The arrested 53 activists in Hong Kong on national security charges, is purifying an entire generation of politicians. Police also demanded documents from three news organizations and for the first time arrested a foreign national – US human rights lawyer John Clancey – on charges of national security. These moves represent an attack on civil society whose aim is apparently to destroy the system that has fostered the type of political involvement that in 2019 brought nearly 2 million people – almost a quarter of the population – to the streets.
Those arrested are suspected of undermining, imposing a maximum sentence for life in prison. By removing the Hong Kong authorities from the political stage, they effectively toppled the opposition. But the subtext behind the official statements for the arrests is even colder.
Hong Kong security chief John Lee said at a news conference that these arrests were necessary as their “malicious” plans for “mutual destruction” would paralyze the government and lead the city into a “bottomless abyss”. What were these bad deeds? In fact, last year, police assembled all those involved in informal primaries designed to select pan-Democratic candidates for a legislative election that was later postponed because of Covid-19.
The mismatch between such apparently moderate actions and the hyperbolic accusations is key; it underscores how the government is attacking reality and distorting language and self-intention. This epistemological offense represents gas lighting on a large scale, or even an attempt to reform public memories of the recent past.
China’s Communist Party used this tried-and-true tactic after suppressing the 1989 protest for democracy, which it again directed as counter-revolutionary riots to overthrow the government. At the time, the strategy succeeded in intimidating Chinese through their memories of the Cultural Revolution and the promise of economic growth.
But it is unlikely that the 600,000 Hong Kongers who voted in the by-elections last year will be persuaded. To them, the arrests represent an attack on the possibility of civic participation, an attack on hope itself. They show the government’s tendency to play with fire, and steal the protest movement’s own slogan inspired by Hunger Games: “If we burn, you burn with us” or laam-chau. The government seems determined to surpass the protest movement, despite the devastation it causes as it is hacked and burned by Hong Kong’s most cherished institutions.
In terms of timing, China has opportunistically adopted the distraction surrounding a global pandemic, the Brexit trade deal, the US Senate’s runoff in Georgia, and a crippling government in Washington. Cynics note that it is no coincidence that Beijing’s trade agreement with the EU, which has been on the negotiating table for seven years, was sealed. But the fact that the European Parliament can still reject this agreement raises the question of whether external pressure could make Beijing even more prolific; the government of Biden, which promises to stand with the people of Hong Kong, may soon find out.
In any case, it’s too late for Hong Kong to return to its famous world. The moderates who tried to work within the system have been criminalized, while Beijing has already ruled that the new national security law surpasses the basic law that provides the framework for post-retrocession Hong Kong.
For China’s Communist Party, national security has always meant security regime. The risks posed by Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement were therefore too great for the domestic audience, the only one that applies to Beijing. Since the protests in 2019, Beijing has strengthened its control over information to censor online discourse and flooded social media with comments that Hong Kongers view as spoiled and undeserved. Despite their rudeness, these tactics have managed to undermine most feelings of brotherhood between the mainland and Hong Kong.
Recent Chinese political thinking views sovereignty as no gray zones; people can be enemies or allies, with nothing in between.
However, this strategy still carries risks. Instead of marginalizing the more radical fringe, it criminalizes political moderates, who can overwhelmingly alienate the sections of the population that support them in direct polls. But Hong Kong CEO Carrie Lam shows no compulsion; in 2019 she calls the protesters “enemies of the people”. In 2020, she extended the designation to everyone who opposed the security law. The act of opening 2021 with mass arrests seems to be widening the gap between the governor and the rulers, raising the deceptively tricky question of who the enemies are in this comparison – and indeed, who the people are.
• Louisa Lim is the author of The People’s Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited and a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne
• Ilaria Maria Sala is a writer and journalist in Hong Kong