In the furore over Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s declaration that there is no separation of powers in Hong Kong, the far more damaging confirmation of an end to the SAR’s high degree of autonomy was somewhat overlooked.

Last week Lam said, “Hong Kong is directly governed by the Central People’s Government. In other words, the high degree of autonomy enjoyed by Hong Kong is not full autonomy. The executive power, legislative power, and judicial power are not a constitutional system that separates power from the central government. The rights that Hong Kong enjoys come from the authorisation of the central government”.

So, that’s it, not only is autonomy limited to whatever the Communist Party wants it to mean but all arms of power (including the allegedly independent judiciary) are subject to control by the central government.

Cynics will say that this is hardly new information but, as ever, confirming the reality of the situation takes matters to a new level. It is now there in black and white and much flows from it.

Once an authoritarian regime no longer feels the need to pretend that it is anything other than what is implied by the word ‘authoritarian’, it feels liberated from constraints that might have prevented the worst excesses of its rule.

Clearly the days of restrain are over in Hong Kong and by the day the full rigmarole of a police state is being unveiled as the quislings stand on the sidelines cheering every move to extinguish the lingering remains of liberty.

To appreciate the implications of the announcement of the end for Hong Kong’s autonomy is to realise how much will be lost. And it explains why Lam also took this opportunity to insist that the separation of powers in the SAR was also dead.

This means goodbye to the existence of an independent judiciary that underpinned the rule of law and goodbye to a legislature with anything like real powers to monitor the government and rein it in.

Lam, the hapless Chief Executive in Name Only (CENO), has now proclaimed that not only will this separation of powers no longer prevail but, in the style of all tyrants (or in her case, wannabe tyrants) she is busy rewriting history to deny that this system ever existed.

Last year President Xi Jinping made clear what the Party thought about having a formal mechanism to constrain government action. In an article for Quishi Journal, the Party’s main theoretical periodical, he wrote “We must never follow the path of Western ‘constitutionalism,’ ‘separation of powers,’ or ‘judicial independence’”.

And, just in case anyone seriously believes that the Party has even a scintilla of interest in judicial independence it is worth recalling the views of Zhou Qiang, the president of the Supreme People’s court. He said, “bare your swords towards false western ideals like judicial independence.” Zhou, incidentally, used to be considered to be a ‘liberal’ within the Party system.

Here we see the dictatorship’s unmasked face asserting its power and absolute determination to exercise control at every level. The fervent hope that the Basic Law or indeed the Sino-British Joint Declaration would shield Hong Kong from mirroring the system on the mainland has now been consigned to the history.

The only mystery in all this is the way some people have greeted this news with a mixture of indifference and weary resignation – don’t they know that there is no such thing as inevitable in the history of mankind. Every step taken in the evolution of this world came as a result of people responding to events and creating new realities.

The famous American psychologist, Steven Pinker, puts it this way: “progress is nothing more or less than the accumulated fruits of humans trying to solve problems, problems are inevitable, new problems can arise, we make progress to the extent that we solve them”.

When Mao Zedong and his little band of followers were holed up in the hills and in dusty meeting rooms learning the skills of revolution under the tutelage of Soviet emissaries such as Mikhail Borodin, who could have imagined that they would end up ruling the world’s largest nation? There was nothing inevitable about their triumph and there is nothing inevitable about the subjugation of Hong Kong.

(Stephen Vines is a Hong Kong-based journalist, writer and broadcaster and runs companies in the food sector. He was the founding editor of ‘Eastern Express’ and founding publisher of ‘Spike’. In London he was an editor at The Observer and in Asia has worked for international publications including, the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, BBC, Asia Times and The Independent and, during Hong Kong’s 2019/20 protests, for the Sunday Times. He hosts a weekly television current affairs programme: The Pulse”

Vines’ latest book Defying the Dragon – Hong Kong and the world’s largest dictatorship, will be published early next year by Hurst Publishing. He is the author of several books, including: Hong Kong: China’s New Colony, The Years of Living Dangerously - Asia from Crisis to the New Millennium, Market Panic and Food Gurus.)

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