ANARCHY IN THE HK PART 394: NATIONAL INSECURITY EDITION
Thursday night, Beijing’s National People's Congress Standing Committee announced it will put forward proposals to enact national security legislation in Hong Kong that will officially make sedition, treason, foreign interference and terrorism crimes in the SAR - bypassing the HK government’s Legislative Council in the process.
By no coincidence, this comes after the HK govt, the HK police, pro-government politicians and Beijing liaison officials police have spent past few months consistently building up the narrative that the protest movement as secessionists and terrorists backed by foreign interference - which just happen to be the exact specific things this bill is targeting.
You see where this is going, yes?
Backgrounder: Under the Basic Law (the mini-constitution that governs Hong Kong under the One Country Two Systems arrangement that allows HK to operate separately from China for 50 years), Article 23 requires the HK govt to enact legislation covering “national security” issues such as sedition, treason and terrorism before its SAR status expires in 2047. This is, to say the least, thorny, because at the time the Basic Law was drafted, everyone knew what the Chinese govt counts as sedition and treason (i.e. simply saying something critical of the govt was equivalent to actively attempting to overthrow it), and that Beijing would naturally expect HK’s law to have similar criteria.
The HK govt first introduced an Article 23 bill in 2003. The response from the HK public was 500,000 people marching on the street to oppose it. The HK govt backed off and didn't bring the matter up again.
Now, in 2020, national security legislation is back, mainly because Beijing (and Carrie Lam, and her crew) have said that it’s the only way to put an end to the protests.
That’s not even remotely true, but it’s the only solution Beijing is interested in because that’s how they handle it on the mainland, and frankly they’re sick of our crap and want to out the fear of God into us. And with HK’s pro-Beijing majority in the Legislative Council not having a big enough majority to railroad legislation through locally, Beijing has evidently decided to bypass LegCo and enact national-security laws here by adding them to Annex III of the Basic Law. HK still has to pass its own national security law under Article 23, but in the meantime, the laws under Annex III will do nicely.
The vote is expected next week.
And so, what then?
I don't know. A lot depends on the details, but there’s no real reason to be optimistic when you loOk at the broader context in which all this is happening. Carrie Lam and her henchmen were just on TV telling us (and the world) that there’s nothing to worry about: we’re still a totally free and open society, and One Country Two Systems will remain completely intact after this bill is passed.
She said that about the extradition bill too.
I mean, these are the same people who just managed to get a long-running political satire program on RTHK taken off the air for the terrible crime of making fun of the police (by a comedian who used to be a police officer!), which to them is no different from actively encouraging people to hate the police. So no, I don't trust them to wield this new power responsibly or fairly.
Is it truly the end of One Country Two Systems?
It’s too soon to say definitively - I think it will continue to exist in the technical sense that HK will still be considered a semi-autonomous region that gets to plan its own economy and have its own version of democracy, etc. But it will be run the way Beijing tells them to run it - and Beijing will be a lot more proactive in doing just that. In terms of free speech, human rights and civil liberties, the HK system may be a separate system, but it will be a system nearly identical to the mainland system, rendering the term another meaningless catch-phrase for Beijing’s foreign ministry spokespeople and the CE to throw around when they respond to international criticism, like “hegemony” and “rule of law”.
How will protesters react?
There’s a march planned for Sunday that the police will almost certainly ban, and will beat up and arrest anyone who tries (as well as anyone who happens to be near anyone who tries, the media and innocent bystanders included). Beyond that, I don’t know. My sense is that the protest movement overall won’t give up - the fact that Beijing is resorting to this shows that the protests has truly rattled the CCP. So stopping now would be a waste of all the effort put in so far.
But they aren’t crazy about another year of sucking tear gas in nightly street fights with riot police either, not least because they know it’s a futile gesture anyway. I’ve heard they’re looking for alternative resistance action plans.
On the other hand, if they feel they truly have nothing to lose, maybe they’ll go out swinging. In which the police would be delighted to accommodate them.
Either way, it seems 2047 has indeed come early.
For more information:
Read this Vox explainer.
Read also this mildly hopeful commentary from Stephen Vines.
The other shoe,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at https://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1642736.html. Please comment there using OpenID.