Spoiler: Soon four years ago, the CCP introduced the draconic Security Law. It is designed to silence demands for human rights, freedom and democracy and anything else that annoys the CCP. It was the end for the relative free media and independent judiciary in Hong Kong before the law. It was the end for Civil society organisations, the end of academic and cultural freedom and the end of freedom of expression. Silence has fallen in Hong Kong.
My previous post about the democratic backlash took its point of departure in the global decline that has been going on for almost twenty years now. The change has been more dramatic in some places than others. Hong Kong is one of these places. The brutal Chinese communist regime has clamped down hard on the relatively free and liberal Hong Kong since the UK left.
Three years ago I posted three different posts about how Xi Jinping and the CCP crushed freedom in Hong Kong. You can find them here, here, and here. They were all about the Chinese security law that made it criminal to be advocating human rights, freedom and democracy. Speaking out loud was labeled as crimes of subversion, and terrorism. The law was designed broadly and vaguely to allow the communist regime to use it to quash freedoms of speech and assembly, political dissent and an independent judiciary. Features of Hong Kong that were taken for granted allowed in Hong Kong for decades, unlike in mainland China.
I noted in the last post linked to above, that
“On the very first day the law entered into force, the police had arrested more than 300 people , nine of which were arrested specifically for violating the new security law.”
Many of these and people arrested later suffered from intolerable abuse and torture in the prisons. Torture is as we all know an old communist tradition and the CCP does honour some traditions.
CCP tortures its critics and democracy activists.
Source: Varieties of Democracy
The CCP not only shuts up its critics in Hong Kong, it kidnaps people abroad. The Swedish citizen Gua Minhai who was kidnapped in Thailand has been detained for more than 3075 days now. This site, https://freeguiminhai.org/, where you can read more about him, keeps track of his detention. Gua Minhai is not the only Chinese-born critic that has been targeted outside of China by the CCP. The CCP does not take kindly that we talk about him, Hong Kong, the genocide of Uighurs, Tibet or its repression in general. In fact, the CCP wants us to shut up.
But I won’t. So this post is about how the CCP continues to destroy Hong Kong. One way to show this is to put numbers on it. The Varieties of Democracy data set allows us to show the deteriorations in democracy and freedom in numbers. The situation of liberal democracy in 2015 vs 2023 in Eastern and Southern Asian countries is shown below. The state of liberal democracy has deteriorated in countries located below the diagaonal stretching from bottom left to top right. The liberal democracy index for Hong Kong has declined from above 0.25 to below 0.20 between 2015 and 2023.
Source: Varieties of Democracy.
Many academics, journalists and organisations have written about how the CCP has increased its pressure on Hong Kong over the last years. Human Rights Watch and Freedom House have documented the developments for many years now.
Human Rights Watch about China
The HRW 2024 annual report states that
“Since Beijing imposed the draconian National Security Law on Hong Kong in June 2020, freedoms have sharply declined.”
Hong Kong authorities have arrested hundreds of people for being democracy activists. All brought to trial were conviced. Pro-democracy politicians, students, the well-known free-speech advocate and publisher Jimmy Lai is among them. The authorities have clamped down on all kinds of media and begun to remove politically sensitive books from libraries. The civil society is effectively silenced and no public assemblies are allowed. Especially not demonstrations organised by workers. No communist regime has ever tolerated a spontanous independent demonstration held by workers. So why should the CCP tolerate that. Indeed, a planned International Workers’ Day protest in April was therefore cancelled after national security police detained one of the organizers. Attacks on the judiciary have been frequent to make the courts bend to the government’s and the CCP’s wishes.
Parts of the development are shown below. Quantitative assessments of situations for media, Internet, the High court, and Civil societies are made on scales ranging from 0 to 4. A 0 indicates a total censoring of media and the Internet, absence of CSO’s, and no High Court independence. A value of 4 indicates absence of government intervention.
The intervention from the CCP has increased significantlty over the years. Especially the media and the CSOs have been targeted.
The CCP censors media, the Internet, clamps down on CSOs and attacks the High court’s independence.
Source: Varieties of Democracy.
It is about to get worse. 86 human rights organisations have published a statement urging governments across the world to oppose a new legislation aiming at further devastate human rights in Hong Kong.
The proposed law would prohibit a range of vague and overly broad offenses. It would punish people who “induce…disaffection against” the Chinese government. It would use procedural changes to dramatically undermine due process and fair trial rights, including by extending police detention without charge and restricting access to lawyers. These changes will exacerbate the impact of the draconian National Security Law, which the Chinese government imposed in June 2020, and then promptly crushed the city’s civil society, independent media, and democracy movement.
An asssessment like the one above, can also be made for rights of a more general nature. Below are situations for Rule of Law, Civil liberties, Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom in 2015 compared to 2023. The CCP’s influence is especially noticeable for Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom where the authorities have made sure that silence prevails.
The CCP attacks the Rule of Law, Civil liberties, Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression.
Source: Varieties of Democracy.
Freedom House about China
In its chapter on Hong Kong in the 2024 report, Freedom House states that:
[..the National Security Law (NSL) has amounted a multifront attack on the “one country, two systems” framework. The territory’s most prominent prodemocracy figures have been arrested under its provisions, and NSL charges or the threat of charges have resulted in the closure of political parties, independent news outlets, peaceful nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and unions.
Freedom House shows that the new Article 23 also threatens religious freedom. Since the CCP wants to know everything, confessions will in the future not only be heard by the priests.
All human rights are attacked by the CCP and its dictator who doesn’t want us to share this picture of him. So, let’s share it!