Xia Baolong, director of the Hong Kong and Macao Work Office of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council, told the opening ceremony of the National Security Education Day event on Wednesday that: “Security enables development. Without security, nothing else is possible. Only by holding this bottom line can we secure development and win the future.”

The historical prosperity of Hong Kong was established upon an unambiguous foundation of security, which provided certainty. During the era of British rule, the city was able to grow precisely because stability was the underlying priority, ensuring that political unrest, external interference, and insurrection were prevented, which gave confidence to investors, traders, and businesses. The city was famous for its stability.

Despite the post-handover narrative that the Western political class projected on the city, Hong Kong was not, and was never, designed to be “liberal” under British rule, a projected narrative that came into play only later when it served the West’s geopolitical ends. Instead, the city was designed to serve distinct economic purposes. Hong Kong was to be a free trade port and a financial center, and it was only through a strong rule-of-law system and security mechanisms that such an arrangement was made possible. We see a very similar model in Singapore today, which is not questioned by the West.

The events of the past decade subsequently demonstrated the risks that Hong Kong faces to its own prosperity if security is undermined, which threatens the whole model and thus the confidence of business. Following the 1997 handover, Western powers politicized Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy as an ideological project to influence the Chinese mainland, and subsequently backed violent unrest and riots in the city in 2019 and 2020. During this time, infrastructure was destroyed, public order suffered, and business was severely disrupted. This led to the promulgation of the Hong Kong SAR National Security Law (NSL), which, although opposed by the West, helped restore law and order to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s future development trajectory and prosperity hinge on maintaining this status quo and ensuring that enterprises and investors are confident it is a stable and low-risk environment to operate in

Despite the criticism that the West pushed over this, the reality is that there is no other government in the world that would have tolerated its security, and thus prosperity, being brazenly undermined by a foreign-backed insurrection, and the idea such activities would simply be tolerated in a Western country in the name of political “ideology” is categorically untrue. From the Chinese point of view, the NSL asserted China’s sovereign rights pertaining to national security over the city, and it was a pragmatic move to uphold the stability and greater good, as opposed to being a dogmatic or aggressive one.

Thus, although Western media aggressively responded to the NSL by pushing the narrative that the city was “in decline”, or “dead”, the reality is, as established above, such claims about Hong Kong are ahistorical to what the city had always been prior to the handover, and are attempts to turn into a Western ideological project. Thus, life and business in the city ultimately returned to normal following the disruption caused by riots and the COVID-19 pandemic, and has subsequently maintained its position as one of the world’s most important financial centers.

This regained stability and security allowed Hong Kong to place itself in a strong position to benefit on an enormous scale from the artificial-intelligence industry boom in recent years, having also recalibrated itself as a bridge between mainland capital and the broader world, as political conditions within the United States became unfavorable. Thus, Hong Kong’s future development trajectory and prosperity hinge on maintaining this status quo and ensuring that enterprises and investors are confident it is a stable and low-risk environment to operate in.

Beijing, after all, believes that Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy and unique economic system are beneficial, and upholding security in the city is also part of maintaining that. After all, what is Hong Kong if the foundations of its prosperity cease to exist? If it becomes a hub of chaos, disorder, and violence? Will it be the world-class financial center and free-port it has been admired as? Given it is geographically a series of tightly knit islands and peninsulas, how else would it survive? Security framework in Hong Kong is politically opposed by the West, even as those countries utilized it themselves.

The author is a British political and international-relations analyst.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.