Since the National Security Act in Hong Kong came into force in 2020, which typified and toughened the penalty for crimes such as terrorism, subversion and secession and was used to persecute political dissidents, Alex Chow, 31, has not set foot in his hometown. .
“I thought about going back and, if arrested, serving the sentence and then being free to live and die in my country. But the idea is also terrifying. How long would I be in prison? fair process”, says the activist, a key figure in the pro-democracy protests in the city since 2014, now in exile in the United States.
The fear of Chow, who went to prison for three months in 2017, is to join the 1,036 political prisoners that the city has today. The data are from the Hong Kong Democracy Council (HKDC), an entity based in Washington, USA, and formed by expatriates like him.
That number includes political leaders, representatives of non-governmental organizations and unions, journalists, teachers, activists and lawyers, among other groups, according to the agency, which estimates that more than 75% of prisoners are under 30 years old.
Today, 25 years after Hong Kong was handed back to Beijing after a century and a half under British rule, the city has seen a crackdown on political dissent soar. In 2019, before the mass protests that paralyzed the Chinese administrative region, there were only 26 people arrested for political reasons, according to a survey by the HKDC.
Also according to the group, since the beginning of 2021, more than 70 civil society bodies have been closed, including student, religious, political, trade unions and human rights organizations, in violation of the right to free association.
Repression also occurs in more subtle ways. This Wednesday (29), the Chinese regime banned ten foreign journalists from following the celebrations of 25 years of the re-annexation of the city, including representatives of agencies such as Reuters and AFP, as well as the South China Morning Post portal, according to the Association of Hong Kong journalists.
The vehicles were “invited” to send other representatives, says the government, but they would need to comply with quarantine to enter the country, which would make coverage impossible anyway.
With the presence of the leader of the communist regime, Xi Jinping, the event marked the passing of the baton from the local chief executive, Carrie Lam, to his successor, John Lee, in what has been seen by analysts as a sign that the repression will not will decrease in the near future.
That’s because Lee, 64, commanded public security in Hong Kong from 2017 to 2021, during the period of greatest repression of pro-democracy protests, and will be the first security officer to assume command of the territory.
Lam, in turn, leaves the government after five years marked as responsible for burying once and for all the promise that Beijing would respect the way of life of the Hong Kong people until 2047, with freedom of speech and press, under the principle of “one country , two systems”, agreed in the negotiations to return the city to China.
At least since 2003, Beijing has repeatedly tightened its grip on Hong Kong, but nothing compared to the National Security Law of 2020, which managed to definitively stifle demonstrations against the communist regime.
Since then, the city has registered what dissidents call a diaspora, and local management counts 117,400 fewer inhabitants between 2019 and 2021. Some countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia have created political asylum programs. In the UK alone, around 100,000 Hong Kong people were granted residency in the first 12 months after the British government opened up this possibility in 2021.
For Li Xing, a professor of international relations at Aalborg University in Denmark, the National Security Law was the Chinese regime’s definitive way of dealing with the demonstrations, which he said were becoming more and more violent. According to the expert, it is necessary to understand the pro-democracy protests from the perspective of the increase in rivalry between China and Western powers.
“Every country has national security laws. The United States bans Chinese companies claiming a national security risk, such as Huawei,” explains Xing, saying that Hong Kong protesters received help from abroad, including equipment such as masks against gas bombs.
Another factor that the professor points out to understand the pro-democracy demonstrations is a kind of anxiety that has fallen mainly on young people due to the stagnation of the island’s economy, which since the end of the last century has grown at rates much lower than that of mainland China.
In the first quarter of this year, while much of the world was recovering from the impact of the pandemic, Hong Kong recorded a 3% drop in GDP compared to the previous quarter, exacerbated by the Covid-19 outbreak that paralyzed the city. The unemployment rate, once around 3%, is now above 5% — after reaching 7% in 2021.
Evandro Menezes de Carvalho, PhD in international law and professor at FGV and UFF, says that the historical context makes even more serious in the eyes of China what may seem like foreign interference, since the domination of Hong Kong dates back to the so-called “century of humiliation”, in which Western powers, especially the United Kingdom, destroyed the Chinese economy.
“I was there in 2019 and I saw quite orderly protests, let’s say. But I also saw some protesters who were holding British flags and asking for British intervention. This is a problem, especially when you look at China’s past, with the very takeover of Hong Kong and the signing of treaties [de cessão de territórios] that to this day the Chinese consider demeaning.”
For Carvalho, “any type of criticism or action by another country in relation to Hong Kong can be seen as an external intervention in internal affairs, which is prohibited by international law, and there is no dispute that the sovereignty of the city belongs to the People’s Republic. from China.”
Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s people have already given up hope of substantial reforms in the near future, says dissident Alex Chow.
“Beijing has already made it clear that it will no longer respect the rule of one country, two systems. The only way for a significant change to happen in Hong Kong would be with the fall of the communist regime in China. Then, who knows, there could be a window for real reforms. For now, I have no hope.”
