The Guardian: Clampdown marks the end of Hong Kong's honeymoon (extract)

The city fears that the 'real handover' to China is about to begin

Friday January 10, 2003

The fate of the free city of Hong Kong is a matter of some considerable importance to the world as well as to the nearly 7 million people who live there. If the difficult political and economic balance in Hong Kong could be sustained, it has been recognised since the handover in 1997, it would suggest a Chinese capacity for skilful management, and an ability to rise above its impulse to control and dictate, which would reassure people in the rest of east Asia. Hong Kong is like the canary in the miner's cage. While it sings, all is well, but if the song begins to falter, there could be danger ahead.

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China surely did not set out to undermine Hong Kong. But the arrangements it has wished on the territory, and the man it twice chose to head its government, have not helped. Nor has the latest and most serious development in the already vexed history of relations between the legal systems of Hong Kong and China. This is the preparation of a set of security laws, under article 23 of the Basic Law, Hong Kong's constitution. Due to be passed in the summer, they import into Hong Kong law Chinese concepts and forms which polls show are disliked by 70% of the population.

They would, among many objectionable provisions, make it a crime to publish information that the government had not specifically released, including information about the relations between Hong Kong and Beijing, and allow searches and seizures without warrant under some circumstances.

But the most dangerous provisions, according to the many critics, are those which would force the Hong Kong government to ban in the territory any organisation that was proscribed in China.

The most immediate object of such laws might be the banned Falun Gong [spiritual movement], but there are other possible victims. For Martin Lee, the veteran Hong Kong democrat who led the Democratic party until recently, this is "the evil of all evils". He believes the new laws show that "the honeymoon is over... they're going to suppress Hong Kong more and more". The Far Eastern Economic Review also went so far as to speculate that article 23 represents "the real handover".

Others, like Christine Loh, the head of a liberal thinktank, are less sure of Beijing's more general intentions, but deplore proposals that would both take away from the rights of Hong Kong people and diminish the attraction of Hong Kong for international business. She says that "this is a business town and the voice of business matters", and that protest against the new laws has united students, lawyers and intellectuals with bankers and merchants, an unusually broad coalition for Hong Kong. The government says it was duty bound to replace the existing British security laws, which are also pretty swingeing, with new ones, and that some proposed provisions may well be withdrawn or amended.

These legal issues are critical. Even if the optimists who forecast that the powers will never be used were to be proved correct, they could not fail to affect behaviour and the atmosphere in which political, intellectual and journalistic decisions are taken. But the furore over article 23 has wider implications still. It shows a Hong Kong which lacks full confidence in its own government, in Beijing and in its own future. Some say that Hong Kong people have allowed themselves to drift into too dire a view of their problems. But they are surely right in sensing that their city needs both a new economic model and a new social compact, and that neither of the governments which control their affairs seems able to grasp the urgency of these tasks.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,7369,871951,00.html