Hong Kong’s New Police State

“Beijing will not be able to establish iron rule over Hong Kong without destroying the territory.”  Or so I wrote in late 2019. By 2021, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seems bent on doing  whatever it takes to make the “city of protest” safe for the regime, no matter the cost.

On June 30, 2020, the eve of the 23nd anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover to Chinese rule, Beijing imposed a national security law (NSL) – or, more accurately, a regime security law – to “prevent, stop, and punish” the crimes of “secession,” “subversion,” “terrorism,” and “collusion with foreign forces.” These terms are vaguely defined to cover any form of dissent.

As of May 17, 2021, national security police have made 107 arrests under the law, with 57 prosecuted, among whom the majority have been denied bail. The first case, that of Tong Ying-kit, is going to trial without a jury. Beijing’s handpicked national security judges are very likely to convict the accused, with punishment ranging from three years to life imprisonment. The NSL decidedly turns Hong Kong away from its rule of law tradition.

This is Beijing’s response to the explosion of anger and frustration in 2019: If Hong Kongers do not want to be extradited across the border to mainland China, the central government simply brings its secret police and public security agents to openly operate in the city. The NSL effectively abrogates Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law, which states that “no department of the Central People’s Government… may interfere in the affairs” of the special administrative region. The NSL established the Office for Safeguarding National Security to “guide, oversee, and supervise” local officials, with a budget of over US$1 billion for 2020-21. Within weeks, Beijing officials and agents swiftly moved into the Metropark Hotel in Causeway Bay, where most protests traditionally started. The office has since expanded so fast that it took over another hotel, the Island Pacific, in April 2021.

Locking Up All Known Enemies

When the NSL was imposed at the eleventh hour on June 30, 2020, the Hong Kong police had already arrested over 9,000 people for various public order offenses related to the anti-extradition protests just in the preceding year. Since early 2020, they also refused to issue “no objection” permits to all applications for demonstrations, citing COVID-19 restrictions.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s moderate democrats were exploring different means to sustain the movement beyond street protests. They were emboldened by the District Council elections on November 24, 2019 in which candidates who campaigned on protest demands won 57 percent of the popular vote and 391 out of 452 seats. They organized a primary to enhance their chances of winning “35 plus” out of 70 seats in the Legislative Council in elections scheduled for September 6, 2020. Professional groups including medics, social workers, civil servants, lawyers, teachers, accountants, surveyors, architects, and financial sector staff organized new unions at an unprecedented rate.

The perceived national security threat the new law is intended to handle is precisely the nonviolent collective action that took center stage in 2020. The central government’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office condemned the primary for “turning Hong Kong into a base for ‘color revolution,’ infiltration and subversion activities against the country.” Luo Huining, director of Beijing’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong, said that the opposition would never be allowed to take over half of the legislature to “seize governance power.” Beijing expressed the same view about strikes and boycotts, whose goal must be “to paralyze the Hong Kong government” and “seize the power for governing the Special Administrative Region.” The general strikes on August 5, 2019 were denounced as “radical violations of public order and laws, challenging the bottom lines of ‘one country, two systems.’”

Why did Beijing elevate elections and unionizing to national security threats? As Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam put it, the entire opposition represented the “enemy of the people.” This is the CCP’s code for an all-out struggle.

According to longtime journalist Cheong Ching, the CCP has a long-standing policy to completely uproot pro-democracy voices in Hong Kong. Zhang Xiaoming, former director of the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office (HKMAO), retorted to pro-Beijing politician Jasper Yok-sing Tsang that Beijing’s ultimate policy toward the democratic camp was to “push them to death.” In 2014, Beijing vowed to tighten “comprehensive jurisdiction” over the city. Zhang told pan-democratic legislators that “the fact that you are still living is a sign of the central government’s tolerance.” In the aftermath of the 2014 Umbrella Movement, whose rallying cry was “we want genuine universal suffrage,” Chen Zuo’er, former deputy director of HKMAO, declared “a long-term struggle with the forces that bring calamity to Hong Kong,” taking the fight “from the street to the law courts, to the Legislative Council, to inside the government, and to universities and secondary schools.”

The NSL is the means to finally achieve Beijing’s goal. The arrests and other accompanying measures are illustrative.

Jimmy Lai, publisher of the Apple Daily, the city’s only pro-democracy print newspaper, has been particularly singled out. On August 10, 2020, 200 police officers raided the newspaper’s headquarters, arresting not only Lai but also his two sons and four senior executives. Lai has been formally charged and denied bail under the NSL. On May 17, 2021, the police further froze Lai’s US$64 million assets, including his 70 percent stake in the newspaper. This marks the first time that a listed company has been targeted.

Agnes Chow, the poster girl of the city’s rebellious youth, was arrested, charged, and denied bail along with Jimmy Lai since late 2020.

The biggest wave of the crackdown to date involved the arrests of 53 organizers and candidates of last year’s legislative primary on January 6, 2021. Among them, 47 were charged on February 28, with most denied bail. For their efforts to avoid splitting the pro-democracy votes, they are accused of collusion to subvert state power. The detained include former pro-democracy legislators and new aspirants for office, such as the internationally well-known Joshua Wong.

The Legislative Council was designed to keep democrats in a perpetual minority by allowing direct elections for only half of the seats. Beijing responded to the prospect of the opposition winning a simple majority by first disqualifying 12 candidates and then postposing the elections last July, and finally arresting all the democratic hopefuls early this year. Mike Lam, one of the 47 primary participants charged under the NSL, even had his retail chain “AbouThai” raided and HK$400,000 worth of merchandise seized by customs in April 2021, citing missing safety labels.

Activist radio hosts Tak-chi Tam and Yiu-sing Wan (the latter known as “Giggs”) have been charged with “seditious” speech and held without bail for their popular programs, which promoted anti-government demonstrations.

In addition, the authorities have deployed the city’s colonial-era public order laws to arrest the entirety of pro-democracy politicians and activists, including Martin Lee, “the father of Hong Kong’s democracy.” They have been sentenced to eight to 18 months in prison for organizing and participating in an “unauthorized assembly.” A protest is readily rendered “unauthorized” when the police refuse to issue the requisite “no objection” permit, as they have regularly done since 2020. Various well-known figures including Jimmy Lai, Joshua Wong, and Agnes Chow were sentenced on multiple counts of unauthorized assembly for protests that took place in 2019 and 2020. Those democratic politicians or activists that remain at large are in exile.

The city that once had no political prisoners is now overflowing with multiple generations of jailed democracy activists. The city that once provided refuge to those fleeing from mainland China is now producing scores of refugees seeking asylum abroad. To stem this exodus, the Hong Kong government in April granted the immigration director unlimited power to bar anyone from entering or leaving the city without a court order.

Quarantining Unknown Enemies

In Beijing’s eyes, it is not enough to lock away all the known opposition leaders. There are millions more faceless “troublemakers.” Behind each protest, there was “an army of volunteer pastors, doctors, and artists,” as the New York Times put it. After all, 1 million marched on June 9, 2 million on June 16, and 1.7 million on August 18 in 2019. The Civil Human Rights Front, which organized such peaceful marches, is facing a police probe into the donations that it received. Moreover, 1.6 million voted for pro-democracy district councilors on November 24, 2019, and 610,000 participated in the legislative primary on July 11-12, 2020. Indeed, many district councilors were hitherto unknown figures. The question for Beijing was how to stop at least one-fifth of the population — 1.6 million voters —from spoiling the party.

In March 2021, Beijing announced electoral changes to ensure that only certified “patriots” are eligible for public offices. The pre-existing Election Committee will swell its size from 1,200 to 1,500, fully stacked with pro-regime loyalists. It will expand its mandate from choosing only the chief executive to also selecting legislators. The Legislative Council will increase from 70 to 90 members, with 40 selected by the Election Committee. Directly elected legislative seats will be reduced from half to a mere 20, and candidates will require nomination by the Election Committee. The remaining 30 seats will be returned by narrowly based functional sectors.

As if the Election Committee could not be fully trusted to screen out potentially pro-democracy candidates, the new rules also create a Candidate Eligibility Review Committee advised by the national security police. This means that any interested candidates must subject themselves to investigation into their life-long records of loyalty to the CCP. The authorities seem to understand that elections held under these conditions would not be popular, and thus plan to criminalize calls for boycotting elections or spoiling ballots.

At the same time, the government imposed a new requirement for members of the Legislative Council, the judiciary, and the civil service to take an oath of loyalty. Those who refuse now face disqualification or dismissal.

Meanwhile, the city’s schools are to be given guidelines for national security education and a new textbook, “My Home is China,” to teach children to love the NSL and the motherland. Art museums also must have the national security unit of the police vet artworks and installations that may breach the NSL. Politically provocative art, such as Ai Weiwei’s paintings, will be stowed away.

Who Will Police the Police State?

A city that has everything vetted by the national security police can only be called a police state.

In 2019, the city’s residents watched with horror as the Hong Kong police force, once Asia’s finest and cleanest, were readily coopted to act with impunity like the mainland’s public security forces. To clear protesters, the riot police regularly fired tear gas, rubber bullets, beanbag rounds, and water cannons at high velocity, at head level, and at close range, so that even technically non-lethal crowd-control weapons caused severe injuries. Since August 11, 2019, police officers have also routinely beaten the arrested with batons, pinned them down and rubbed their faces against the ground, pepper-sprayed their wounds, and broken their bones. Officers fired live ammunition, causing near-fatalities on October 1 and November 11. All such abuses occurred in front of live-streaming media, so they were well documented by local and international watchdogs. Doctors and nurses, who saw firsthand the severity of injuries, staged sit-ins with the slogan “Hong Kong police attempt to murder Hong Kong citizens.”

The events on July 21 and August 31, 2019, are particularly infamous. In the first instance, white-clad assailants armed with sticks and rods indiscriminately attacked rail commuters and pedestrians at the Yuen Long station. Current Police Chief Chris Tang was then the district’s commander. Officers did not show up until the thugs had left. Senior officers were filmed speaking with the men in white shirts prior to the attacks; a pro-regime legislator, Junius Ho, was seen shaking hands with gang leaders. All these led to suspicions that the police were colluding with the attackers. In the aftermath, a pro-democracy legislator Cheuk-ting Lam, who was himself beaten bloody, was arrested for rioting. Freelance journalist Bao Choy, who produced an award-winning video investigation on the incident, was convicted and fined HK$6,000 for using public car registration records to establish police collusion. Radio Television Hong Kong, which ran the episode, was appointed a new director, Patrick Li, in March 2021 who has since required prior approval for political programs. On August 31, uniformed police launched indiscriminate attacks on passengers at the downtown Prince Edward station.

On the first “National Security Education Day” on April 15, 2021, a schoolgirl was photographed pointing a blue toy gun at the head of another child in a mocked-up train carriage at the police college. When the Apple Daily likened this image to the August 31 incident, Chris Tang warned of actions against “fake news.” In May 2021, Carrie Lam reinforced the message that the government was going to criminalize “fake news” that spread “misinformation, hatred, and lies.” Of course, journalists have complained since 2019 that it is the authorities that have been lying about police violence. To shape a positive narrative, the police also sold souvenirs, including teddy bears dressed in riot gear holding warning flags regularly seen during the 2019 protests.

The police state is intended to destroy the opposition as “the enemy of the people.” However, when the national security police are given carte blanche immunity for whatever they do and hold vetting power over all public offices, anyone who dares to reprimand them – including their superiors – can be seen as “the enemy of the police.”  When Carrie Lam’s deputy, Chief Secretary Matthew Cheung, apologized over the Yuen Long incident by saying that “the police’s handling fell short of the citizens’ expectations,” he was rebuked publicly by the Police Inspectors’ Association. One anonymous statement read: “Matthew Cheung, why do you deserve to represent the police force? If you want to apologize, you should resign. If you don’t step down or apologize to the whole force, you will be a sworn enemy of the police!” On the other hand, Director of National Security Frederic Choi was recently caught in an unlicensed massage parlor with six women arrested for prostitution, but the police’s internal procedure cleared him of any illegal or immoral conduct.

With the police state firmly in place, Beijing will get what it wants and make Hong Kong into just another Chinese city. This means not just the end of Hong Kong’s once flourishing freedoms, but also the full-scale transfer of mainland-style corruption, with periodic “anti-corruption campaigns” that bring down the less powerful rather than the most corrupt. With more concentrated wealth, Hong Kong is set to become more corrupt than the rest of China. To eliminate any challenge to the regime, the CCP is destroying a once-thriving international city on par with New York and London and turning it into a second-tier Chinese city.