The city’s lawmakers won’t try to solve its problems. They’re too busy mimicking Beijing.
Hong Kong is about to enact another security law on top of the draconian one Beijing imposed following prodemocracy protests in 2020. Known as Article 23, the new law includes a vague definition of state secrets, just like that under mainland Chinese law; the power to hold suspects without charges; and punishments for people who publish “false or misleading statements.”
The city’s mini constitution, which came into effect with its handover to China in 1997, actually requires the passage of Article 23. But no previous Hong Kong leader has been willing to take it on for fear of a ferocious backlash. In fact, the city’s government introduced a version of the article in 2003 but wound up shelving it under widespread criticism that the law violated Hong Kong’s special status.
John Lee, Hong Kong’s chief executive, will face no such dissension this time around. The 2020 national-security law, combined with British colonial regulations that the city has resuscitated to criminalize political speech, have obliterated civic space. The government has reengineered the electoral process to wipe out opposition at every level, and stunt elections have replaced the city’s democratic model with “patriotic rule.”
Lee and other city leaders ultimately answer to Beijing, and they are apparently unwilling to make the best of the few remaining elements of the city’s exceptional status. Instead, they are feverishly obsessed with security and with integrating Hong Kong into the mainland. For them, governing appears mainly to consist of mimicking Beijing or trying to predict what it wants from them.
“The biggest obstacle to Hong Kong’s future development is its current political elite,” Wang Xiangwei, an associate professor of practice at Hong Kong Baptist University and a former editor in chief of the South China Morning Post, said on an online talk show last month. Lawmakers should proactively pitch Beijing on their ideas for administering the city, Wang said, and demonstrate that they are capable of taking charge. Instead, he said, “they are trying to guess Beijing’s intentions.”
Read: Why I won’t give up my dream for Hong Kong
The early results from this new era of governance inspire little confidence. The Hang Seng Index, a measure of the city’s financial health but also an unofficial barometer of public sentiment, has declined for four consecutive years. It was recently overtaken by India’s as the world’s fourth largest stock market. Housing prices are tumbling. The city’s birth rate has plummeted to a record low, and Hong Kong, according to experts, appears to be suffering from a mental-health crisis. Lee has urged journalists to tell “good Hong Kong stories,” but the media have largely fixed their attention on the high-profile trial of the newspaper tycoon Jimmy Lai.
The city’s new lawmakers include a crop of young hyper-nationalists who compete for the favor of officials in Beijing. They are fond of obnoxious online banter—cheering on Russia, berating Taiwan—and performative displays of patriotism, such as staging protests at Google’s offices and the British consulate. Some legislators have adopted a decidedly conspiratorial worldview: One this week said that the soccer star Lionel Messi and his club, Inter Miami, were controlled by a “black hand” that wanted to “snub” Hong Kong, and she recommended barring Messi from entering the city.
Many lawmakers have taken part in study trips to the mainland to learn about policies and innovations. Photos show groups of them staring, enraptured, at mundane pieces of infrastructure or studiously hunching over their notebooks as they are lectured about the greatness of China’s achievements.
A person in Hong Kong with ties to the pro-Beijing camp, who asked not to be identified, because of possible repercussions, told me that legislators often have schedules packed with such extracurriculars as dinners with Chinese officials and outings with businessmen to drink mao-tai, a type of Chinese liquor that is synonymous with dealmaking and overindulgence. Chinese officials in Hong Kong now keep close tabs on lawmakers’ comings and goings; last year, legislators were chastised for poor attendance. When they are present, few seem eager to take on ambitious initiatives. “They just work on trivial, useless matters,” my source said.
Neither lawmakers nor the government is keen to take ownership of Hong Kong’s many problems. In the past, pro-Beijing lawmakers and members of the government blamed the prodemocracy camp for whatever ills befell the city, no matter how scant or nonexistent the evidence. Now the government and lawmakers find themselves with a dilemma of their own making: The old scapegoats are in jail, exiled, or otherwise barred from meaningful political participation, so officials need new culprits to pin their underperformance on.
More often than not, they point to the United States, the West more broadly, or some amalgamation of shadowy outside forces working to destabilize Hong Kong. And they do so by issuing screeds and condemnations whose tone and vocabulary are jarringly incongruous with the government’s past reputation for efficient civil service and lingering British formality. When the U.S. credit-rating agency Moody’s issued a negative outlook for Hong Kong and Macau in December, the city’s No. 2 official went on the radio to claim that the decision was part of a Western-led plot to smear the city as well as the mainland. “Its sole purpose is to use Hong Kong as a means of suppressing the country’s development,” he said. “This is very obvious.”
Hong Kong’s government has no constructive solutions to the city’s problems and tends to resort instead to exerting control. Article 23, as it is proposed, will provide another instrument for doing so. The consultation document lays out a wide range of new offenses and expands those already on the books. One subsection titled “Barbaric and gross interference from foreign governments and politicians in China’s internal affairs,” neatly captures the general tone of the document. In a lengthy chapter dealing with espionage, state secrets is less an umbrella term than a circus tent.
The law would make it a crime to obtain, possess, or disclose nonpublic information that pertains to major policy decisions; the structure of national defense or the armed forces; diplomacy or foreign affairs of the mainland; external affairs of Hong Kong; economic and social development; technological development or scientific technology; the relationship between the mainland authorities and Hong Kong; and, for good measure, the previous national-security law.
Lee has gone as far as to warn that people saying the government is too focused on security could themselves be partaking in “soft resistance” to the government. A reporter, capturing the dark absurdity of the situation, asked Lee if criticizing Article 23 would itself be a violation of national security. Lee said that it would not be, but when a reporter from the generally establishment-friendly news station TVB tried to interview city residents about the law, they ducked away or declined to comment. One woman said that a single wrong sentence could be dangerous and that she was too scared to comment.
Article 23 is subject to a consultation period, which will finish at the end of the month; then lawmakers will draft it into a bill, and the Legislative Council will look it over. Lee has urged that this process conclude “as soon as possible,” because the city “can’t afford to wait” for the law.
But a former senior U.S. official familiar with the situation told me that Beijing does not feel the same urgency and had stipulated only that the law not be enacted during Taiwan’s elections last month. By unveiling the law now, Hong Kong has “injected a new variable” into cross-strait relations before Taiwan’s government is formed in May, the official said, adding: “It does seem eerily reminiscent of a previous chief executive who perceived demands of the boss,” a reference to Carrie Lam, whose drive to push through extradition legislation to please Beijing kick-started the 2019 protests.
Read: Farewell to Hong Kong and its big lie
A speedy passage is all but assured through Hong Kong’s neutered legislature. Back in 2003, the opposite was true: Some 500,000 people protested the proposed law that summer, including pro-Beijing politicians and business groups. At the time, the city was still reeling from the effects of the SARS epidemic, whose spread many in Hong Kong blamed on the mainland’s secrecy and official cover-ups. Article 23 looked to impose a similar regime of silence on Hong Kong.
“Freedom of the press ceased to be abstract when it was measured in terms of the deaths of 299 people, the infection of over one thousand, and the virtual collapse of key sectors of the Hong Kong economy, including the tourism and hospitality industry,” Michael E. DeGolyer, an academic who ran a years-long project monitoring Hong Kong’s transition from British to Chinese rule, wrote at the time. “Hong Kong people realized that passage of the proposed Article 23 legislation posed a direct threat to their personal health and well-being, not just a few of their freedoms or political rights.”
Today, Lee maintains that the law will resuscitate Hong Kong’s economy, reverse the out-migration of businesses and people, and vault the city back to the position it held before 2019. When he announced the legislation, he told reporters: “When you have stability and security, money will come toward it. People will come toward it.”
Lee’s exceedingly simple explanation is anchored in one of the most enduring falsehoods about Hong Kong: that the city’s residents are apolitical and will be placated by money. Neither of these assumptions is true, but even if they were, Hong Kong’s economic problems could not be solved so easily, as they are due in part to the slowing economy on the mainland. Exactly what is driving this deceleration has occasioned much debate, as have the possible remedies—but a new security law in Hong Kong is not one of them.
The law will put Hong Kong in step with the mainland, where foreign businesses have been spooked by a security clampdown. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that China has been detaining a British businessman since 2018, one of a spate of similar instances. Officials in Beijing have no experience in running a capitalist city. Looking to them for answers is “absolutely wrong,” Wang, the professor, said. “If Hong Kong continues to decline in this way,” he added, “we will be self-destructing.”
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