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The global pushback against China's overreach in Hong Kong

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Supporters of Hong Kong anti-government movement gather at Liberty Square in Taipei, Taiwan, 13 June, 2020 (Reuters/Wang).

In Brief

On 28 May 2020, with a vote of 2878 to 1, China's rubber stamp National People's Congress passed and enacted its new controversial Hong Kong national security legislation. It sent a clear message to the international community: Hong Kong's ‘one country, two systems’ model is history. But the process of hollowing out Hong Kong's autonomy started much earlier.

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The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has played a very long game. Following the 1997 handover of Hong Kong, the CCP used ‘its united front approach to advance a selective decolonisation of Hong Kong [and] former beneficiaries of British colonial rule such as the Catholic Church, and other Christian denominations were increasingly disenfranchised’.

Other sectors of Hong Kong’s society continued to benefit from party-state patronage, particularly the local business community. The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government also began working closely with the CCP-controlled Liaison Office and implemented policies that largely aligned with the interests of the Chinese party-state.

The process of undermining democracy accelerated once CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. Under Xi we have seen the rise of an ever-expanding security state. According to Yuhua Wang and Carl Minzner, ‘public security chiefs have risen in bureaucratic influence, funding and personnel for state operations aimed at controlling citizen petitioners and social protest have increased, and control of the institutions responsible for addressing these issues has been vested in progressively more senior Party authorities’.

Security analyst Samantha Hoffman points out that ‘threats come from both inside and outside China’s physical borders and from both inside and outside the CCP. China doesn’t delineate between external and internal security policy’. This is particularly evident in the CCP’s military–civil fusion which can be described as China’s attempt ‘to create and leverage synergies between defence and commercial developments, particularly in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology’.

In the past six years, an entire suite of national security legislation has been passed, including mainland China’s Counter-Espionage Law (2014), National Security Law (2015), Cyber Security Law (2017), National Intelligence Law (2017) and Overseas NGO Law (2017). It was only a matter of time before Xi would put Hong Kong in a chokehold too. Chief Executive of Hong Kong Carrie Lam seemed eager to please him by initiating the extradition bill in 2019. Now the CCP’s unilateral imposition of the national security law on Hong Kong means that mainland China’s governance model has firmly arrived in the territory.

Hong Kong expert and human rights activist Dan Garrett pointed out that the ‘enemification’ of dissidents is a key approach to governance under Xi Jinping. The Chinese party-state has weaponised its increasingly militant form of nationalism against Hongkongers. Amid the uprising over the extradition bill, Chinese state media portrayed Hongkongers as undeserving and disloyal. Meanwhile, China’s Consul-General in Brisbane, Australia, praised mainland Chinese international students’ physical assaults against peaceful pro-Hong Kong protesters at the University of Queensland.

The CCP’s strategy of ruling by fear in Hong Kong is also seen in its use of political and psychological warfare. China’s Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office (HKMAO) recently used dehumanising language to refer to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement as a ‘political virus’. The HKMAO also called for the elimination of so-called ‘poisonous’ and ‘violent’ protesters. Following the most recent protests, a disproportionately large number of children were arrested. What the CCP fears most is a new generation of Hongkongers who no longer accept the Party’s authority.

Despite an overbearing central government and an inept HKSAR government, Hong Kong’s political movement has shown great courage. But it has struggled to reach a consensus over its ultimate goal. While previous demands were implicitly in defence of the ‘one country, two systems’ model, political activists will have to reassess their strategic options.

By lobbying for the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act in the United States, political activists have enabled the US government to exert pressure on the CCP. They correctly assumed that Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy cannot be won without the international community taking a stand against the CCP. But this means that Hong Kong may now become a political football for US–China great power rivalry. Given US President Donald Trump’s unpredictability, there is no guarantee for Hongkongers that he won’t use the city’s fate as a bargaining chip in future trade negotiations.

This escalation has also placed considerable pressure on the European Union to clarify its muddled position on Hong Kong. It remains to be seen whether the international community can muster the strength to push back against an increasingly totalitarian CCP. While some believe that western governments’ policy of engagement with China is dead, this does not mean that it will flip to the extreme of containment. Western governments are more likely to seek a middle ground, a strategy that international relations expert Gerald Segal once called ‘constrainment‘.

The signing of former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten’s open letter by over 800 parliamentarians from 40 countries as well as the launch of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China suggests that this evolution in the West from engagement with China to ‘constrainment’ has already started.

Andreas Fulda is a senior fellow at the University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute. He is author of The Struggle for Democracy in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong: Sharp Power and Its Discontents (Routledge, 2019).

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