Most of the world remembers footage from Hong Kong in the summer of 2019: young people in black crowding the streets as Molotov cocktails fly overhead, police cracking their batons, clouds of blinding tear gas. Today, three years after the protests, Hong Kong is an oppressed city. During the Covid pandemic, government orders kept people at home and gave police an incentive to stop and search anyone not wearing a mask properly. After Omicron tore up nursing homes earlier this year, the government continued to ban groups larger than four from gathering in public.
Much of this is due to an unprecedented new security law that Beijing imposed on the city in June 2020. Its broad regulations and unpredictable enforcement gutted the city’s democracy movement and the richness of civic life disappeared. The once frequent rallies, public debates, open forums and large campuses for opposition politics are gone. Most human rights and democracy groups are closed. No journalist, academic or artist who works with words feels completely secure. Documentaries that officials say could threaten national security interests, including those for 2019, are banned. Public libraries have locked books by activists as well as journalists’ accounts of the protests. The city’s broadcaster RTHK has purged its website of most reports from the time. There are no official archives of Apple Daily, News standand civic news, after arrests and threats forced media companies to close.
By spring 2020. Hong Kong police have arrested 10,270 people, and no doubt detained more, in what the government euphemistically calls “social unrest.” Prosecutors brought charges against a quarter of those arrested. Since the new security law was imposed, more than 160 people have been arrested, including many prominent activists.
The “social unrest” is still going on, at least in the judicial system. As of February, the government had indicted 2,800 people, about half of whom have pleaded guilty or signed compliance orders. Hundreds of those arrested during the protests are serving sentences in prisons and juvenile detention centers. Every day in courthouses across the city, magistrates and judges handle cases of public disorder, assault, weapons and disorderly conduct. Nights of protest played out in courtrooms as prosecutors showed videos of black-clad youths at barricades, sometimes throwing bricks and breaking windows. Prosecutors describe the protesters in the videos — which are devoid of context and background, with almost no sight of police action — as violent offenders. All the time, new court cases start; most crimes in city ordinances do not have deadlines for filing charges. A person charged by the police with an unauthorized assembly in 2019 could face charges months or even years later. Hong Kong’s youth are a generation in limbo, waiting for this era to end.
ILLUSTRATION: JOAN WONG
In 1984, when Britain agreed to give up the colony of Hong Kong, Beijing officials promised that when China took over, the city’s government would have “a high degree of autonomy except in the fields of foreign affairs and defense.” By the time the transfer took place, at midnight on July 1, 1997, it was clear that autonomy had notable asterisks. Hong Kong will exist as a special part of China – with its own rights, legislature and legal system – until 2047. Yet the final interpretation of the city’s constitution will lie not with Hong Kong’s courts but with China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee.
China’s involvement soon expanded in Hong Kong’s economy and development. Since SARS rocked the city’s economy in 2003, state-controlled companies have poured money into the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Such companies supply much of the city’s food, develop transportation and commercial real estate, and exert enormous influence on the territory’s politics.
