Many had always been dubious about the sustainability of Deng Xiaoping’s pledge that Hong Kong would continue to be itself for 50 years after 1997. The pledge, which was written explicitly into an international treaty signed by both Britain and China and lodged at the UN (the Joint Declaration), was encapsulated in the mantra ‘one country, two systems’. For a start, many questioned whether the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party had any idea what Hong Kong being itself actually meant. As I noted in the diary, I had a problem explaining to Lu Ping the difference between the rule of law and rule by law. He found it difficult to accept that when I had been a government minister, my decisions could be subject to successful challenge in the courts. The distinguished barrister and pro-democracy legislator Margaret Ng put the point very well when speaking in her own defence in court against charges brought against her for civil disobedience. She said this: ‘Your honour, I came late to the law. I have grown old in the service of the rule of law. I understand that Sir Thomas More is the patron saint of the legal profession. He was tried for treason because he would not bend the law to the King’s will. His famous last words are well authenticated. I beg to slightly adapt and amend them: I stand the law’s good servant but the People’s first. For the law must serve the people, not the people the law’ (Hong Kong Free Press, 16 April 2021).
The economist Milton Friedman thought the whole idea of a free market economy under the rule of law living happily within the control and jurisdiction of a communist totalitarian state was preposterous. It was an oxymoronic contradiction on stilts. Others, including many Chinese business leaders in Hong Kong, plainly had their doubts as well, albeit kept close to their chests. Why otherwise would they make sure that they had foreign passports in their back pockets before British rule came to an end? Each of my successors, chief executives for the communist colonial power in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), either themselves had foreign passports or had ensured that members of their families had them. And, of course, there were some (for example, members of the United Front) who knew the Chinese Communist Party and its ways all too well and accepted as a pardonable necessity the bloody brutalities that had for years kept China in Leninist hands. There were also some people like my visitor (in May 1995), the former Labour Party Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, who thought that Beijing’s bosses would probably behave badly but there was not much the rest of us could do about it, so why bother making a fuss now? That was simply what China’s communists were like. You would have to ‘get real’, shrug and move on.
What of those who were optimists? Some had read or at least noted the main message of the book by Francis Fukuyama on the so-called ‘end of history’. China would change, as had happened elsewhere as economics and technology perforated its thick political hide. Both arriving in and exiting what economists call the middle-income trap would produce political change in China as it had elsewhere. Maybe, they hoped, Hong Kong would change China rather than the other way around. While there was a large dollop of delusion about this, it had some effects on many of us. Although never myself believing that there was an umbilical relationship between economic development and political change, I hoped that there was at least some connection, even if it was not mechanistic, between politics and economics. On top of this, I found it impossible to believe that nothing we had tried to do would last and that Hong Kong’s citizens would come to the point of defining their patriotism first and foremost as loving the Communist Party. After all, the majority of them were in Hong Kong as refugees from some of the worst excesses of communism. They knew better than most of us what the distinction was in practice between a free society and a dictatorship.
Such were the cautious hopes that I held when I left Hong Kong, buttressed by the thoughts of one of my most experienced Foreign Office officials that surely the Communist Party had not spent more than 20 years negotiating with us about every pinhead only to walk away as soon as they could from what they had helped to create. This degree of modest optimism, admittedly constrained within the bounds of public decorum, was strengthened by a sense of relief that we seemed to have come through critical years in Hong Kong with its structures and practices more or less safely in place.
As all who asked knew from my answers to their regular questions about Hong Kong’s future, I never for one moment reckoned that Hong Kong was too successful for China to risk its future well-being. Yes, it may be a ‘golden goose’, but history is full of examples of this large, valuable bird being killed off by the farmer supposedly responsible for its welfare. Hong Kong’s success in comparison to China’s was bound to decline proportionately because of the rapdily growing Chinese economy. Moreover – crucially – communist bosses did not distinguish between the interests of the country and those of the party. People very often talked with another avian metaphor about Hong Kong as the canary in the coal mine: its treatment would give a clear signal of what China was really like and what its intentions would inevitably be. I never believed that the Communist Party would hesitate for a second to throttle the canary if they thought this was important to the party’s continued control of the country. They would not be deterred by the signal this would send to the region and the rest of the world.
Why had so many Chinese men, women and children sought refuge in a British colony? The journalist Tsang Ki-fan described Hong Kong as ‘the only Chinese society that, for a brief span of 100 years, lived through an ideal never realized at any time in the history of Chinese societies. A time when no man had to live in fear of the midnight knock on the door.’ Hong Kong enjoyed the separation of powers between executive, judiciary and legislature; executive accountability to a partially elected legislature; due process and an independent judiciary; the rule of law; disciplined services operating within strict rules according to a Bill of Rights (or at least explicit legislation governing their behaviour); a clean, respected and competent civil service operating within the traditions of public integrity; fierce measures against corruption; freedom of assembly and worship; a free and outspoken media; and schools and universities that were not given political directions from the government or its apparatchiks.
None of us who left in 1997 would pretend that Hong Kong was perfect. Although considerable progress had been made to encourage the creation of a socially responsible market economy, to develop welfare, health and education, and to limit the worst extremes of income and wealth distribution, the gap between rich and poor remained excessive, especially in housing. The casual and infrequent patronizing racism probably institutionalized in every colony had mostly disappeared; but it had left some understandable resentments. Overall, however, Hong Kong was a good place to live, to bring up a family, to thrive, aspire and prosper. And, probably above all, there were no midnight knocks on the door, feared in every totalitarian society, and the sound of a police siren did not occasion quiet prayer. What price do you put on all this? How do you explain its importance to a communist hack?
I used to wonder occasionally how much the rest of China liked or admired Hong Kong with its own language – Cantonese – and its (not always disguised) disdain for its northern cousins. The communist leadership, I am sure, regarded with a degree of contempt the rich Hong Kong tycoons who paid court to them. How much respect did those tycoons attract by bowing quite so low? Perhaps their wealth and behaviour sometimes brought out, if only for a fleeting moment, a few residual communist sentiments in the attitude of those whose approval was being sought or purchased. Yet many of the communist hierarchy and their families were of course very happy themselves to loot their own economy and stash away the proceeds in colonial Hong Kong, the laundromat for their corruption. In addition many communist officials undoubtedly believed, with limited historical understanding, that the material success of Hong Kong resulted from piggybacking on China’s own economic resurgence. For many mainland visitors to the city there must have also been a palpable sense that they were being looked down on, criticized for their intermittent crude public behaviour and tastes. Hong Kong’s growing sense of its own identity must have become apparent to those who could tell that in this southern city people did not think of themselves as simply Chinese. They were more than that: they were a unique hybrid, Hong Kong Chinese.
Yet for all this, for a dozen or so years after 1997, Hong Kong did seem able largely to retain its civic personality. Not everything went well. Beijing went back on the promises it had made about the development of Hong Kong’s modest democracy, commitments made before and after 1997 by both Lu Ping and the Foreign Ministry. The debate about this was choked off whenever it arose. And it was of significance that in C. H. Tung’s first term as Chief Executive, his deputy, Anson Chan, resigned after only four years. She had attempted to get Tung to stand up for Hong Kong’s autonomy, to protect the integrity of the Hong Kong civil service and gradually to strengthen Hong Kong’s democratic institutions. She had become known as ‘the conscience of Hong Kong’. Needless to say this had not gone down well with leaders in Beijing, who criticized her and let it be known that she should do no more than loyally support Tung. His behaviour set in motion a process of weakening Hong Kong’s autonomy which gathered pace over the years. Hong Kong’s government began in time to suffer the exhaustion of servility. Public service standards and morale slipped and the search for Beijing’s approval became the city government’s default position.
Tung was not at all a bad man but was too malleable with Beijing. He combined a curious mix of indecision and stubbornness. He was also politically tone deaf. He set out in his second term in 2003 to legislate on the issues raised in article 23 of Hong Kong’s Basic Law governing secession, sedition and other public order offences. Before 1997, we had offered Chinese officials assistance in drafting legislation on these matters in ways consistent with the Basic Law obligations, the common law and Hong Kong’s international human rights commitments. When Tung himself attempted to legislate on these matters in 2003 the result was a disaster. Many legislators objected, not only the Democrats, and there were public demonstrations involving up to half a million people. The result weakened and discredited Tung. He had to withdraw the legislation.
This failure cut short Tung’s second term. He was succeeded by Sir Donald Tsang, who had been an exemplary Financial Secretary in the last period of my governorship and had then, under Tung, succeeded Anson Chan as Chief Secretary for Administration. He served for seven years and made at least some effort to revive discussion of universal suffrage for the Legislative Council and for choosing the Chief Executive. But he was stopped in his tracks by Beijing. He ended his term criticized for alleged corruption but was eventually acquitted by the courts after serving a short term of imprisonment.
Meanwhile, year by year, Beijing’s interference in Hong Kong’s affairs became increasingly pronounced. When the United Kingdom, with considerable diplomatic circumspection, pointed out that there was a danger of infringement of the Joint Declaration, Chinese officials argued with apparently growing confidence that this was simply a historical document and of no further relevance: an extraordinary way of talking about an international treaty. Presumably any past treaty could be described in such a way. So, I suppose, could the 99-year lease covering the New Territories, the termination of which had rightly led to the change of sovereignty in 1997. It would have been helpful if the Hong Kong government had also criticized this argument, which might have encouraged the UK government itself to be rather more robust on the matter. But with the Cameron government we were moving into the so-called ‘golden age’ of relations between Britain and China. Nothing could be allowed to cool the ardour of affection sustained by often imaginary, fictionalized or quietly aborted trade and investment deals.
Nevertheless, while first Jiang Zemin and then Hu Jintao ran China, Hong Kong remained identifiably what it had been before 1997. The rule of law was still based on due process, with an independent judiciary and a police service which operated within legal constraints defined by human rights principles. Freedom of assembly was still guaranteed, one prominent civil rights group commendably organizing protests with government and police approval and largely without violence or disorder. There was manifestly an increasing degree of self-censorship, but there were still some independent newspapers, particularly Apple Daily, owned by a notable refugee from mainland China, Jimmy Lai, and a public service broadcaster, Radio Television Hong Kong, which regularly broadcast BBC news coverage of world affairs including those in mainland China. Hong Kong seemed to have survived reasonably well, if not without some knocks and bruises: an extraordinary mixture of Chinese and Western attitudes, a great international trade and cultural hub acting as the principal conduit for investment in and out of China, and a part of China with its own personality which had managed to safeguard China’s knowledge of its own history. Books were published and sold in Hong Kong which told the story of modern China with honesty. They could not be published and sold on the mainland. Perhaps the most notable example of this aspect of Hong Kong’s contribution to China’s Memory Palace was that every 4 June thousands of people commemorated, with a solemn vigil in the centre of the city, the murders of students and others in 1989 in and around Tiananmen Square. The Chinese Communist Party might be able, so it thought, to whitewash the past, but that was not something that could or would happen in Hong Kong. In the future this itself will be regarded as a major contribution to the history and culture of China. Hong Kong would not ‘burn the books and bury the scholars’ like an early Qin emperor and like modern China’s communist dynasty.
It is interesting that the next dramatic twist in Hong Kong’s history was largely triggered by an attempt to counter what communists call historical nihilism, or what most others call the search for the evidence-based truth. This was the attempt in 2012 to impose a Chinese communist version of civic education on the Hong Kong public school curriculum. There were huge protests against this involving more than 90,000 people in street demonstrations. A group of secondary students called Scholarism, organized by a 15-year-old school pupil named Joshua Wong, helped to lead and organize protests against what they regarded as brainwashing. Opposition to these plans was so fierce that they were dropped, though the whole experience paved the way for further protests during the disastrous period of office of the third Chief Executive, C. Y. Leung.
After higher education in Britain, Leung had been a commercial property developer, very often in China. He was an enthusiastic fellow traveller with an eye for the main chance and a hint of racism in his attitude to the West. Whether he had actually been a closet member of the Communist Party was a matter of some debate. According to the polls, the public (who often have excellent judgement in these matters) clearly thought he was a nasty piece of work. Leung’s period of office, which mined new depths of disapproval, coincided with the emergence of Xi Jinping as China’s leader.
Following the successful campaign against trying to browbeat children and students in Hong Kong to accept the Chinese Communist Party’s narrative about its history and aims, Joshua Wong and those who had led the protests turned their attention in 2014 to proposals made by the National People’s Congress in Beijing in a document which claimed ‘comprehensive jurisdiction’ over Hong Kong. It defined local autonomy as simply the power to run local affairs as the central leadership of China laid down. Within this approach there would be limits determined by Communist Party leaders for the next Legislative Council elections in 2016 and for the election of a Chief Executive in 2017. This election would allow for universal suffrage, but the choice of candidates would in effect be determined by a selection committee chosen by Beijing. This is similar to the process for electing a president in Iran.
Beijing’s announcement produced an extraordinary series of city and street protests, sometimes called the Umbrella Revolution (the demonstrators carried yellow umbrellas to attempt to ward off tear gas and pepper spray) or the Occupy Movement (the demonstrations blocked the centre of the city) from late September to mid-December 2014. The organization of the demonstrations was extraordinarily successful despite increasingly heavy-handed policing. The demonstrators, many of them students, could be seen in the evenings helping one another with their homework. After each day’s events they would help to clear up any rubbish left behind. The demonstrations caused disruption and inconvenience in the heart of the city but also attracted global media coverage, both for the cause espoused and for the manner in which it was pursued. The same could not be said for the position of the Beijing and Hong Kong authorities – not that there was now any obvious difference between them. The Hong Kong government had become simply the transmission mechanism for Beijing’s political judgement about how best to crush dissent and democracy in the city.
Attempts to engage the protesters in discussion and debate got nowhere. As with demonstrations in later years, tear gas and pepper spray replaced any attempt to find agreement or compromise. Eventually the demonstrations fizzled out, leaving behind considerable bitterness among many of the pro-democracy activists and a nascent movement arguing that the issue should not be just about democracy in Hong Kong but the liberation of Hong Kong from China’s yoke. This was not a wise political development on the part of those, a minority, who advocated it. I visited Hong Kong twice in the years after the Occupy Movement had ground to a halt, and on the first of these occasions, in 2016, made a speech to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in which I said that I would always support the movement for greater democracy in Hong Kong and for protection of the rule of law, but that I could never support a campaign for Hong Kong’s independence from China, desirable as some people might regard it. That had never been possible within the terms of Britain’s historic agreements with China.
The first time that I made this speech Joshua Wong and other student leaders asked if I would go and say the same things to students themselves. I agreed and spoke in a packed main hall to 700–800 students at Hong Kong University. I set out my reasons for not being prepared to go along with the argument for Hong Kong’s independence. I was listened to politely but there were some very tough questions. I was asked for example what supporters of democracy outside Hong Kong would do if Beijing attempted to destroy the democratic cause. It was a very good question which I answered with some well-meaning remarks about the indestructible case for freedom, the concern of most of the world, and the courageous spirit of Hong Kong. I did everything except sing ‘Kumbaya’. But I am not sure that my answer convinced even me. A year later I was back in Hong Kong and I was asked again if I was prepared to talk to students on the same subject. I did, and to my amazement was told that in the intervening period no one from the government, let alone from Beijing, had tried to talk to them to try to persuade them to take a less confrontational position. What happened then was of course entirely predictable. Calls made by a small minority for independence were used by hardline communist officials and propagandists to disparage all the efforts of the democracy movement to promote greater accountability and respect for Hong Kong’s local autonomy. A Rubicon had been crossed, and the die was cast.
Leung’s deep unpopularity ensured that, even given the political insensitivity of Beijing, he was only a one-term Chief Executive. The election for his successor pitched the very successful Financial Secretary, John Tsang (who had been my private secretary), against Carrie Lam, the Chief Secretary for Administration, who had been given responsibility by Leung for constitutional development (not that there was any) during the period of the Umbrella Movement protests. Tsang had a huge opinion poll lead. He had favoured talking to the leaders of the democracy movements, not least the students, whereas Lam’s selling point with communist apparatchiks was that she either refused to communicate with them or else simply put up a stone wall to all their requests or demands. So Lam got Beijing’s nod. She was a career civil servant who had risen without notable trace through the administration through hard work and, latterly, a willingness to carry out unquestioningly the political decisions taken by the Chinese communist politburo. A Chinese Vice Premier, Han Zheng, was given responsibility for Hong Kong and Macau affairs; in effect he took all the big decisions affecting these territories. Senior Hong Kong government officials, particularly those with any responsibilities for security, would frequently (especially during increasingly numerous periods of tension) travel to Shenzhen to a residence there called Bauhinia Lodge to take instructions from Han Zheng and those who were really running their community – a community once, of course, promised a high degree of local autonomy.
The first major protests against Lam took place in the summer of 2019, when she attempted to introduce an Extradition Bill on a spurious justification built around a real argument for extradition unhappily involving a crime committed in Taiwan. How could a subservient Hong Kong deal with Taiwan? These cases had been dealt with in the past with discrete legal and administrative competence. But Lam plainly saw the opportunity of winning support in Beijing for the way that she dealt with the matter. One well-known and experienced journalist, Melinda Liu, argued convincingly (Foreign Policy, October 2019) that ‘Lam was in a rush because she’d hoped to curry favour with senior officials in Beijing around the time of the PRC’s 70th anniversary.’ Opposition to the bill came from right across the community, including business: there was a widespread perception that the bill would be used by Beijing to secure the arrest and trial on the mainland of Hong Kong citizens not least for political offences. One of Lam’s closest advisers gave the game away when he said that a main reason for the legislation was that it would save Beijing from having to abduct people from Hong Kong, as had happened in 2015 in the case of five men involved in the publication and sale of books which the Communist Party did not like, and the abduction also of a very rich Chinese citizen who had obviously been a bag carrier for corrupt senior officials on the mainland. He had evidently known too much about the corruption of senior party leaders for his own good. The demonstrations built to almost a million people by June 2019 and later to double that figure. The police dealt with them using increasingly violent methods which plainly well went well beyond the normal limits placed on public order policing. As the protests grew in size, the young demonstrators, who were in the vanguard, appeared to be taking their tactics explicitly from the martial artist Bruce Lee, who had talked about acting like water, without obviously organized tactics or strategy. Using social media and mobile phones, they moved almost formlessly from one target to another. The rough-house police response inevitably produced occasional violent reactions by the demonstrators. There was no excuse for this behaviour; this was not civil disobedience. It was used by the government and its friends – and particularly Beijing – to discredit the protests as a whole. But keeping civil disobedience civil is always difficult when it is not regarded as a legitimate form of protest by the authorities. It was not just the incontinent use of pepper spray and tear gas, along with the wielding of batons, which provoked anger. There were some specific incidents which outraged public opinion well beyond the ranks of the demonstrators. For example, in one incident at Yuen Long Metro station, people who were travelling home after demonstrating were beaten up by Triads. This was plainly done with the complicity of the police, who turned a blind eye to what was going on. Calls for an enquiry into the handling of the demonstrations, as well as the behaviour of the demonstrators themselves, were rejected out of hand. Moreover, the authority of the police complaints body was filleted by the government. It became readily apparent that the police were not accountable to anyone except their own leadership, clearly under the thumb of Beijing security officials. Radicalization of young demonstrators was also inevitably the result of the disenfranchisement by the government of Legco members whom they had helped to elect.
The initial demand for the withdrawal of the Extradition Bill (which was eventually conceded in September 2019 with a bad grace) grew into a wider political agenda which became known as ‘the five demands’. In addition to full withdrawal of the Extradition Bill the protesters insisted on the establishment of a commission of enquiry into alleged police brutality, the retraction of the classification of protesters as rioters, an amnesty for arrested protesters and, perhaps most fundamental, universal suffrage both for the election of the Legislative Council and for that of the Chief Executive.
Probably the greatest violence was seen on university campuses, particularly with what amounted to a state of siege in some cases. During the course of the violence in and around these campuses, and in other demonstrations, there were credible reports of the police manhandling and even arresting professional medical staff who were trying to help those who had been injured. Overall during these and some later demonstrations more than 10,000 people were arrested and over 2300 charged. Hardly a single police officer was charged at the same time for excessive use of force.
The Hong Kong government and the United Front as a whole regularly bragged that the demonstrations were unpopular with the public at large, who would give the causes advocated by the demonstrators a big thumbs down in the district council elections in November 2019. In fact the reverse happened, as could have perhaps been predicted by looking at the opinion polls which showed overwhelming support for the demonstrations – and suggested that more than one third of all those in the territory had actually attended at least one demonstration. The council elections proved to be an overwhelming success for the pro-democracy camp, with a high level of voter participation and victory in 86% of all the seats up for election. The response of Carrie Lam to the results was not to meet the newly elected councillors but to invite the defeated candidates to a meeting. Her government, which really meant Beijing’s communist leaders, refused to accept the reality which was staring them bravely in the face. Hong Kong wanted its autonomy, its way of life and a greater share in the way it was governed: all these things were anathema to Beijing.
Another consequence of the events of 2019 was a collapse of public respect and trust in the police service. In a survey in the autumn of that year conducted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, almost half of those questioned had zero trust in the police. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 points indicating ‘complete trust’ the average score given was 2.89. This was a police service which had been called before 1997 ‘Asia’s finest’ and which had deserved the epithet.
The lesson which Beijing’s communist leaders plainly took from all this was that they could not believe those who told them there was a silent majority in the city for acquiescence in Beijing’s demands; they needed to act comprehensively and directly to destroy what they disliked about the city, to run it themselves and to bury the idea of ‘one country, two systems’. The macabre joke was all too obvious: ‘one country, two cisterns’. From now on, anything resembling another system was to be a facade or masquerade. Above all they had to avoid the holding of the Legislative Council elections in the autumn of 2020, which would, on the basis of those held in 2019 for the district councils, produce a large pan-democratic majority. They now moved to destroy the autonomy and way of life of Hong Kong with a National Security Law enacted in time for the July celebrations of Chinese National Day in 2020. Needless to say it was neither enacted by the Legislative Council in Hong Kong nor as the result of consultations in the territory.
This law gave the notorious mainland security police the right to work in Hong Kong without being answerable to local laws. Soon after the National Security Law was passed by the National People’s Congress in Beijing, the Chinese security services moved into a 33-storey hotel in the centre of Hong Kong, which became known as the new National Security Office. Hong Kong’s new rulers were headed by Zheng Yanxiong, a former party boss in the neighbouring province of Guangdong with a reputation as a hard-line enforcer of the party’s will. Formal responsibility for implementing the National Security Law was given to a new committee for safeguarding national security which in theory was headed by the Chief Executive, Carrie Lam. It consisted in the most part of officials from the discipline services, particularly the police. The real power lay with Beijing’s National Security Adviser, who acted as a commissar directing the committee’s activities. This was Luo Huining, the head of the Chinese government’s liaison office in Hong Kong, who had increasingly been the power behind the local administration.
The National Security Law was based on the Chinese legal system. The main judicial authority in Hong Kong was in practice to be the Communist Party. Special courts with harsh sentencing powers were to try cases under the new legislation. The nature of potential offences was defined in only the broadest terms and in practice it soon became apparent that the prosecuting authorities were free to define your criminality in pretty well whatever way they wanted. These broad powers, exercised without the safeguards and transparency which are a fundamental part of the common law, dealt with what were deemed acts of subversion, terrorism, secession and collusion with a foreign country in any way which might endanger national security. A panel of judges selected by Carrie Lam, under the guidance of Beijing, presided over this new judicial system, and in exceptional cases suspects were to be pushed across the border to face Chinese courts, where no one really doubts what will happen in trials. In practice it soon became apparent that bail, jury trials and open courts would be set aside at will even when the offence was covered by the common law. The procedures and approach under the National Security Law leached into the common law: for example, over bail. One of the more unusual aspects of this National Security Law was, as Amnesty International pointed out, that it applied to the whole planet: it asserted jurisdiction over people who are not residents of Hong Kong and who may never have set foot in the city. Amnesty International noted that ‘social media companies for example can be asked to remove content deemed unacceptable by the Chinese government, even if these were posted outside of Hong Kong or if the companies’ offices and servers are located in other countries’.
Well over a hundred pro-democracy activists have already been arrested under this draconian law and face up to 10 years to life in prison for a range of vague and dramatic charges. In February 2021, 47 pro-democracy leaders were arrested on suspicion of ‘subversion’ because they had participated in democratic primaries organized by various civil groups to select the best candidates for the Legislative Council elections in 2020. The free press has been attacked, most infamously with the closure of Apple Daily and the arrest of its proprietor, Jimmy Lai. The Chinese communist leadership hates Mr Lai, who is an example of a refugee from communism who made a huge success of his life in Hong Kong and was bravely determined to try to protect it from the heavy hand of Chinese communism, which, like so many others, he had personally experienced. Other well-known democratic leaders have been charged and sentenced, like Martin Lee, under old public order legislation as well as under the new law. The full horror story of what has happened has been very well told by Stephen Vines in Defying the Dragon. Vines is a brave and distinguished journalist who has lived and worked in Hong Kong for over 30 years and has also run a business there. In August 2021 he left Hong Kong for the United Kingdom fearing what he called the WhiteTerror – a combination of the new national security legislation and the activities of United Front thugs. He had been threatened because of his views and argued that his most suspect activity was that he loved Hong Kong. He believed that ‘the near-term prospects of things getting better are simply non-existent’.
Apart from those jailed or threatened with imprisonment, civil servants have been purged, academics thrown out of their jobs, teachers sacked, professional bodies attacked and, in the case of the main teachers’ union, closed down. Schools are obliged to teach the sort of communist curriculum against which they protested successfully in 2012–13; this is called using education as ‘an engineer of the soul’. The whole notion of separation of powers between the executive, legislature and the judiciary has been dismissed, even though it is fundamental to the Basic Law and the Joint Declaration. How much of the rule of law still exists is moot; most of whatever confidence remains seems to be based on the fact that judges still wear wigs. What we have witnessed, and are still witnessing, is the destruction of one of the freest societies in Asia by communist tyranny with the complicity of some local leaders and against the manifest wishes of the majority of the public. The world has criticized, but the Chinese leadership has been oblivious. No one can now pretend that they don’t understand the reality of Chinese communism, and no one can surely base their approach to China any more on the Cradock proposition that, while the Chinese leadership may be thugs, they are men of their word.
Many countries have offered to take emigrants from Hong Kong, where the number seeking to leave has reached record levels. As I write these words, I have just finished reading a farewell statement to Hong Kong from the owner of an independent bookshop who is closing it down, and with his university professor wife and young family quitting the city they all love. Neither the owner nor his wife is overtly political, but given the state of politics in Hong Kong, they said, they could no longer see a life for themselves and their children in the city. This is a fairly typical story. But Beijing seems prepared to tolerate the flight of so many Hong Kongers. Its leaders hope that they can create a Hong Kong fit for bankers and other financial executives with many of the jobs in the sector filled by mainlanders: their ideal city will be Hong Kong without Hong Kongers, they want Hong Kong with political lobotomy. Early signs show many medical professionals and teachers among the emigrants.
In the United Kingdom, the BNO Visa scheme was announced after passage of the National Security Law in 2020 and began in January 2021. This gives Hong Kongers with BNO passports and their dependants the opportunity to work in the United Kingdom as a pathway to gaining citizenship. The scheme covers 2.9 million Hong Kongers who have BNO status. The estimates of how many are likely to take advantage of this are inevitably uncertain but run up to over 300,000. One mark of changes in attitudes to China, and perhaps a recognition of the vigour and entrepreneurial enthusiasm of Hong Kong citizens, is that overwhelmingly they have been welcomed so far in the United Kingdom.
With Hong Kong in handcuffs and the building blocks of a police state now in place, we should perhaps consider briefly how and why this happened. I go back to the nature of communist tyranny and to what I said earlier about the relationship between economics and politics. The bloody events in Tiananmen Square in 1989 seemed to many to be just a blip on the great arc of history. It was argued, with a good deal of liberal hubris, that the fall of the Berlin Wall would presage a comprehensive defeat for authoritarianism all around the world. These sentiments were turbo-charged by China’s entry into the WTO in 2001 (on terms which it has regularly abused). Tony Blair confidently predicted that there was now in China ‘unstoppable momentum to democracy’. He was not the only person to utter these sorts of wishful sentiments. So what happened?
The momentum might of course always have been illusory. But such momentum as might have existed was halted in its tracks by the present leader of the Chinese Communist Party and the subject of its latest personality cult, Xi Jinping, who assumed power in 2013. He took over the leadership at a time when he and his colleagues had been badly spooked by the attempts of the aggressive and talented Bo Xilai to elbow his way to the top of the party with the support of Zhou Yongkang, who combined both power and patronage in the energy sector and in the security field. Party leaders were even more worried by the threats to their ability to hold on to power posed by globalization with its economic consequences, by urbanization with the flood of rural workers into the cities and by the development of the Internet. They also evidently recognized that some of the increasingly successful and wealthy tycoons in the technology sector posed a threat to the party’s control of economic policy. Their conclusion was that the party had to tighten its grip on every aspect of national life, not least education and the private sector, even though the latter was a much more productive contributor to the economy than the State Owned Enterprises.
The more I have known about contemporary China and its leaders, the more I have asked myself why we accept its description of its all-powerful party as a communist organization following a socialist path. Its own definition of socialism has little to do with the usual meaning. Confucius believed that things should be what they were called and should act as they were described. But how does Chinese communism or socialism explain the fact that the inequalities in the country are greater than in the United States of America? Inequality is the Achilles heel of the party in China’s totalitarian state. Inequality can only be confronted by removing many of the privileges of the governing class. To do this in a way which has much of an effect would require the dismantling of China’s governing cadre.
Shortly after taking power, Xi Jinping ordered party and government officials to recognize that they needed to conduct an ‘intense struggle’ against liberal democracy. The existential threat, the enemy, was itemized: Western constitutional democracy, the allegation that human rights were universally applicable and valid, civil society, the West’s idea of journalism, and open historical enquiry. This began the crackdown across society from the concentration camps, forced abortions and sterilization in Xinjiang to the incarceration of Hong Kong’s freedoms, from locking up dissidents to attacking faith groups including Muslims, Buddhists and Christians, from closing down swathes of civil society to stamping out free enquiry at universities, to greater control of the internet to try to prevent any foreign news or ideas polluting China’s story. Xi Jinping has made clear what Chinese communists oppose; to discover what the Communist Party under Xi favours, you need to attempt to penetrate the vacuous waffle of ‘Xi Jinping Thought’, which was officially made an integral part of China’s constitution. It has also been turned into a series of brainwashing books for students and children of all ages. What does it all mean? A former US President, Warren Harding, used to talk contemptuously of bloviation – ‘the art of speaking as long as the occasion warrants and saying nothing’. This is ‘Xi Jinping Thought’.
This blether, from a man described by those who polish his cult of personality as someone almost super-human, with the wisdom of Solomon and the eloquence of Lincoln, boils down to three positions: first, grievance-infused nationalism; second, the notion that the Communist Party embodies all that is best in China’s history and culture; third, obey Xi at all times and everywhere. China is a great country with some hugely talented citizens. Surely it can do better than this (admittedly the same could have been said of Trump and America). If you want to know more, why not sign up – it’s possible – to do a weekend study course in Xi Jinping Thought. Monday morning won’t come quickly enough. Hong Kong represented an amalgam of precisely the sort of values which Xi Jinping and his colleagues regarded as posing an existential threat to their ability to hold on to power. They hated free enquiry; they were scared stiff of political accountability; they were suspicious of civil society; they felt threatened by a free press; they were in short scared stiff of free citizens; and they felt no obligation to abide by agreements they had made if this meant (for instance) allowing the values of an open society to continue to flourish in Hong Kong. It may also be the case that nervousness about their ability to cling to power was aggravated by understanding the huge challenges which have started to hit them: first, the falling and ageing population; second, the severe water shortages in parts of the country, the most serious consequence of climate change in China; and third, the growing debt burden, each unit of growth now requiring twice as much debt as was the case only a decade ago.
China’s behaviour over the outbreak of the coronavirus is a reminder of how untrustworthy it is as an international partner and citizen, and how its institutionalized commitment to secrecy threatens all of us in a world so interconnected. We have to see Hong Kong in relation to all this.
In 2021 Xi added a further defensive trench around the Communist Party’s absolute control of the totalitarian Chinese state. It was dug by a member of the seven-man standing committee of the party politburo, Wang Huning. He is regarded by some as the present ‘court philosopher’ in Beijing. An academic intellectual, Wang has risen with little fanfare (having been a senior adviser to both China’s previous presidents) and is now the focus of attention as an éminence grise. In 2017 he was made chairman of the Central Guidance Commission on Building Spiritual Civilization. Could George Orwell have made up this title? His ‘spiritual guidance’ is based on his experience of a single visit to America, a country which he clearly loathed, and which became the subject of a widely read book in China, America Against America. From his comprehensive critique of America, he has cobbled together an assault on liberal values, which in his judgement combine to destroy social solidarity, high personal moral standards and national purpose. That liberal values, or a distant reflection of them in economics, have been the principal engines of economic growth in China as elsewhere is a fact which he appears to reject or of which he is perhaps ignorant. Wang’s perspective has been transformed into a justification for an assault on the very rich, especially the high-tech billionaires who represent a challenge to the party’s monopoly control of China’s national narrative. But millionaires are caught in the net as well as billionaires, especially if they have a flashy lifestyle. This provides the pretence of a campaign for greater social equity and also can be advantageously used to take down any critics of Xi Jinping. Yet the fundamental reason for gaping inequity is ignored. The party’s absolute and comprehensive powers put its leaders on top of everything everywhere, accountable to no one but themselves. That is of course in part a result of the lack of any rule of law and the total absence of a free press. Moreover, attacking gambling in Macau, proscribing videogames, lashing out against so-called ‘sissy boys’, as well as those with large cars and glamorous mistresses, does not offer a very convincing or profound alternative to the spirituality absent from Marxism/Leninism but still offered in China by faith groups. The idea of a return to Maoism in order to discover a contemporary moral code ignores the lechery of the former party leader, though perhaps lechery is the part of Mao’s legacy which has survived among party bosses, and not just in relation to female tennis players!
However badly China behaves, we do not want to return to the Cold War years. But Chinese communist leaders sometimes behave as though that is exactly what they want. We don’t wish to build a wall of containment around China. Nevertheless, we should recognize the truth today, in relation to the Chinese Communist Party, of what George Kennan said in his famous long telegram in 1946 about the Soviet Union: ‘our respective views of reality are simply incompatible’. Our views of the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang and Buddhists in Tibet are incompatible with those of Beijing’s leaders. Our views on the trade in body parts are incompatible. Our views on forced labour are incompatible. Our views on freedom of religion and freedom of expression are incompatible. Our views on military threats to Taiwan and even India are incompatible. Our views on Hong Kong are certainly incompatible. The list goes on and on, and it is alas Hong Kong’s ill-fortune to be included.
There are a few other factors which have sabotaged Hong Kong’s chances. First, as many Hong Kong citizens recognized at the time, the guarantee of Hong Kong’s way of life contained in the Joint Declaration was not supported by any arbitration mechanism. It was said by British ministers and officials – this was the sales pitch to Hong Kong, to the United Kingdom and around the world – that this was unnecessary, since it was the intention to develop more rapidly Hong Kong’s own democratic institutions. In the event, this promise was left rather limply dangling in the wind. China’s leaders recognized that breaking an international agreement such as the Joint Declaration would trigger criticisms from many countries. But they thought they could get away with it, just as they have got away with their behaviour in the South China Sea (militarizing reefs and islands against international law and against all their commitments to America and others) and with the breach of the International health regulations in relation to the coronavirus.
Second, totalitarian bosses, sometimes with good reason, take a cynical view of the limited extent to which many of the more prosperous members of any society are prepared to take risks to stand up for the values which probably helped to make them prosperous in the first place. While I am a huge admirer of the bravery of the majority of people in Hong Kong in fighting and speaking out for what they believe in, I still find myself shocked from time to time by the attitudes of some of the better off. I recall one friend whose main comment on the activities of demonstrators was that their presence on the streets made it more difficult to get to the golf course. I recall another conversation with a very prosperous lawyer who argued, as though it were a certain truth, that the demonstrations had all been funded and organized by organizations from outside Hong Kong. I remember being assured, by a wealthy Hong Kong friend who prided himself on being a man of the left, that there were no threats to freedoms and the rule of law in Hong Kong; he went on to tell me about the new boat he had just purchased. I suppose I am naïve. I suppose these are just expressions of human nature as it has always been. Perhaps in their position I would have behaved in exactly the same way; perhaps I should not feel so personally aggrieved by usually amiable people who act in such a self-deluding and spineless way when the consequences of behaving well are likely to be uncomfortable. This is true on the national scale as well. China thinks it can get away with almost anything because of the attractions of access to its market. Moreover, so far as Hong Kong is concerned, it doesn’t really care if it has to squash the city’s openness, competitiveness and commercial sophistication in order to keep a grip on power on the mainland.
Third, the leadership of the public service in Hong Kong, renowned at one time for its integrity and professionalism, has gradually been squeezed into acquiescent servility. Hong Kong has produced its own quisling class drawn not only from the ranks of the United Front. I suppose that Carrie Lam and some of those like her, including some lawyers, who are happy to implement the National Security Law and Beijing’s other diktats, may be outlived by the totalitarian Chinese Communist Party. They may not confront therefore the infamy which history will surely load on them for the part they have played in destroying a great city and its way of life.
Finally, we should recognize the part that the values and bravery of the people of Hong Kong have played in determining their own fate. They heroically and understandably refused to accept that to love China they had to love the Communist Party, a piece of Leninist political consubstantiality. Indeed, the opposite is plainly true. How do people in Hong Kong see and define themselves? In a public opinion survey by Hong Kong University in 2019, part of a programme which has been tracking the question of identity for many years, it was found that a majority of people identified themselves as Hong Kongers – 53%. Two years earlier the figure had been 37%. There was also a drop in the number who regarded themselves as being of mixed identity. Worst of all for Beijing was that the number who identified themselves as simply Chinese had dropped to 11% in 2019. Were the people of Hong Kong proud of becoming citizens of China in 1997? 71% said no. In the youngest age group, from 18 to 29 years of age, only 9% said they were proud of being Chinese nationals, and indeed hardly any in the same age group identified themselves as Chinese at all. One might think that it would be something of a wake-up call to Chinese communist leaders to recognize that the handover of 1997 reduced rather than increased the sense of being Chinese in Hong Kong. Insofar as this is recognized by Xi Jinping and his acolytes it only apparently encourages them to hammer Hong Kong for being so ungrateful for the benefits of living in a totalitarian surveillance state. If you can’t convince or win over their hearts and minds, hammer them or lock them up.
Who can know what comes next? Will the story of the 21st century be one in which freedom and liberal values are snuffed out around the planet one by one as they have been in Hong Kong? Is Hong Kong and what it has always stood for now doomed? I refuse to accept this, refuse to accept that the sort of world I have taken for granted is doomed to disappear long before my grandchildren are my age. I learned more about the relationship between economic and political freedom in Hong Kong than I’ve ever learned from any books, and more about the importance of the rule of law. Maybe I learned too about the extent to which very often some people get the system of governance they deserve. But I’m not sure that this last point was entirely true in Hong Kong, certainly not for the majority. They deserved better than we bequeathed them, and I cannot give up hope that they will get a better deal in due course through their own courage, despite these recent depressing and tawdry events.
Hong Kong was an important part of my public life, perhaps the most important part of it. I think what happens there will be crucial for all of us over the next few years. We have to go on caring about Hong Kong, speaking up for Hong Kong, making clear that we share the values for which Hong Kong citizens are courageously fighting. As we know from what has happened in Hong Kong, we cannot take the survival of those values for granted. Hong Kong’s fight for freedom, for individual liberty and decency, is our fight as well. That is why I read again and again the words of the anthem that Hong Kongers – young and old, students and pensioners, men and women in wheelchairs and parents pushing prams – sang at their demonstrations with passion and belief:
We pledge. No more tears on our land
In wrath, doubts dispelled we make our stand
May people reign, proud and free, now and ever more
Glory be to thee Hong Kong.
The Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei, when asked how Hong Kong can bear fighting for democracy in a climate of fear, described the cause as an ‘eternal struggle’. He went on: ‘Hong Kong’s glory and true victory are going to be defined by history and not by the regime.’ From a historical perspective, people won’t forget the price that Hong Kongers have paid for Hong Kong’s own autonomous and free spirit, and the price they continue to pay for democracy, dignity and freedom. The struggle continues for Hong Kong. And for the rest of us. It is surely a cause that will define us all.