Xi’s HK power play puts China ever more at odds with West

Bloomberg

Minutes after reports broke that China passed a sweeping national security law for Hong Kong, Carrie Lam stood in front of a backdrop of the city’s iconic skyline for a weekly press briefing.
With legions of reporters clamouring to hear details of the law that could reshape the financial hub’s future, it quickly became clear that Hong Kong’s leader had none. Lam, who previously acknowledged that she hadn’t seen the legislation, couldn’t even confirm that China had approved it before quickly ending the press conference and walking away from the podium.
The awkward scene underscored the extent to which
Chinese President Xi Jinping sidelined Hong Kong’s leaders in shaping the city’s most important legislation since Beijing took control of the former British colony in 1997. When the details were finally unveiled to the world on June 30, it became clear why they kept it under wraps.
The law carries life sentences for secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces, which cover everything from serious disruption of transportation networks and attacks on government offices — tactics used by protesters last year — to advocating foreign sanctions against China, which many in the pro-democracy camp called for just weeks ago to deter Beijing from passing the law.
It also gives Chinese agents operating in Hong Kong immunity, allows for secret trials and calls for greater oversight of news agencies.
And the law is applicable to everyone, anywhere in the world — whether or not they are Hong Kong residents.
While those provisions look familiar to anyone on the mainland, they are foreign to Hong Kong. The treaty between China and the UK that resulted in Hong Kong’s Basic Law guaranteed an independent judiciary, freedom of speech, the right to protest and other civil liberties — protections credited with attracting foreign talent and investment and preserving its status as one of the world’s top financial centers.
But the law shows that Xi sees Hong Kong foremost as the one place under his control where citizens could openly undermine the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on power, and that could not stand no matter the consequences. Consulting with Hong Kong on a law designed to intimidate its residents into silence, therefore, might make it less effective both as a tool of coercion and as a message to China’s neighbours and the world, according to Rush Doshi, director of the Brookings China Strategy Initiative.
“Beijing is determined to signal strength and resolve even when doing so might harm China’s economic and reputational interests in the US, Europe, and now India,” said Doshi, who is also providing informal counsel to the presidential campaign of presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. “This approach, however, clearly reduces the space for bargaining with others.”
The legislation raises
concerns about China’s commitment to international agreements like its 1984 Joint Declaration with the UK. That treaty, which was registered with the United Nations, guaranteed that Hong Kong “will enjoy a high degree of autonomy, except in foreign and defense affairs” and that the “laws currently in force in Hong Kong will remain basically unchanged.”
The Group of Seven foreign ministers said before the law’s passage that the decision was “not in conformity“ with the treaty. China has rejected such criticism as foreign meddling, saying “the core” of its treaty obligations were fulfilled after resuming sovereignty over Hong Kong. “The bill reflects Xi’s steely determination to draw a bright red line on the inviolability of Chinese sovereignty, and that he views Western governments at best as easily divided and at worst as paper tigers,” said Chris Johnson, a former CIA China analyst who now heads China Strategies Group, a consulting firm.
“If Xi is proven right in that judgment, it will increase his dialectical, almost millenarian certainty that the West’s decline is both permanent and accelerating, perhaps emboldening him
to take greater risks on other points of tension with the US.”