Transcription
Hong Kong is still standing, technically. The skyline still dazzles, the trams still rattle, and the city sells itself proudly as Asia's world city, but it's all branding now, not belief.
Because since Beijing's national security law came into force in 2020 amidst territory-wide protests, Hong Kong has gone from being the loudest, most lovably argumentative city in Asia to a case study in how to kill a free city while only firing four shots. The center has been outlawed, newspapers dismantled, and classrooms turned into patriotic obedience schools. Unions dissolved themselves before the state could do it for them. Politicians were dragged from their homes in dawn raids. And yet, officially, nothing is wrong at all. Central insists Hong Kong has moved past chaos. And to be fair, it has. It's moved past chaos, straight into silence.
On the night of the 1st of July 1997, Hong Kong stood in the rain and watched its future change hands. The Union Jack came down, the five-star red flag went up, and the crowd, some cheering, some weeping, all stood witness to the ascension of a new ruling order. "One country, two systems," Beijing called it. There was to be 50 years of autonomy legally guaranteed during which time Hong Kongers would be free to govern their territory their way for the first time ever with all but the most minimal of oversight from the mainland. And even then, it would only be in matters like defense and foreign affairs.
And for a while, people believed it. The Basic Law, Hong Kong's mini-constitution, guaranteed freedoms that no mainland city could dream of. A free press, open courts, independent judges. Beijing called the arrangement autonomy. But to the business world, it was stability. All those billionaires created, all those enormous glass and steel obelisks erected in Central during the latter colonial years. Hong Kong had gone through a real boom in the late colonial period, and it would be staying put. Hong Kong, it seemed, would stay Hong Kong no matter what flag flew over the central government offices. And so the tycoons toasted, the middle classes kept on consuming, and the territory more broadly thrummed with the exact same relentless confidence as it had been doing for decades by that point.
However, beneath the neon and the noise, things were already starting to shift slowly but surely. The Communist Party had learned its lesson post Tiananmen Square massacre, you see. And now it knew that less was more. It knew to play the long game. And so it sent in not tanks, but shareholders. Money began absolutely pouring into the city, and state-backed conglomerates began quietly buying up stakes in media outlets, infrastructure, and property. The China National Aviation Corporation, for instance, bought a controlling share of Dragon Air just before the handover. Similarly, the Chinese Merchants Group bought a 13% share of the Western Harbor Crossing tunnel in 2000. And also in 1997, Costco Shipping acquired 20% of Yu Chong Hing Bank. Beijing had discovered the art of infiltration by investment, and few objected. After all, profit had always been Hong Kong's true native language.
And it wouldn't be long until the creeping influence of Beijing started to become visible, too. As in 1999, the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal issued a ruling that granted permanent residency rights to the children of Hong Kongers born on the mainland. A straightforward interpretation of the Basic Law. Or so the judges thought. Beijing, however, disagreed and had the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress in Beijing, China's top law-making body, simply reinterpret the law, thus overturning the decision made down in Hong Kong. It was a quiet constitutional coup, ergo, in the language of procedure, and one that carried a very blunt message. Hong Kong's highest court did not have the final word in the territory's affairs. Beijing did. It was the moment when the city first saw the fine print beneath its supposed new freedoms.
But even then, most shrugged it off. The markets were recovering from the Asian financial crisis. Property prices were climbing again. And the South China Morning Post was full of editorials assuring everyone that "one country, two systems" remained intact. It was simply easier to believe the line than to confront the alternative.
Beijing, for its part, remained patient. Jiang Zemin's administration treated Hong Kong as a laboratory of control, a place to prove that capitalism could thrive without democracy. And to help make sure of it, the party began cultivating a new class of loyalists: the "red capitalists." Mainland-born business figures such as Li Ka-shing (born in Chaozhou), Tony Leung (born in Shanghai), and Cheng Yu-tung (born in Shunde). They were buttered up at receptions, given awards for patriotic service, and elevated to the city's election committee, the small, unelected body that chooses Hong Kong's leader, the chief executive. Indeed, Tony Leung even did serve as the first chief executive, specifically between 1997 and 2005. It was democracy, but by appointment.
Despite that, however, the illusion of autonomy was holding strong. After all, the chief executive was elected, even if it was only by 1,200 handpicked pro-Beijing figures. And the Legislative Council, Hong Kong's parliament, did have about half of its seats directly elected, even if the other half were so-called functional constituencies directly appointed by industries that now depended upon Beijing for their success.
But cracks were starting to form in the illusion, with a particularly large one appearing in 2002 when Tung's administration introduced new legislation to add Article 23 into the Basic Law, which stated that "the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall enact laws to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People's Government; to prohibit foreign political organizations or bodies from conducting political activities in the region." To the pro-Beijing camp, it was a necessary and vital update to protect Hong Kong against malicious foreign actors. And to everyone else, well, they had concerns about what exactly would end up being counted as treason, secession, sedition, and subversion.
At first, the resistance was polite. Op-eds, petitions, a few marches in the brutal summer heat. But the unease spread quickly. Churches warned of a law written for fear, not order. Journalists and unions spoke of the death of the free word. Even the bankers, many of whom had been only too happy to put on a pair of blinders so long as they were allowed to still flop out of the International Finance Centre and into Pier 2 for an expensive pint after work, began to mutter that this new law might just be bad for business.
The final spark came in early July 2003 when the government ignored calls to delay the vote. On the first of the month, the anniversary of the handover, half a million people filled the streets. Entire families, students, pensioners, lawyers in suits. A human river through Central chanting for freedom. It was the largest protest the city had seen since 1989. And ironically, those past ones had been aimed at Beijing, too, as they were protests in solidarity with the Tiananmen Square demonstrators. In an instant, Hong Kong had remembered itself. The government withdrew the bill within days. Beijing, furious but pragmatic, waited. Tung would eventually resign, citing health reasons that fooled no one. The people had won, for now. The promise of 1997 had not died yet, but it was no longer blind faith. The rain-soaked optimism of Governor Chris Patten's farewell had dried into something sharper: a quiet understanding that freedom in Hong Kong would never be a gift. It would always have to be defended.
For a city that had just marched half a million people into the streets and stared down Beijing, Hong Kong should have been alive with political energy. Instead, it went back to work. The 2003 protests that buried Article 23 felt, for a brief time, like a revolution. Instead, they fizzled out and became the last breath before a long exhale of complacency. The following decade became the quiet years. The kind of quiet that hums under fluorescent light. Productive, profitable, ever so suffocating.
The global economy was rising again. China was roaring into the WTO, and Hong Kong found itself perfectly placed as the middleman in Beijing's new global dream. Mainland tourists poured across the border by the millions, clutching duty-free shopping bags and government-issued enthusiasm. For Hong Kong's business class, it was salvation. For Beijing, it was strategy. The Individual Visit Scheme, launched in 2003 as part of China's Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement, was sold as tourism but acted as soft annexation. Every visitor brought money, and every dollar spent made Hong Kong that much more dependent on the mainland. The influx was staggering: from 6.8 million mainland visitors in 2002 to nearly 47 million by 2014. Malls turned into Mandarin-speaking showrooms. Luxury brands replaced mom-and-pop stores. Officially, it was called integration. On the streets, it was called "mainlandification."
The tycoons who once played both sides of the border quickly fell in line with their red capitalist counterparts. And steadily, property moguls and media magnates, long masters of colonial neutrality, began tilting toward Beijing. They'd have been mad not to, if they valued everything that they had built, as now a call from the Liaison Office, Beijing's official representative in the territory, could now end a headline, a contract, a career.
For most citizens, though, life was good enough to ignore politics. Through successive chief executives Donald Tsang (from 2005 to 2012) and Leung Chun-ying (up to 2017), property soared, stocks boomed, and the skyline glowed brighter and taller than ever. The old narrative that freedom could coexist with obedience seemingly was holding. Hong Kongers could speak freely online, shop in Causeway Bay or Mong Kok if they were cool, and tell themselves they were still different from the mainland.
Some, however, were starting to grow restless: the post-handover babies. They had been raised on the rhetoric of democracy but had lived in its absence, and they began to ask the questions that many of their seniors had long since stopped asking. Questions like, "If we're meant to have one country but two systems, why does the mainland have so many variations?"
And it was in that environment that the Hong Kong government overplayed its hand again, just as they had in 2003. It happened in 2012 when Leung Chun-ying's chief executive unveiled a plan to introduce Moral and National Education into Hong Kong schools, supposedly to promote civic values. In reality, though, the proposals read like a love letter to the Communist Party. Textbooks described the one-party state as progressive and selfless. The Cultural Revolution became a period of development. Students were told to respect authority. Teachers were told not to question it.
The backlash was immediate. Tens of thousands gathered outside the Central Government Complex, many in school uniforms, sleeping in makeshift camps, and studying under the glow of street lamps. Their movement had a name: Scholarism, and a face: a bespectacled 15-year-old named Joshua Wong, whose voice cracked with youth but carried conviction far beyond his years. For weeks, the protests swelled. Sympathetic parents brought food. Teachers joined picket lines, and musicians played beneath the banners reading, "We love our country, not its party." And the government blinked first. The curriculum was shelved, officially being suspended.
But something fundamental had shifted. The protests exposed a generational divide. Not just in age, but in belief. The older generation either still trusted the system or had come to trust it. And the younger people just didn't. Parents who once filled the streets in 2003 now told their children to stay home. They saw the state's encroachment as regrettable but manageable. Their children saw betrayal. This was no longer about textbooks. It was about Hong Kong's very future: whether it was to be under the jackboot or truly, as they had been promised, autonomous and free.
And naturally, those students and young people didn't exactly have a change of heart as time wore on, which meant another crisis was looming around the corner when Beijing once again overplayed its hand in 2014. That summer, they issued a white paper asserting comprehensive jurisdiction over the city, an obvious euphemism for direct control. In that moment, any remaining illusion of independence shattered, and in response, activists such as a slightly older Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow, and Nathan Law began calling for something more: true democracy and universal suffrage.
In response, Beijing made an announcement that it was trying to meet its naysayers in the middle: the infamous "8.31 Decision," so-called for the date that it was announced, which said that Hong Kong could have a popular vote on all political positions, but that they would only be able to choose from a list of two or three pre-approved candidates, each vetted by a Beijing-controlled nominating committee. That was received, um, badly, to put it mildly.
Students led a strike against the decision that began on the 22nd of September, and by the 26th, it had swelled into a full protest outside the Central Government Complex. By the 28th, it had grown further still, with "Occupy Central with Love and Peace," a 2013-born civil disobedience campaigning group, announcing the beginning of their formal campaign, which saw them block arterial routes into Hong Kong Island proper and, as their name rather implied, occupying Central as well as Admiralty down the road. With protest numbers happily hitting 100,000 at any given time, the government decided that it was time for the gloves to come off before they totally lost control of the situation, and the police were sent in with tear gas and baton rounds to break up the peaceful protests.
From there, the world watched as umbrellas rose against the haze. First as shields, then as symbols, the Umbrella Movement had been born. For 79 days, a pocket of Hong Kong lived outside Beijing's control. A city within a city, running on idealism and Wi-Fi. The government, however, waited them out, betting correctly that fatigue would do what force could not. By December, the tents were gone. The students dispersed, and the police moved in to tidy up the revolution. The Umbrella Movement ended not with violence, but with a weary shrug.
Still, something irreversible had happened. The world now saw Hong Kong for what it was: a city fighting for that which was promised to it. When the last student left Admiralty in December 2014, the party quietly began rewriting the rules. Every election, every court case, every new law that followed was designed to make sure Hong Kong would never again mistake defiance for democracy. They moved slowly, though, so slowly, in fact, that in the 2016 Legislative Council election, pro-democracy candidates bagged 30 of the 70 seats up for grabs, among them Nathan Law, with some other notable names being Sixtus Leung and Yau Wai-ching.
In response, it was mandated that the new lawmakers were required to take an oath pledging allegiance to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. Some, such as Sixtus and Yau, infamously inserted pro-democracy language into their oath, displayed a "Hong Kong is not China" banner, and mispronounced "People's Republic of China," while Nathan Law intentionally threw his intonation about as he spoke, meaning that thanks to the way Cantonese works, he hadn't actually really said his oath at all. And that, unfortunately, was exactly what Beijing wanted: a perfect pretext dressed up as procedure. Within weeks, Beijing's Standing Committee issued a new interpretation of the Basic Law, declaring that all oaths must be taken sincerely and solemnly, and that anyone who failed to do so would be instantly disqualified. An interpretation that would result in six of the newly elected councilors being disqualified and expelled from the house.
Next, more broadly, came the loyalty tests. Civil servants, teachers, and even candidates for local councils were forced to prove their patriotism. Librarians removed books by pro-democracy authors. School administrators warned students to avoid sensitive topics. And then, after a few more years of just ever so chipping away at Hong Kong some more, it happened: the decision that would plunge Hong Kong into chaos and drive it up to the precipice of total calamity. The Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation Bill.
That mouthful was proposed in February 2019 under the auspices of Carrie Lam, chief executive since 2017 following Leung Chun-ying. The bill, on its surface, was a simple one. A chap by the name of Chan Tong-kai had brutally murdered his partner Poon Hiu-wing in Taipei and then fled to Hong Kong. And since there was no extradition or mutual legal assistance arrangement with Taiwan, the authorities couldn't prosecute him. And so the bill, as presented, was a simple cleaning up of a loophole to allow people like him to be prosecuted in Hong Kong or extradited to answer for their crimes. The issue, however, was that it included the mainland. And while, sure, murder was a crime there just as much as it was in Hong Kong and Taiwan, you know what else was? That's right, naughty opinions. In practice, then, it would allow anyone in the city, including foreign nationals and political critics, to be sent to mainland China for trial under its opaque, party-controlled system. Civil society groups, lawyers' associations, journalists, students, even corporate executives warned that the law would destroy the city's judicial independence. Beijing's courts had a near 100% conviction rate. Everyone knew what that meant. The moment the bill passed, Hong Kong would cease to be a safe haven. It would, in real terms, be just another Chinese city.
And indeed, even for Hong Kong's usually cautious public, this was too much. It was the last straw that broke the camel's back. And the backlash was fierce, with protests breaking out immediately. They were small in size and desperate at first. A few banners in Central, a few placards in Yau Ma Tei. But with the government refusing to give any ground, the protests grew and grew and grew. Come the 9th of June, an estimated 1 million people marched through the streets, one in seven of the territory's entire population. Carrie Lam called it an "expression of opinion," and three days later, her police were firing tear gas and baton rounds into the central protest gathered outside the Legislative Council, branding it a "riot." Riot here isn't just dramatic posturing, too. No, legally in Hong Kong, it is a word that has very real consequences, as those arrested for purportedly engaging in one specifically could face years in prison.
Instead of retreating, though, the movement grew, with 2 million people, so over a quarter of Hong Kong's entire population, filling the streets in protest on the 16th of June. The message was simple: "No China extradition." Carrie Lam temporarily suspended the bill but refused to withdraw it. Her tone-deaf stubbornness, her robotic insistence that "communication is key," made her the perfect villain. Calm, smiling, utterly deaf to the roar outside her window.
This time, though, there were no leaders per se. Sure, there were vocal figures, and sure, they were thought leaders, but an actual centralized structure and organization? No, none really at all to speak of. The movement had learned from the Umbrella Movement. Centralization made you a target. The new motto was borrowed from Bruce Lee: "Be water." Protesters appeared, disappeared, and reappeared elsewhere within hours. Telegram groups and encrypted apps became command centers. Lennon Walls, covered in post-it notes, spread like ivy across the city. Demonstrators flowed through Hong Kong like flash floods: sudden, unpredictable, impossible to contain. It was tactical genius. When the police charged, protesters scattered. When the police withdrew, they regrouped. Crowds blocked roads, surrounded government buildings, occupied shopping centers, and vanished before dawn. They carried umbrellas and helmets, not slogans. When one was arrested, 10 more took their place. The police, trained to control crowds, found themselves trying to fight smoke.
By some, the city was at war with itself. As the riots just didn't stop, riot police and gas masks filled the streets. Black-clad protesters fired back with slingshots and Molotov cocktails. Tear gas became the scent of Hong Kong's weekends, and even the odd weekday if the government had done something particularly extreme in its crackdown, like what locals dubbed the Prince Edward "terror attack." It happened on the 31st of August, by which point the protests felt like they were everywhere in the actual city part of Hong Kong. In Mong Kok, a flash protest organized on encrypted communication channels in the spur of the moment was broken up by the police. Some of the protesters then fled into Prince Edward MTR station, and the police made their pursuit. And then, well, rather than telling you, we'll show you. Suddenly, it got a bit real, didn't it?
And tragically, it is also far from the only alleged incident of police brutality that we can point to from the protests. Because:
1. In June, police officers were filmed beating an unarmed and incapacitated woman on the floor.
2. In August, riot police fired tear gas inside Kwun Tong and Tsim Sha Tsui MTR stations, enclosed platforms, and blasted pepper ball rounds at near point-blank range.
3. In late September, Indonesian journalist Veby Mega Indah was left permanently blind in one eye after a beanbag round struck her as she filmed from a Wan Chai footbridge.
4. Then on September 24th, a video emerged showing officers kicking and beating a middle-aged volunteer from Protect the Children. The official line at first: they were only kicking a yellow object.
5. In October, a police water cannon drenched the steps of Kowloon Mosque and the small group guarding it with blue-dyed irritant. The government apologized the next day.
6. In November, a police officer was recorded ramming a protester with his motorcycle.
7. On the 18th of the same month in Yau Ma Tei, a police van suddenly accelerated into a crowd as officers leapt out, triggering a crush and panic. The force subsequently denied a stampede.
And then there's the shootings. Because as 2019 dragged on, even that final line, the idea that Hong Kong's police might use lethal force, was crossed four times. The first live round came on the 1st of October, China's National Day. In Tsuen Wan, an 18-year-old secondary school student named Tsang Chi-kin was shot in the chest at near point-blank range during a scuffle with riot police. The footage, an officer leveling his sidearm at a teenager meters away, tore through Hong Kong's encrypted chats within minutes. Tsang collapsed, bleeding heavily, and was rushed to the hospital in critical condition. He survived, only to be arrested as soon as he could stand. The government insisted the shot was lawful and necessary. To the public, it looked like the state firing into its own children.
The second happened just three days later, on the 4th of October, in Yuen Long. A 14-year-old boy became the next to be hit. He was struck in the thigh by a live round fired by a plainclothes officer as protesters clashed with police after the government invoked emergency powers to ban face masks. The next came on the 11th of November in Siu Sai Wan as commuters filmed on their phones. An officer drew his pistol, grabbed one protester with his left hand, and fired three live rounds into the crowd with his right. One of those bullets struck Chow Pak-kwan, a 20-something passerby, in the torso. He dropped instantly. Another man was hit moments later. Both rushed to hospital, one in critical condition. The videos, raw, close-up, with the crack of gunfire echoing between apartment blocks, looped across the world before lunchtime. Each time the police claimed self-defense; each time witnesses swore otherwise. What none disputed was that four civilians had now been shot with live ammunition inside what was supposed to be one of Asia's safest cities. Amnesty International and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights demanded independent investigations, but of course, none came.
But even that wasn't the end. A week after the Siu Sai Wan shootings came what would be the last great stand of the protest movement: the Polytechnic University siege. It began as a blockade. Protesters had dug in across several university campuses. But PolyU, perched beside the Cross Harbor Tunnel with not insignificant parts of it only really accessible via awkward elevated walkways, was the most strategically vital. What started as an attempt to disrupt traffic and hold a symbolic space turned within hours into an urban battlefield. The police surrounded the campus, sealing every exit, while hundreds of students and volunteer medics barricaded themselves inside. Roads burned, petrol bombs lit the night sky in orange arcs. Tear gas canisters clanged across the sports fields. For nearly two weeks, Hong Kong watched in disbelief as one of its top universities was turned into a war zone. Reporters described the smell of chemicals and fear. Drones filmed black smoke curling out of lecture halls. Students scavenged food from cafeterias, treated the wounded in makeshift clinics, and tried in vain to negotiate safe passage out. When the police finally stormed the campus, they arrested more than a thousand people. Some barely old enough to vote. Dozens were hospitalized. Several attempted to flee by climbing down ropes onto waiting motorcycles or crawling through sewers. PolyU, however, was the movement's high point. The protests that had begun with umbrellas and chants ended with fire and surrender, and it would be the last time Hong Kong's youth would hold ground against the state.
Hong Kong had burned for half a year, but by the time new calendars were being put up, it was exhausted, bruised, and teargassed. And so 2019-2020's protests ended basically the exact same way as 2014's had. The government just waited them out. They were in decline anyway post-PolyU. Visible street action had thinned to scattered flash mobs and sit-ins. More than 7,000 people had been arrested. Many organizers were jailed or in exile. And the government wasn't budging. Like we say, the movement had simply run out of steam.
And while it was wheezy and struggling to breathe, two things would happen that would kill it dead: COVID and the passing of the National Security Law. For the matter of COVID, the situation more broadly was actually quite peculiar, as its arrival both totally changed how things worked in the territory but, compared to elsewhere, left day-to-day life weirdly intact. The virus itself is believed to have first hit on the 22nd of January, being carried by an infected 39-year-old man arriving by high-speed rail from Wuhan. And three days later, Beijing activated its highest emergency level, set up an initial command structure, and began tightening things up. All but three ways into the city were shuttered. Those three being the airport, Shenzhen Bay Port, and the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge. Students and civil servants shifted to home-based working. A two-week quarantine was imposed on those entering, and mask requirements gradually expanded until they were needed everywhere, save for your own home, by the end of July. Oh, and they also began rolling out vaccines and the "Leave Home Safe" app that tracked where you'd been and whether you had been around anyone later found to be infected. Other than that, though, life went on generally as normal, with restaurants, stores, public services, and leisure amenities all generally remaining open. Occasionally, a residential building would be locked down during a local spike, and occasionally the boozers would be shut down as well, although some places in the party district of Lan Kwai Fong just went full speakeasy and ignored it. So, yeah, like we say, life was weirdly normal given the world's wider events at the time.
Despite that, however, COVID proved to be just enough to sap some more momentum from the protests, to rob their rhythms, and thin their numbers. Streets that had been loud with bodies and banners grew quieter, not just because people were afraid of being snatched by police, but because they were afraid of catching a virus on the way home.
And then, in the middle of all that, came the Law of the People's Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, better known more simply as the National Security Law, or NSL – the single most consequential piece of legislation to hit Hong Kong since 1997. It was first announced on the 21st of May during the annual session of China's National People's Congress, where officials confirmed that Beijing itself, not Hong Kong's own legislature, would draft and impose a new law to prevent, stop, and punish acts endangering national security. The full text wasn't released until the 30th of June, and it came into force at 11 p.m. that very same day, literally one hour before the 23rd anniversary of the handover.
The law established four new criminal categories: secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces, each carrying a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. It also authorized the creation of two new enforcing bodies: the Office for Safeguarding National Security (the OSNS), staffed directly by mainland Chinese agents and operating above local jurisdiction, and the National Security Department of the Hong Kong Police Force, which was granted sweeping new powers of search, seizure, and surveillance.
And if you want to hear some particularly chilling specific parts of the NSL, consider Article 55. Under this, the OSNS could take over any case it deemed complex, transfer suspects to mainland China for trial, and apply mainland legal procedure inside the city. Oh, and just for some context, whereas Hong Kong inherited and maintains its British abolition of the death penalty, it's still fully on the books in the mainland, and not just for murder, either. On the mainland, political crimes can also carry it, at least in theory. Treason, espionage, or colluding with foreign forces in ways deemed to endanger state security can all be punished by death under China's criminal law. Even subversion or terrorist activity charges, if said to cause especially serious consequences, fall within the same bracket. In practice, Beijing tends to hand out life terms instead, but the statute keeps that final option open. So when Article 55 says suspects may be taken north for trial under mainland procedure, it doesn't just mean a different courtroom; it means they're entering a system where, on paper, the ultimate sentence still exists.
And then there's Article 38. It says the NSL applies to anyone who commits an offense from outside the region, even if they're not a Hong Kong resident. With that in mind, consider the following utterances: "Gee, on reflection, I don't really think machine-gunning student protesters in 1989 was quite cricket." "You know, the whole pinning down pregnant women and forcing them to have abortions thing that China did during its various child policies? Not on, was it?" "Hong Kongers, having never fallen under the communist jurisdiction until the handover and basically all of them being people who specifically fled from it or descended there from, probably should get to choose how their territory is governed, shouldn't they?" Or to quote a legend, "Donald Trump: 'Don't trust China. China is...'" With all four of those utterances, as far as Beijing is concerned, we've just violated the NSL, and they believe they have the right to come for us as a result.
But wait, there's more. Because consider also Article 46. With it, jury trials, long a common law hallmark, can be dispensed with if the case involves state secrets, foreign factors, or juror safety, with such trials instead being heard by a panel of designated judges only. And some may say that that is just a little bit open to abuse.
Next, Article 43 and its 116 pages of implementation rules. Oh, with this one, police powers are supercharged. Officers can freeze assets, seize passports, demand platforms remove online content and hand over user data, conduct warrantless searches in urgent cases, compel suspects to disclose encryption keys, and impose exit bans. We could go on. Certainly, there is no shortage of other eyebrow-raising articles. But you get the idea.
And within hours of the NSL taking effect, the police were making their first arrests under its provisions. As on the 1st of July, 10 people were detained at a small protest in Causeway Bay. Among them, a man carrying a Hong Kong independence flag. By year's end, nearly 100 people had been arrested under the law.
Less visible, certainly no less notable, is the fact that political and human rights organizations began shutting up shop left, right, and center post-NSL. For example, Demosistō, the youth-led pro-democracy party founded by Joshua Wong and Nathan Law, disbanded within hours of the law's passing, its leadership resigning en masse on the 30th of June. Student Localism, another activist group accused of promoting independence, likewise folded the same day, while the Hong Kong National Front announced it would move its operations overseas. There's no two ways about it. By the close of 2020, the idea of Hong Kong as a semi-free, semi-autonomous civic space was dead, and it was entirely thanks to the NSL. Because of it, institutions that once buffered dissent – political parties, unions, human rights groups, independent newsrooms, university faculties – had been hollowed out or dismantled.
Economically, the city still glittered. The skyline and the stock tickers offered a neat, photogenic story of resilience. Politically, however, something essential had been excised: the capacity of citizens to contest power without fearing criminal reclassification, asset seizures, or disappearance into an opaque legal process. The NSL had not only criminalized opposition; it had redesigned the incentives of daily life so that conformity, not courage, paid. That was the law's cruel efficiency. It did not need to arrest everyone; it only needed to make dissent dangerous enough that most people stopped trying. The lights were still on, but they no longer illuminated a free city.
And from then on, for Beijing, it was just a matter of consolidation. Resistance to them, both spoken and physical, had been crushed. So all they had to do was make sure that it was never able to take root ever again. The so-called "patriots only" Legislative Council election in December 2021 was their first great act of tidying up. Every candidate was run through a new eligibility screen. Only those deemed sufficiently loyal to the motherland could stand. And even then, it was only 20 of the 90 seats up for election that were voted in directly. The rest were appointed or chosen by industry, each one vetted in advance. Turnout, perhaps unsurprisingly, collapsed to 30.2%, the lowest in the city's history, even after the government made public transport free in a desperate bid to coax people to the polls. The legislature that emerged was precisely what Beijing had wanted all along: obedient, bloodless, and impossible to tell apart from the one over the border in Shenzhen.
Outside the chamber, the city's civic backbone was systematically dismantled. The Civil Human Rights Front, the organizers of Hong Kong's million-strong marches, dissolved in August 2021, blaming "unprecedented pressure." Then, mere weeks later, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, the group behind the annual Tiananmen Square vigil at Victoria Park, voted itself out of existence after its leaders were arrested and its accounts frozen. The vigil itself had been explicitly banned in 2020, supposedly due to COVID. And yet, to this very day, despite COVID long since having become a thing of the past, it remains banned, and police officers always turn up in force on the anniversary, just in case anyone plans on coming over and having a little too much to think. The Professional Teachers' Union, too, once 95,000 members strong, folded in late 2021 after state media called it a "poisonous tumor." And by October, the Confederation of Trade Unions followed.
Then they came for the press. The newsroom of Apple Daily, an openly pro-democracy newspaper, had actually been raided in August 2020. 200 officers pouring into its Tseung Kwan O old newsroom, seizing hard drives and flipping through reporters' notebooks, looking for unpatriotic takes. They had arrested Apple Daily's founder, Jimmy Lai, the day prior, charging him with collusion with foreign forces. But he told his staff to keep working, and for a while, they did, printing front pages that no one else would even dare to entertain. Beijing meddling in the courts, the gutting of the Legislative Council, the quiet vanishing of protest leaders. Advertisers fled, banks froze accounts, suppliers suddenly lost capacity to deliver paper stock. But the newsroom kept the presses running. At least they did until June 2021. As on the 17th of that month, more than 500 officers from the National Security Department surrounded the building, sealed the doors, and spent the day carting away boxes of documents and arresting senior editors. Hours later, the government then froze 18 million Hong Kong dollars of the company's assets, cutting off payroll overnight. Staff wept as they cleared their desks. But a few stalwarts prepared one last edition. It landed on doorsteps on the 24th, selling a million copies as opposed to the usual 80,000. And it ran a simple headline: "Hong Kongers bid a tearful farewell in the rain. We support Apple Daily." Within weeks of the last drops of ink drying, the company was liquidated, its servers seized, its journalists either jailed or having fled abroad. Jimmy Lai himself has remained imprisoned ever since, having been sentenced in April 2021 and remaining in solitary confinement ever since.
And the fate of the other pro-democracy outlets wasn't much different either. Stand News, the independent online outlet that had inherited much of Apple Daily's audience, was raided in the final days of 2021. More than 200 national security officers swept through its newsroom before dawn, arresting its senior editors, seizing computers, and freezing its assets under the charge of publishing seditious material. The site was deleted within hours. In the days following, Citizen News also announced it would shut down for the safety of its staff, and investigative agency FactWire quietly folded soon after. Others, however, adapted. i.e., they bent the knee. RTHK, for example, Hong Kong's public broadcaster, was re-engineered into a government mouthpiece, its archives wiped, and its award-winning journalists dismissed. Even the venerable and once highly lauded South China Morning Post learned the new lines, softening their tone and trimming their coverage to keep their licenses safe. By 2022, then, Hong Kong's once cacophonous press had been reduced to all but a single note, and a very obedient one at that.
And the persecution of Hong Kong's pro-democracy politicians didn't stop either. As in early 2021, 47 of the city's most prominent opposition figures were rounded up in dawn raids and charged under the National Security Law in what became known as the "Hong Kong 47" case – the largest political prosecution in the territory's history. Their supposed crime: organizing and taking part in an unofficial primary election the previous summer. In reality, it was just a simple, peaceful vote intended to decide which candidates should contest the next Legislative Council race. Among those charged were veteran legislators like Claudia Mo, Leung Kwok-hung, our old friend Joshua Wong, and many district councillors barely out of their 20s. All were accused of conspiracy to subvert state power, and almost every one of them was denied bail under the NSL's reverse presumption of innocence (yes, that's a thing in NSL cases), and they were left to languish in pre-trial detention for years. And naturally, when the verdicts finally arrived in 2024, the vast majority – all but two of them – were found guilty, with sentences ranging from 4 years and 2 months all the way up to 10 years.
And to make sure none of their ilk should ever rise again, in 2022, Beijing turned its attention to the classroom and introduced a new national security education model built directly around Article 10 of the NSL, which requires schools, social groups, media, and online platforms to conduct national security education. Now, every Hong Kong student, from six-year-olds in primary school to university undergraduates, is now a subject of patriotic re-education. The first framework, issued in 2021 and revised in 2025, laid out 15 subject-specific syllabuses linking Chinese history, geography, and civic education to the state's overall national security concept. The content itself leaves little doubt about its purpose, too. Textbooks now describe Hong Kong as an inseparable part of China since ancient times. The Communist Party is the state's core leadership, and national security is the shared duty of all citizens. Pupils are required to memorize the four national security offenses and to identify examples of each. Secondary students, able to handle the more difficult concepts, learn that rights and freedoms must be exercised within the boundaries of national security, while their civics lessons teach that the People's Liberation Army safeguards the prosperity of Hong Kong. Schools also now hold mandatory flag-raising ceremonies, install patriotism corners, and participate in joint mainland exercise trips to military museums and "red education bases."
By 2022, the first real consequences of all of this were visible not on the streets, but in the departure of nearly half a million people – over 6% of Hong Kong's entire population – left between 2020 and 2024. Teachers, nurses, engineers, journalists, and civil servants. It was a huge brain drain. The UK was the biggest destination, thanks to the fact that the British National Overseas Passport, a document that all pre-handover Hong Kongers and their first-generation descendants are able to receive. Bit of a stab in the back from London on this one, though, because if you think that, given the fact that "British National" is written on the cover, that this document is a British passport with just some kind of, "yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a technicality to keep Beijing sweet" setup, you'd actually be wrong. What it actually is, in real terms, is the right to apply for a work visa with skill requirements waived and at a reduced cost. Although this still costs about $1,300 a year all-in. And that is a cost that many Hong Kongers simply cannot afford. Sure, they live in a wealthy place, but it has its working classes and its poverty. And people like that simply are trapped. They have no way out. They don't have the resources to just upstick and move to another country. They don't have the flashy banking job in the International Finance Centre that can be copy-pasted into basically any big city in the world. They don't have the uncle who immigrated back in the black-and-white days and so can help them get over and land on their feet. They are people who protested back in 2019, who knowingly put themselves in harm's way for a chance of the freedom that they were promised in 1997, and now have to live their lives looking over their shoulder, wondering if those facial recognition cameras did pick them up when their mask slipped. And if that latest knock on the door is the National Security Police coming to have a little chat about it. What are they meant to do when their kids come home from school and tell them all about what they've been learning about in their new civics classes? Do they dare not even speak their mind in their own home for fear their own child repeats what they tell them at school and then they get a knock on the door? Hell, even those who did escape, what do they do when they go to transfer their work-accrued pension fund and they find it blocked and inaccessible? Their whole retirement plan gone. What do they do about family members who for one reason or another could leave but just chose not to? Sure, they can just pop back to visit, and odds are they'll be safe unless they're a particularly outspoken public figure of one kind or another, but they can't guarantee it, can they? That, and yes, those weirdly specific examples do come from real people that we spoke to, is the reality of what pro-democracy Hong Kongers face in the present day. The territory is still their home. They can still go there. They can still live there. And yet, it's no longer theirs. The streets are the same. The Star Ferry still crosses Victoria Harbour as it's done for 150 years. But the spirit that once animated it is gone. All smothered beneath a velvet quiet that hums with CCTV self-censorship. Thank you for watching.