Others proposed that China pass a law tailor-made for Hong Kong, bypassing political obstacles in the city. Some Chinese academics published studies arguing that the mainland’s own national security law could be extended to Hong Kong. “The central government has the power to deal with these matters.” “Some people think that the central government can’t do anything,” Mo Jihong, a law professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a state think tank, said at a 2016 meeting about security legislation for Hong Kong. Hawkish voices began advancing arguments that China could impose a security law on the city by constitutional fiat. Xi’s calls for resurgent party power emboldened policy advisers to look for new ways to break the impasse over Hong Kong. “No one, including the Western countries, truly believed that Hong Kong locally had the ability to complete this legislation.”Īfter 2014, Mr.
“Nobody was willing to grab this hot potato,” Professor Tian said. A previous attempt had failed in 2003 after a massive protest. Pro-Beijing politicians in Hong Kong were reluctant to push for national security legislation. Chinese leaders began to worry that Hong Kong had become an ideological abscess that would need lancing. Tens of thousands of people responded by occupying major streets for two and a half months. In August 2014, the Chinese government revealed a narrow proposal to allow a direct vote starting in 2017, but only from among a handful of candidates approved by Beijing. Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, had raised the possibility of fulfilling China’s repeatedly delayed promise to let the public directly elect the chief executive, Hong Kong’s top official.
“It will only prompt an even bigger social reaction.”īeijing soon made clear that it was serious about setting new rules for Hong Kong. “This avowed posture of ‘crushing a crab to death with a boulder’ is a foolish move,” Chan Kin-man, an academic at the forefront of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy campaign, said at the time. While the term ignited protest by lawyers in Hong Kong, many considered it an intimidating political statement without legal foundation, one that would goad the opposition rather than deter it. Davis, a former professor of law at the University of Hong Kong and author of “Making Hong Kong China.” The paper’s new phrase, “comprehensive jurisdiction,” suggested that Beijing no longer saw a legal “firewall” encasing Hong Kong, said Michael C. Since that law took force one year ago, Beijing has unleashed a stampede of actions to bring Hong Kong into political lock step with the Chinese Communist Party: arresting activists, seizing assets, firing government workers, detaining newspaper editors and rewriting school curriculums. The paper marked the opening of a contest for control in the city, culminating in the sweeping national security law that few saw coming. But the words were dismissed by many as intimidating swagger that the city’s robust legal system and democratic opposition could face down.
The paper, published in June 2014, signaled the Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s determination to tame political defiance in the former British colony, which had kept its own laws and freedoms. Beijing, the document declared, would wield “comprehensive jurisdiction” over the territory. Hong Kong’s march toward an authoritarian future began with a single phrase in a dry policy paper.
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