When I first traveled to Hong Kong nearly two decades ago, the city’s free expression, political dynamism, and rule of law were a reinvigorating breath of fresh air after years of living in China. I remember buying an issue of Apple Daily and being amazed at the ability to do real reporting. I remember seeing an interview with Martin Lee on television and feeling exhilarated at the possibility of speaking frankly and honestly about current affairs. I even remember asking a policeman for directions, and finding him extremely friendly and helpful (how times have changed).

These experiences not only made me enamored with the city of Hong Kong, but also helped me recognize more than ever the power of freedom and the corresponding failings of the China model. It has thus been extremely disconcerting to watch over the past two decades as this China model, whose utter irrationality was disclosed to me by Hong Kong’s freedoms, has gradually overcome and smothered those freedoms.

Although the developments of recent years are shocking and infuriating, in retrospect they should not have been all that surprising: the Chinese Communist Party is obsessed with control, which makes it instinctively opposed to everything that captured my imagination in Hong Kong. Sure, they signed the Joint Declaration and oversaw the drafting of a Basic Law guaranteeing a high degree of autonomy for fifty years and universal suffrage and all of that nice stuff, but anyone who has taken the time to read all of the equally nice stuff promised in China’s Constitution will know that a measly little law will never get in the way of the CCP doing whatever it wants.

A realistic reference point for understanding Hong Kong’s relationship with China is thus to be found not in any legal document like the Basic Law, nor even in the allusive language of an extra-legal document like the forthcoming National Security Law, but rather in the torturous history of the People’s Republic of China’s controlling relationships with its nominally autonomous regions.

A revealing example in this regard is Tibet. Many commentators have already pointed out the ominous similarities between China’s 1951 Seventeen-Point Agreement with Tibet and the Basic Law, both of which promise freedoms, genuine autonomy, and protection of the prevailing political system. What has not been considered, however, is the similarities in the rapid unraveling of these two documents’ promises.

First, the Chinese Communist Party simply cannot hold to its promises of autonomy: it knows no checks or restraints on its control, and behaves accordingly. In Greater Tibet in the 1950s, the CCP initiated “reforms” which reorganized land and society according to the Party’s master narrative, while also suppressing religious practices that were a cornerstone of Tibetan society. This is precisely what the Party claimed it would not do. Since 1997 in Hong Kong, the central government has pushed draconian national security legislation under Article 23, national education modeled on post-Tiananmen patriotic education, a national anthem law that imprisons citizens for failing to show sufficient respect for a song whose author was struggled to death in the Cultural Revolution, an extradition bill that would allow citizens to be extradited to China’s notoriously corrupt legal system, and now a national security bill that threatens a range of legally guaranteed basic freedoms. So much for limiting its control to matters of diplomacy and defense.

Second, the CCP enacts its control falsely in the name of “the people.” Although social reforms were forced on Tibet from the top down, the CCP presented these initiatives as having popular support. Similar trends are apparent in Hong Kong, wherein obvious power grabs are portrayed as the will of the people via signature drives and other transparently phony political performances. The real bottom up trend in both cases has been resistance. “Reforms” in Tibet provoked armed resistance against Chinese rule that culminated in the 1959 Tibetan Uprising. The decision to force the extradition amendments on Hong Kong has similarly inspired a year of resistance to CCP mismanagement that has forever changed this city, but has perhaps not yet seen its culmination.

Third, resistance drives ever greater CCP interference. Just as China’s suppression in Tibetan regions in the 1950s was legitimized through the language of saving Tibet from itself, removing a “feudal aristocracy” overseeing a “slave society,” so China’s suppression in Hong Kong is rationalized through the language of saving Hong Kong from “political chaos” and “foreign anti-China forces,” phantoms pushed by the Liaison Office and its media arms. The CCP ironically presents its endless search for control beyond all legal restrictions as a defense of autonomy and the rule of law.

Finally, as tensions build, all members of society are forced to take a “correct stance” on China’s complete abandonment of its legally binding promises. The ability to speak honestly and frankly, which impressed me so greatly during my first visit to Hong Kong, is gradually being replaced not by silence but by a creeping requirement to speak dishonestly. Just as Tibetans are forced to endlessly perform their false gratitude to the CCP for their oppression as “liberation” in state-sponsored political galas, so politicians, pop culture figures, and business elites in Hong Kong today are being forced to express their newfound fondness for the National Security Law that will destroy the city’s way of life unless actively resisted.

Just a few years ago, it may have seemed hyperbolic and even potentially insensitive to compare Hong Kong’s situation to Tibet’s. After all, the people of Tibet have suffered under a colonizing dictatorship for six decades and are denied even the most basic rights. Yet the fate of Hong Kong in recent years shows that the oppression and suffering in Tibet is not an anomaly within the Chinese model of autonomy, but rather an intrinsic part of this model. Insofar as autonomy does not actually mean autonomy but rather control, oppression and suffering are at the end of the day the true face of autonomy within the People’s Republic of China.

(Kevin Carrico is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Monash University)

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