Beijing crushes Hong Kong’s spirit under a legal jackboot

China’s latest move is a looming, terrible and perhaps irreversible tragedy for the people of Hong Kong.

Pro-democracy supporters scuffle with riot police at a rally in Hong Kong. Picture: Getty Images

The Chinese Communist Party has decided now to crush the semi-independent, liberal way of life, based on the rule of law and independent institutions, that the people of Hong Kong have enjoyed since before the territory’s handover to Beijing in 1997.

The passage by Beijing’s National People’s Congress of a national security law to apply in Hong Kong makes this now stark and clear and undeniable.

Under the Sino-British Joint Declaration, and Hong Kong’s Basic Law that flowed from it, Hong Kong is meant to have its own national security laws.

It hardly seems to lack them. The Hong Kong authorities have arrested 8000 people in this past 14 months of protests.

Carrie Lam’s Hong Kong administration this week tried to pass its own complementary law that would make it a crime, punishable by three years in prison, to insult the Chinese national anthem.

Under Beijing’s new national security law for Hong Kong it will become a crime to spread false information, engage in acts of sedition or secession, and to conspire with foreign agents.

Beijing’s People’s Armed Police, the Ministry of State Security and other similar mainland institutions will set up in Hong Kong.

The vagueness in Chinese law of terms such as sedition and foreign agents suggests virtually anyone in Hong Kong who participated in demonstrations such as those that transfixed the world over the past 14 moths, even the most peaceful demonstrations, would be liable for savage punishment.

This is a looming, terrible and perhaps irreversible tragedy for the people of Hong Kong.

The once famous romantic novelist Han Suyin observed that British Hong Kong was living “on borrowed time in a borrowed place”.

It now seems that the Hong Kong its 7.5 million people have built — the Hong Kong of an open life, a nearly free citizenry, a wide cultural sympathy, the full range of ethical and aesthetic and even political concerns — that this too was living on borrowed time.

Beijing’s moves are clearly in violation of the agreement under which Hong Kong fell under Beijing’s control in 1997, which provided that the people of Hong Kong would exercise “a high degree of autonomy” and would preserve their distinctive way of life for 50 years.

That is the view of Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne; US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo; British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab; and Canadian Foreign Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne.

The four issued a joint statement, which said in part: “Direct imposition of national security legislation on Hong Kong by the Beijing authorities, rather than through Hong Kong’s own institutions as provided for under Article 23 of the Basic Law, would curtail the Hong Kong people’s liberties and, in doing so, dramatically erode Hong Kong’s autonomy and the system that made it so prosperous.”

The foreign ministers described Beijing’s move as “in direct conflict with its international obligations under the principles of the legally binding, UN-registered Sino-British Joint Declaration”. They said this would “undermine the ‘one country, two systems’ framework” and lead to the prosecution of political crimes in Hong Kong.

The absence of New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters from this statement shouldn’t be misinterpreted as division within the Five Eyes allies. Peters issued his own protest before the joint statement came out.

Chinese government websites, embassy spokespeople, and TV, newspaper and social media outlets have been full of denunciation of the foreign ministers’ criticisms.

Pompeo has formally informed the US congress that the State Department can no longer certify that Hong Kong is an autonomous territory. This could well mean that Hong Kong loses the special trade status it enjoys in the US system.

Alternatively the Americans might take other actions against the People’s Republic of China more broadly, or against targeted Chinese senior officials.

Why is this all coming to a head now?

There seem to be three explanations: tactical considerations by Beijing; the sour, dangerous mood of the coronavirus world; and the long-term strategic ambitions and world view of Xi Jinping’s government.

First, the tactical stuff. It was probably always the case that Beijing would eventually act decisively to snuff out Hong Kong’s semi, quasi, attenuated but nonetheless real, partial independence. But a year ago, Beijing was constrained tactically. Any big action that it took led to a million or more people, sometimes two million or more, coming out on the streets of Hong Kong to protest.

Mostly these protests were peaceful which meant they enjoyed enormous legitimacy, and blanket media coverage, around the world. Occasionally some of the demonstrators became violent and that was a mistake. But overall there was hardly a democrat in the world who didn’t sympathise with the idealism and courage of the people of Hong Kong fighting to preserve their rights.

Second, the US congress was as moved by these images as anyone. And had Beijing acted in too heavy-handed a manner the congress would likely have imposed crippling sanctions. Don’t worry about Donald Trump. He would likely have been less inclined to impose sanctions than congress and if congress had been in that mood its margin in favour of sanctions would probably have been veto-proof.

What changed those tactical constraints on Beijing was the coronavirus. The virus alone did what the Hong Kong government had never been able to do. From January on, it virtually stopped the protests from convening.

It also completely preoccupied the world, taking interest away from Hong Kong. And it inflicted massive damage on the US economy, so that while congress has not become one zot more sympathetic to Beijing, it has become a little more cautious about actions that might also harm the US economy.

Which leads us to the second big change. The virus has not produced a time of amity and co-operation among nations as they seek a cure and a way out of the pandemic. Instead it has produced a sour, bitter environment. And nowhere is more sour or more bitter than Beijing itself. Having initially underestimated and mishandled the virus in Wuhan, Beijing has been in a furious battle ever since to create a new virus narrative.

Enraged by international criticism of its behaviour, Beijing has responded by casting itself to its domestic audience as the victim of international persecution. It has ratcheted up nationalist outrage at home and picked a fight with a bewildering number of nations abroad.

It has a thousand troops now on Indian territory in Ladakh in the Himalayas and is playing an intensely dangerous game of military brinkmanship with New Delhi. It has frequently violated Taiwan’s air space and similarly challenged Japanese air space. It has harassed Southeast Asian shipping across the South China Sea. Its wolf warrior diplomats are engaged in multiple disputes and abuse in Europe. It’s even beating up on tiny inoffensive New Zealand, the mouse that had seemed determined never to roar.

But there is a third factor at work as well. And that is the historic ambition and purpose-driven ideological view of history prevalent in Xi’s government.

Xi has accelerated the trends of communist Chinese history. And he is immensely important himself as a figure in history. But he is not an outlier in Chinese communism. He is in fact an intensely representative figure.

The Chinese Communist Party brings together two ideological dynamics unique in global history. The first is Marxism/Leninism. Western analysts routinely pooh-pooh Marxism/Leninism, if they’ve ever even heard of it. But one compliment analysts should pay the Chinese is to listen to what they actually say, especially to each other.

The Chinese Communist Party has fashioned its own ideological position but it has taken at least five lessons from Marxism/Leninism.

These are: the centrality of the Communist Party to the state; the dominance of the state in the economy; the necessity for the party to ruthlessly maintain control over every element of state power; the historical, almost metaphysical quality of the party as the vanguard of history, the animating agent of history; and finally the notion that political life for the party and the citizenry is one of continuous struggle. This last is a theme Xi himself has often repeated.

Marxism has always had metaphysical pretensions and a kind of spiritual ambition. Its metaphysics are junk and its spirituality fraudulent, but these were two factors that explained much of its appeal throughout the 20th century.

The second great ideological dynamic that powers the Chinese Communist Party is the tradition of Chinese nationalism and exceptionalism.

Under Xi, Beijing has fashioned a pervasively ideological view of all history. It has determined, for instance, that the Qing Dynasty (1636 to 1912), China’s last imperial rule before the Chinese republic was established early in the 20th century, was a uniquely benign, and uniquely non-military, golden child of world history.

The Qing dynasty, like all other empires in human history, expanded in part through military conquest. But under modern Communist Party orthodoxy it is seen as having won support from the periphery of the Chinese empire, from Tibet and Xinjiang, from Taiwan and Inner Mongolia, entirely through acceptance of its superior civilisational qualities.

Blending with the revolutionary metaphysics of Marxism, this view of Chinese history endows the Chinese national project with a quality of spiritual high purpose. One of Australia’s most gifted Sinologists, Geremie Barme, has argued that one element of the way the Chinese government views the Chinese national project is that it gives spiritual meaning to Chinese lives.

The aforementioned Han Suyin, who was a great supporter of the Chinese Communist Party, once remarked that the true religion of the Chinese people was China. That is surely the view of the Chinese government.

A phrase common in Chinese official publications, though not all that often translated, is talk of “the sacred, indivisible territory of China”.

The ambition of the Xi government, so it often says, is to reclaim all of China’s traditional territory, which means Taiwan, and, extremely worryingly, apparently a great deal of the South China Sea.

The existence of a liberal society in Hong Kong, and even more of a fully democratic, liberal, self-governing, peaceful, Chinese constitutional democracy in Taiwan, thus represents a kind of existential threat to the con­temporary world view of Beijing. For Hong Kong and Taiwan in their current guise rebuke the idea that Chinese history must go the way of the Chinese Communist Party, that it must represent a centralised, national rule that is not liberal nor democratic.

One fusion of Marxism with Chinese nationalism is through a kind of debased Confucianism, which reduces the great and complex sage of Chinese history to a demand for conformity to authority, and is really about the ruthless exercise of power.

A couple of weeks ago the Hong Kong authorities arrested 81-year-old barrister Martin Lee. Lee was the great figure in Hong Kong’s struggle to strike a decent deal with Beijing back in the 80s and early 90s. He bitterly and rightly condemned Britain for its failure to introduce any democracy in Hong Kong during its long colonial rule.

He always won the most votes in any democratic election. He is a byword for personal decency and moderation. Scholarly, unfailingly courteous, precise, a conscientious Catholic, deeply in love with the rule of law, his rebukes to Beijing were always measured and legal and ethical. He is one of the most admirable men I have ever interviewed.

He points out that one thing the world will lose if Hong Kong’s freedom is suppressed is an independent media that actually understands Beijing and can sometimes reveal its secrets, such as its early mishandling of the coronavirus.

A year ago the police would not have acted against this mildly spoken voice of moral reason. Lee’s offence in part was to have attended a demonstration. Now the police feel they can do what they like to Lee. That is the sorrowful change Hong Kong’s year of living dangerously has wrought.