Now it’s one country, one system — Xi rules off Hong Kong’s basic law
In Hong Kong on Wednesday a new national security law came into effect. It was drafted and passed in Beijing, and imposed arbitrarily on the territory. It effectively puts an end to the Basic Law under which Hong Kong has been governed since 1997.
This is a grim moment, and a wake-up call to all who cherish democracy and civil rights. Geopolitically, it’s similar to the Anschluss in March 1938, when Nazi Germany absorbed Austria.
The Basic Law guaranteed Hong Kong special autonomy under its own administration, no abridgement of its civil rights and movement towards full democracy across 50 years.
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All that is being swept away. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, there will be no special autonomy, no tenable civil rights and no democracy. The Basic Law is null and void. Beijing has scrapped the agreement into which it entered a generation ago.
The millions of citizens of Hong Kong who have been calling for more open and accountable government and more complete democracy in the territory face the unfettered apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party. They face arbitrary arrest and detention, lack of anything resembling due process and lack of the right to organise, protest or form political and civic bodies in defence of their basic freedoms. That’s what has just happened.
This is consistent with the communist regime’s practices in Tibet and Xinjiang, its total surveillance and indoctrination practices in China proper, and its harsh repression of all dissent or independence of thought. In short, Hong Kong is being repressed under the Gleichschaltung of the “China Dream”, the political and surveillance order of Xi’s national socialist state.
Comparisons with Adolf Hitler’s Germany are made too often and too glibly in common political discourse, especially when flung by left-wing militants at what are, in fact, liberal democracies. But in this case the comparison is warranted. Gleichschaltung, under Hitler’s Enabling Act of March 1933, was the introduction of a system of totalitarian control and co-ordination over all aspects of German society. From 1938, this was extended to all societies conquered by the Nazis.
There is no other adequate way to describe what Xi’s regime has been doing in China and has just introduced into Hong Kong. This is shocking enough, given the promises of the Basic Law.
What is even more shocking, as Stephen Vines pointed out acidly in the online Hong Kong Free Press last week, is the cynical and cowardly response of leading figures in Hong Kong’s administration and among sundry celebrities when confronted by the announcement of this “national security act” — this “Enabling Act” of the Xi regime.
The rollcall of sycophants starts with Chief Executive Carrie Lam who, as Timothy McLaughlin put it in The Atlantic recently, has “killed” Hong Kong. Justice Secretary Teresa Cheng has stated blithely that Hong Kong’s common law tradition should be cast aside to align with law in China — as if that were a good idea.
Security Secretary John Lee declared that the new law would have to limit communication between Hong Kong citizens and foreign governments. Erick Tsang, at the apex of Hong Kong’s Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Department, popped up with the suggestion that the law could be used to disqualify from elected office anyone who did not support the law’s abrogation of the special autonomy of Hong Kong.
These craven figures look for all the world like Austrian politicians embracing the Anschluss. They are neither standing up to the CCP’s imposition of control and co-ordination, nor even falling silent or resigning. No, they are embracing it. They are betraying everything that has made Hong Kong so remarkable and attractive for so long.
But it gets worse if you turn to what’s being trumpeted in the CCP media in Xi’s Reich. Last Saturday, China Central Television railed against Martin Lee and Anson Chan, the supremely dignified, principled and articulate leaders of the Hong Kong democratisation movement. They will not be left in peace to retire but will face retribution for their traitorous behaviour: “Do these troublemakers really think they can escape judgment day? Certainly they won’t. As some put it on social media: “Traitors will certainly come to a bad end! .”
Traitors? Seldom in its long history has China had finer citizens than Martin Lee and Chan. Both have been tireless campaigners for constitutional reform and democratisation in the city-state. This feral denunciation of them is the kind of thing one might have expected from a Joseph Goebbels.
Amid the pro-democracy protests last year, Chinese state media denounced Chan, now 80, as one of a “new Gang of Four” stirring up unrest. The others were Martin Lee, Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai and former politician Albert Ho. Gang of Four? There could hardly be a more perverse comparison. These four stand for the antithesis of what those architects of the Cultural Revolution stood for. And the latter actually were a Gang of Five led by Mao Zedong, whose portrait still sits above Tiananmen Square. Xi likes to drive through there, standing in his limousine, past huge military parades. Remind you of someone?
The implications are stark. A thoroughly nasty, anti-democratic superpower is snuffing out democracy in its neighbourhood. Taiwan is in Xi’s sights. And so are we.
Paul Monk is former head of the China desk in the Defence Intelligence Organisation and author of Thunder From the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2005) and Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018).
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