Yahoo News Beijing has fatally undermined the image of a self-governing and stable Hong Kong
To understand how wide Beijing now casts its security net in Hong Kong, consider the case of Martin Lee. Now in his 80s, Lee is a distinguished barrister, a politician and a lifelong defender of civil liberties. He has never committed an act of violence or advocated that others do so.
Last month, in an early sign of what was coming, Lee was arrested at his home. Fourteen other prominent Hong Kong citizens were taken into custody that day and charged with taking part in illegal demonstrations. He has pointed out that he was already facing 14 similar charges in mainland China, and had the extradition law that triggered last year’s protests in Hong Kong been adopted he could have been sent for trial in China under a system that not even the Chinese Communist party’s (CCP) most generous supporters could describe as adequate. The CCP regards rule of law and separation of powers as threats to its power. Law, for the party, is one instrument among many that can be used to eliminate opponents – who can be anyone from dissenting public intellectuals to prominent businessmen.
Lee was a member of the drafting committee for the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution and the legal scaffolding of the “one country, two systems” formula promoted by the late paramount leader of China, Deng Xiaoping. Deng saw it as the means by which China could recover sovereignty over the British colony while preserving Hong Kong’s civil liberties, rule of law, a relative lack of corruption and even an accountable government. He understood that these features had made Hong Kong a thriving centre of global finance and it was key to the economic renaissance of China that became his great legacy.
Not only has Hong Kong been essential to huge volumes of investment into China, it has also been a place where information and ideas that are stifled on the mainland could flourish, a place where spies from all over the world could learn each other’s secrets, civil society groups could organise and religious practice could thrive. Its media freedoms helped to save the world from the worst effects of the Sars epidemic in 2003: it was in Hong Kong that the CCP’s months-long silence was broken. Without that, many more people would certainly have died.
Hong Kong has also been a safety valve for a Chinese political system that has lurched too often between intense repression and violent convulsion. One reason the people of Hong Kong defend their freedoms so vigorously is that so many of them are there because they, or their parents or grandparents risked their lives to escape from China. They learned the value of Hong Kong’s freedoms from personal experience.
Deng, too, had experience of both the oppression and the convulsion and understood the value to China of Hong Kong as a place apart. He sent tanks to crush the students in Tiananmen Square in 1989, but he didn’t prevent the people of Hong Kong gathering, as they have every 4 June since, to remember the dead. This is the first year that that gathering is in doubt.
Speaking in New York in 2014, Lee pointed out that Deng’s promises to Hong Kong included no interference in its affairs by any mainland institution and the introduction of universal suffrage. Without universal suffrage, Lee warned, Hong Kong people would mistrust their government and the region would not be stable. But Beijing had repeatedly postponed universal suffrage, and in June 2014 China’s state council published a white paper that claimed government in Beijing had comprehensive jurisdiction over Hong Kong and Macau. As Lee predicted, Hong Kong has not been stable, Beijing has steadily lost support, and today a majority of people in the region identify as citizens of Hong Kong, but not of China.
Every move to tighten control since 1997 has been met with resistance. Throughout last year’s growing tumult provoked by a proposed extradition law, Carrie Lam, the latest in a line of disastrous chief executives, argued that Hong Kong’s silent majority supported her government. In an exceptionally large turnout, that majority responded by giving 90% support to democratic parties in the local elections in November. Beijing is anxious to avoid another electoral humiliation in the legislative elections later this year.
As resistance mounted, Beijing drew the lesson that only further repression would suffice, fatally undermining Deng’s vision of a self-governing and stable Hong Kong. It has now effectively torn up the treaty it signed with Margaret Thatcher’s government and condemned Hong Kong to further unrest and decline. If Beijing’s desired outcome was stability and security, it has disastrously mishandled it. Few doubt that Beijing’s security law will criminalise dissent, undermine the rule of law and target prominent activists such as the youth leader Joshua Wong, as well as veterans such as Lee. Further turmoil is inevitable.
The UK has been shamefully feeble in defence of Hong Kong, though the recent hardening of attitudes towards China within the Conservative party may produce something more than the usual pro-forma expression of concern. Hong Kong’s best hopes of support, however, lie in Washington. Under the 1992 Hong Kong Policy Act, the territory enjoys special trade status with the US, provided the secretary of state certifies annually to Congress that it retains its autonomous status. When, on Wednesday, Mike Pompeo notified Congress that Hong Kong could no longer be considered autonomous, the question left open is what will the Trump administration, already locked in angry confrontation with China, do about it?
The nuclear option of revoking Hong Kong’s US trade privileges would hurt Hong Kong more than China and could provoke direct retaliation on hundreds of US businesses in both regions. Other options, which include targeted sanctions on party officials, asset freezes and visa restrictions, carry similar risks. In other times, the US might have mobilised its allies to support a concerted rebuke in the upcoming G7 meeting and other high-level gatherings. But Trump is noted neither for effective nor skilful alliances, and his administration has been described as having an attitude to China but not a policy. As for the UK, the least it should do is to open its doors to those citizens of Hong Kong who hold British national (overseas) passports, something it should have done in 1997. This week, the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, spoke of opening up a “pathway to future citizenship” for BN(O)s, if China doesn’t “step back” from implementing the security bill. But, so far, these are just words. If the UK is to have any pretence to international standing, it must honour its moral debt.
• Isabel Hilton is a London-based writer and broadcaster who has reported extensively from China and Hong Kong
