that Beijing would move to end the protests, virtually thought the steps would be familiar. Some expected fresh pressure level on local lawmakers to enact security laws.
At the fourth dimension, Ms. Ip, the lawmaker, doubted that Master Executive Carrie Lam could make much progress on a security law. "Information technology'due south not something that tin can happen anytime presently," she said in November 2019.
Notably absent-minded was any talk of security legislation imposed directly by Beijing. The mainland scholars' proposals had largely faded from view. Meridian loyalists and government advisers in Hong Kong were non briefed on the option, which might have risked inflaming the protests.
It had "non been discussed in the media," said Albert Chen, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong who sits on a legal advisory committee to Beijing. "Non even mainland Chinese scholars talked about this possibility at that time."
Merely China'southward leaders had already reached beyond the offices that usually dealt with Hong Kong — their credibility wounded by the months of protest — and quietly recruited experts to prepare for the security intervention, said ii people who were told about the deliberations past participants. Top Communist Party agencies steered the preparations, said both people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the matter.
Mr. Xi would formally extend China's formidable security apparatus to Hong Kong, creating an agency there that answered direct to the party.
Non even the most draconian public proposals for security legislation had envisioned this footstep.
"Nobody in their wildest imagination would accept thought there would be a central agency in Hong Kong," said Fu Hualing, the dean of the University of Hong Kong law school.
'Welcoming and back up'
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The announcement stunned the city. Ahead of China's annual legislative meeting, a spokesman said at a late-night news conference on May 21 that lawmakers would review a plan to impose a national security police force on Hong Kong.
The law was quickly passed on June thirty, laying out four offenses — separatism, subversion, terrorism and bunco with foreign powers — with penalties upwards to life imprisonment. It demanded oversight of schools and media.
And it created the new Chinese security agency in Hong Kong, virtually immune to legal challenges. Information technology was empowered to investigate cases and bring defendants to trial on the mainland, where party-controlled courts rarely reject prosecutors' charges.
City officials initially said the security law would be applied with scrupulous precision; instead, it unleashed a rolling campaign that has left few corners of society untouched.
The Hong Kong regime take arrested more 110 people in national security investigations over the by year, charging 64, including most of the city's best-known pro-democracy activists.
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The Chinese security bureau itself has stayed largely out of view. Its most visible footprint has been its temporary headquarters at the 33-story Metropark Hotel Causeway Bay, overlooking Victoria Park, once the site of some of Hong Kong's biggest protests.
But information technology has occasionally cleaved its silence, reminding residents that it looms behind the scenes.
Information technology has pointedly praised the arrests of loftier-profile figures, including opposition politicians and top editors of Apple Daily, a brash pro-commonwealth tabloid ensnared by the police force and forced to close last calendar week. It has scrutinized museums for potentially destructive artwork, co-ordinate to a local official. It has extolled the security police every bit a cure for Hong Kong's political turbulence.
"I thank the Hong Kong people," the agency's primary, Zheng Yanxiong, said in a rare public speech communication on National Security Education Mean solar day, in April.
"They've gone through a very natural, reasonable procedure from unfamiliarity, guessing and wait-and-see about the Hong Kong National Security Law," he said, "to acceptance, welcoming and back up."
A calendar week after, the Hong Kong government announced that China'due south security bureau would build a permanent headquarters on the city's waterfront, occupying a site about the size of 2 football game fields.
Keith Bradsher contributed reporting.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/world/asia/china-hong-kong-security-law.html
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