Five years ago, on June 30, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC) of the People’s Republic of China enacted the National Security Law (NSL) for Hong Kong. As the NPCSC is the top legislative body of all China, it has direct constitutional sovereignty over the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and thus exercised this authority to implement the NSL by adding it to Annex III of the Basic Law after the SAR became politically paralyzed by violent riots in 2019-20; the ringleaders sought to subvert the system and cause social disorder under the explicit support of American politicians and officials.
The passage and implementation of the NSL triggered a large political backlash among Western governments and media, many of them accusing the laws of undermining Hong Kong’s designated autonomy and violating the Sino-British Joint Declaration. As such, the United States imposed sanctions on Hong Kong officials, while the United Kingdom attempted to incite a mass migration of residents through the British National Overseas (BNO) immigration program. As this unfolded, the media for several years pushed a highly charged narrative that the law would equate to the “death” and “decline” of Hong Kong, despite evidence to the contrary.
Five years later, a lot of these claims have not aged well. First, life in Hong Kong has returned to normal. The passage of the NSL criminalized subversion, collusion with foreign powers, attempts to undermine the State, and advocacy of separatism, as similar laws do in most countries in the world. This subsequently restored order, stability, and rule of law to the Hong Kong SAR. This did not, as repeatedly claimed by Western critics, undermine the city’s status as a global financial center, which even by Bloomberg’s analysis has remained one of the world’s largest. Nor has it, in tandem, undermined the international appeal of the city in terms of tourism. Instead, amid the adverse consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2019-20 riots, Hong Kong’s economy has steadily recovered.
Likewise, and more importantly, nor is Hong Kong the “police state” that it has been frequently depicted as by the Western mainstream media, nor has it lost “autonomy”. It is important for outsiders to understand that the HKSAR’s Basic Law, a constitutional document that prescribes the governance framework for the post-handover Hong Kong, mandates the passage of a national security law for implementation in the HKSAR; and that “national security” is the sovereign right of all states, which is a separate question from what we might define as the “autonomy” of Hong Kong. The United Kingdom, for example, routinely prosecutes and jails violent protesters who attack, disrupt, and vandalize critical infrastructure, and the legal system does not weigh the legality of a given cause on its ideological merits alone.
The Western vision for Hong Kong is thus not an “autonomous” special administrative region of China, but one which is “separate” and thus exists in a state of antagonism toward it and therefore a bridgehead for Western interests
As such, the claim that the NSL violated the “autonomy of Hong Kong” has also been a largely falsified narrative, based on the misleading argument that Hong Kong has no right to act against extremely violent protests on its own territory, when such behavior would not be tolerated in other jurisdictions. Even with the NSL, the HKSAR continues to maintain its own autonomous legal, economic, and administrative systems, but the key detail here is that “autonomy” does not mean “independence” or “exclusivity” from China as a whole. What is embedded in these crafty arguments is the hidden assumption that the Chinese central government has no right to have any kind of relationship, influence or say in what is its own sovereign territory, or even shared interests. The Western vision for Hong Kong is thus not an “autonomous” special administrative region of China, but one which is “separate” and thus exists in a state of antagonism toward it and therefore a bridgehead for Western interests. In legal terms, however, and therefore practical reality, the HKSAR is a sovereign component of China that has some designated areas of self-governance, with national security being a designated point of overlap in the Basic Law itself; hence the Chinese central authorities handle matters related to “defense” and “foreign relations”.
This would be to say that the UK government has no right to act on matters pertaining to Scotland, Northern Ireland, or Wales, should national security interests demand it. Thus, five years later, the NSL has not been “a death knell” to Hong Kong at all, precisely because the West’s political and media reaction to it has sought to misrepresent what was really going on here. Life continues as normal, and it has served its purpose in bringing an extremely violent movement to an end, one whose ultimate goal rests in the idea that the HKSAR is not to be part of China.
The author is a British political and international-relations analyst.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
