Sri Krishna*

Hong Kong became Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China on July One, 1997. And Beijing guaranteed “one country, two systems,” to the seven million plus people. Twenty-six years down the line, Communist China appears to have rolled back its promise.

China’s National Security Law (NSL) has all but extinguished criticism. And decimated most civil rights and fundamental freedoms. Official data shows someone has been arrested every four days for security offences over the past three years and most have been denied bail.  More legislation is expected to push the envelope further and thus enable Beijing to tighten its control of the former British colony under President Xi Jinping. This is in addition to invoking the seldom-used colonial-era sedition law, which allows for a maximum sentence of two years. 

The regime has empowered itself to surveil, detain, and search any person or persons suspected of indulging in secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign organisations. Any open speech, verbal promotion or intention of Hong Kong’s secession from China is considered a crime. The overarching security concerns are ground enough to demand publishers, hosting services, and internet service providers to block, remove, or restrict content.

“The NSL was something that Beijing rammed down Hong Kong’s throat; the optic was bad. Any new law promulgated by the local authorities is likely to be harsher than the NSL as Beijing can shrug it off as Hong Kong’s own decision,” according to Ching Cheong, a long-time commentator on Chinese politics.

By June 2020, Beijing imposed the NSL, criminalising activities deemed to be secession, subversion and collusion with foreign forces. Within a few months, a slew of arrests aimed at pro-democracy activists and media outlets had effectively quashed all dissent.

Current Chief Executive John Lee feels powerful enough to do what his predecessors could not. A former security chief, he has just completed his first term in office.  He is now determined to curb what he considers as ‘soft’ resistance. And has promised to pass the territory’s own security legislation by this year-end. “We need a suitable and effective law to safeguard national security,” Lee told the local tabloid The Standard.

While Hong Kong authorities are taking the lead in writing the legislation, there is little doubt about Beijing’s influence.

An amendment to China’s counter-espionage law to cover online attacks, defections and other spying activities has just come into force.

As part of efforts to curb dissent, Hong Kong police have offered a reward of up to one million Hong Kong dollars ($127,000) for information that would bring about the arrest of prominent activists who have fled the city.  The authorities are targeting to catch eight persons residing in the United States, Australia and Britain. This is for the first time that a cash reward is being offered for individuals living abroad who are accused of violating a strict national security law.

Kevin Yam, who is on the wanted list, is undeterred.  “I will not be deterred from talking publicly about the situation in Hong Kong”, he said from his perch in Melbourne.

Another ‘wanted’ Australian resident, Yam, is also unmoved. “I am an Australian citizen exercising my freedom of speech as an Australian in Australia to speak about a city that gave me everything, which I still love,” he said. Yam is a non-resident senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Asian Law.

Human rights groups have decried the “bounty” as an attempt to silence and intimidate critics even after they were forced to leave home, with the cause they had once fought for all but banished from public discussion.

The arrest warrants are “not an indictment of these activists [but] of Hong Kong’s once well-regarded law enforcement and judiciary,” said Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch.

Police accuse the eight wanted men of collusion with foreign forces, incitement of secession or subversion — all crimes that are vaguely defined under the law imposed on the territory by Beijing in 2020 after months of massive pro-democracy protests.

The alleged violations, detailed on police website, focus on advocacy by the activists from late 2020 to 2023, after they had left the Chinese soil.

Now a quick recap of Hong Kong’s slide.

In April 1989, Hong Kong people overwhelmingly cast their lot with the pro-democracy protesters on Tiananmen Square and sustained the movement with donations for weeks until Chinese tanks rolled in and crushed the uprising.

The crackdown coincided with the drafting of the Basic Law, which was to lay out the administration of post-handover Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China.

In the final stages, Beijing-appointed drafters toughened up Article 23 by tucking in an anti-subversion clause and prohibition on foreign political entities. Under the framework of “one country, two systems”, Article 23 stipulated that the future Hong Kong government should “enact laws on its own” to satisfy those requirements.

In a belated attempt to safeguard the territory’s political freedoms, the colonial Hong Kong legislature in 1991 passed the Bill of Rights Ordinance by incorporating the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and codified the civil liberties for Hong Kong residents.

In the years leading up to the 1997 handover and until 2003, Hong Kong society largely trusted Beijing’s promise to maintain the status quo for at least 50 years. That was why the government’s gambit to push through the legislation struck activist Jay Chan as a bolt from the blue.

Chan had supported the Tiananmen protests as a college student and had joined the million-strong march of 2003.   

A decade later, in 2014, thousands of pro-democracy protesters threw themselves into ‘Occupy Central’, camping out in parts of the city centre for nearly three months in a last-ditch attempt to pressure Beijing into allowing universal suffrage as guaranteed in the Basic Law.

In 2019, one million people again flooded Hong Kong streets to oppose an extradition bill that would allow Hong Kong’s courts to extradite suspects for trial to mainland China, where the courts are controlled by the Communist Party.

Even after a further one million protesters hit the streets, then-Chief Executive Carrie Lam would not withdraw the bill until a few months later. The protests, calling for accountability and democracy, raged rage on and turned violent only to be dissipated when COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020.

The ever tightening of tough measures in Hong Kong clearly shows that Xi has indeed become the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, especially since the ending of presidential two-term limits in 2018. 

Xi has departed from the collective leadership practices of his post-Mao predecessors. He has centralised power and created working groups under his baton to subvert government bureaucracy, manifesting as the new helmsman of Bamboo Capitalism from Xinjiang to Tibet and Hong Kong. 

Every leader, whether in a democracy or autocracy, has a limited shelf-life. President Xi appears to be no exception.

Certainly, going by the flip-side of the Chinese economy and reports of protests against his Covid policy. 

–*The writer is a Delhi based journalist and commentator