Can Hong Kong repair its battered image?

In the eyes of Hong Kong’s new leader John Lee, the city has a publicity problem. It has a great story to tell, and just needs to do a better job of showcasing its achievements to the world. “We should not belittle ourselves,” Lee told lawmakers a few days after taking office last month, saying he planned to send delegations overseas to “convey the truth” about Hong Kong. How’s that going so far? Not smoothly.
Figures showed a 1.6% drop in the population that was the largest in at least six decades, with a decline of 121,500 residents in the year ended on June 30. A government commentary accompanying the data pointed to a number of factors, including a plunge in the number of births, an increase in deaths, the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated impact of stringent border control and quarantine requirements. One element it didn’t mention: the national security law that Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in mid-2020. That’s a striking omission, considering that 113,742 Hong Kongers were granted visas to enter the UK alone under the British Nationals (Overseas) scheme between January 2021 and late May this year — a program that was explicitly linked to the passage of the security law.
If the census data undercut Lee’s narrative, even that pales beside the report last month from the United Nations Human Rights Committee, which placed the security law front and center in a wide-ranging critique of how authorities have suppressed and undermined rights to freedom of expression; peaceful assembly; freedom of association; judicial independence and fair trial; and participation in public affairs. Human rights lawyers described the report, a review of Hong Kong’s compliance with its obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, or ICCPR, as one of the strongest condemnations they had ever seen from the committee.
It lays down a marker that will hang over the city for years; officials will have to answer how they have acted on the recommendations of the UN’s experts at the next review in 2028.
The government’s initial reaction attests to the damage that the report has done to the financial center’s international reputation. In Hong Kong’s radically reshaped political culture, the security law has effectively been declared sacrosanct, with even the mildest criticisms typically labelled “smears.” Former Hong Kong Bar Association Chairman Paul Harris, who had called for the law to be amended, fled the territory in March shortly after being interviewed by national security police, having been branded “anti-China” by Beijing’s state-run media. Yet in its lengthy statement, the Hong Kong government refrained from leveling such accusations at the UN’s independent human-rights experts. Instead, it applauded a “constructive dialogue” with the committee and asserted that it had been the victim of “misunderstandings.”
The authorities’ argument, as it has been from the start, is that the national security law was a necessary response to the violence of pro-democracy protests in 2019, and that the rights and freedoms of residents have been protected. After dealing with this little local difficulty, the city remains fundamentally the same, only better: Hong Kong is moving from “chaos to stability and prosperity,” in the oft-repeated slogan of Chinese government agencies and media.
It’s a theme that runs through official communications, including the words of Lee, who oversaw the 2019 crackdown and was handpicked by Beijing to be the next chief executive. Hong Kong society is “free, open and inclusive,” the former policeman said in his question-and-answer session with legislators last month. “Apart from being a dynamic city, Hong Kong has a low-tax regime and has put in place a well-established system with a very high degree of transparency. Our rule of law is clear and protects citizens of Hong Kong very well. These are the strengths we can leverage on and I think no matter how others try to smear, they can never succeed.”
As a line of attack for a public relations campaign, this has very little chance of working — at least in the liberal democratic sphere which, presumably, is its primary target. It attempts an impossible contradiction: convincing the world that, having wholly embraced the political culture and values of the Communist Party-run mainland, Hong Kong somehow remains an island of freedom and openness between East and West.
—Bloomberg

Matthew Brooker is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering finance and politics in Asia. A former editor and bureau chief for Bloomberg News and deputy business editor for the South China Morning Post, he is a CFA charterholder