Delenda is Hong Kong. China knows that, whatever it does in the Pearl of the East, someone is going to call it a liberticide, in English. Firstly, those who, for a century and a half, kept it under their colonial rule. But if revenge must be served cold, Beijing has also allowed itself to offer it at the right moment and with icy humor.
The Legislative Council of Hong Kong, a city in turmoil for five years, approved this Tuesday, unanimously and without question, the security law pending since its reintegration into China. This provides for life imprisonment for sedition and high treason. Crimes specifically contemplated by the new legislation, along with sabotage, espionage, theft of state secrets and foreign interference.
“We have to legislate for the security of our country and Hong Kong. Whatever has to come, will come. We don’t care,” said the head of the legislative body, Andrew Leung. The so-called Article 23 has been approved after just two weeks of debate and will come into force in four days.
For all these reasons, for its detractors, it is a gag law, which degrades the freedoms of the former colony (freedoms that, by the way, never included the right to vote). For its defenders, however, it is the guarantee that there will not be a revolt again like the one that paralyzed the city for months in 2019, including the looting of that same legislative chamber, prefiguring the storming of the Capitol, a few months later.
Those days, more than one predicted a “Tiananmen-style” solution, with a military crushing of the youth protest spreading its shock wave to Taiwan. Thus discrediting, for several generations, any promise of reunification under the siren song of “one country, two systems.” Although nothing has been left to chance, that solution actually arrived this Tuesday, five years later. The turtle, as is known, is a symbol of wisdom in Chinese civilization.
That turtle started moving once the Taiwan elections were over, when there were fewer incentives to torpedo it. Then, everything happened at great speed, with the world pending on Palestine and Ukraine. For thirty days, the Hong Kong authorities presented the draft law for the introduction of suggestions to the public. Quite slowly, as will be seen.
To justify the classification of new crimes – all of them variants of the same sin – the project refers to practically identical articles from the legislation of the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and Australia. The Chinese authorities could have used India’s legal strangulation of NGOs receiving foreign funds as an example. But they have chosen to refer to the countries that they consider to be the batterers of the destabilization of those months.
As proof of this, they allude to the fact that, as soon as the covid confinements wreaked havoc and thousands of expatriates returned to their country of origin – or adoption – never to return, the protests never rose again. The revolts of that time, by the way, were triggered by the project that allowed “extradition” to the continent for certain crimes, also related to foreign interference.
For Hong Kongers interested in a democracy they were never able to taste – not because they were young, but because it never existed under a colonial governor – the legislation is a warning and a blow, despite the many references to consolidated democracies that they admire. Many of them, in fact, are already in Taiwan, Singapore, the USA or the United Kingdom. But for a no less vast number of Hong Kongers, it comes as a relief. Even in distant Thailand, those months of uproar served for “people of order” to demonize the parties that defined themselves as democratizing, pushing for their illegalization and obtaining it.
It should be said that both the mini-Constitution of Hong Kong and that of Macau call for the development of their own security legislation. Something that in the case of Macau occurred without any setback in the distant 2009. In Hong Kong, on the other hand, the first attempt, twenty years ago, ended with large protest demonstrations, in which thousands of people took to the streets to avoid the continental roller coaster, despite the supposed guarantees of the “one country, two systems” model.
Those protests caught the city’s leader by surprise, and he resigned, citing health reasons. This time, by the way, the deliberation period has been shortened from three months to just one.
But the most important thing is that, along the way, under the cover of covid, in mid-2020, Beijing imposed much more restrictive electoral legislation, with the ostensible objective of allowing only “patriots” access to public office, filtering to the “traitors”. President Xi Jinping, who had chosen not to suddenly quell the previous protests, also decided that he was not going to leave the field open for them to be repeated. The appearance of supporters of the “independence” of Hong Kong, of variable independence, alarmed the Chinese authorities, generally scrupulous when it comes to respecting the territorial integrity of others, let alone their own.
Although some consider that twenty years have been lost, one of the legislators cited does not see it that way. He believes that in these decades, the world has changed so much that the law would have had to be reformed anyway. Twenty years ago, China was not seen as “a systemic rival” by the EU, nor as a mere rival, for the scepter of hegemony, by the United States.
“Who could have imagined that TikTok would one day be presented in the United States as a matter of national security,” the same legislator says sarcastically. Another remembers that high treason can carry the death penalty in the United States.
In the defense of capital punishment, the Chinese one-party system and the American two-party system finally converge. Although China does not reveal the number of executions, it is assumed that it will multiply the 24 in the US in 2023. On the other hand, proportionally, for every citizen imprisoned in China there are five citizens imprisoned in the United States.
Washington and London have already reacted to the announcement. The White House speaks “of the end of an open society” and criticizes “the vagueness” in the definition of crimes, for sentences “ranging from several years to life imprisonment.” For his part, the British Foreign Secretary, David Cameron, has stated that the law violates the Hong Kong retrocession agreement signed in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee speaks ecstatically of “a historic day.” Not for freedoms.
