Writing recently in China Daily, the Communist Party’s English language outlet, Stephen Philips, the director-general of Investment Promotion at Invest Hong Kong, had this upbeat message:

“Hong Kong’s fundamentals as a premier international business hub are very sound and this is borne out by global investors’ continued confidence in the city. Opportunities abound too. Hong Kong is very much open for business, and investors from around the world are raring to go.”

Mr Philips is well paid to spout this kind of nonsense and is clearly not inclined to listen to what international business organizations are actually saying. More worryingly it is possible that no one has told him just how hard his paymasters are working to undermine the fundamentals he writes of in such glowing terms.

Things have got worse as the government steps up efforts to deliver body blows to the credibility of Hong Kong as “a premier international business hub”.

Businesses traditionally came to Hong Kong to set up global and regional headquarters because they had confidence in the rule of law and the provision of first class legal services, alongside other key supporting services such as accountancy. They liked the fact that business could be conducted in a secure atmosphere with a reasonable degree of transparency. They liked the free access to information and a regime that actively encouraged freedom of movement.

Now these underpinnings of business confidence are being shattered, one by one. It is hard to know where to start in detailing the carnage but let’s consider what has been proposed in the space of a single week, last week as it happens.

Unsatisfied with introducing the National Security Law, which departs significantly from Hong Kong’s common law system, allowing the executive to appoint judges, abolishing the right to trial by jury and allowing for extradition to the Mainland, etc., the government is now proposing to undermine the status of the legal profession by overriding the Bar Association, which has jurisdiction over the appointment of senior counsels. The Justice Secretary wants to give herself the right to appoint lawyers employed by her own Legal Department to join the ranks of barristers to become senior counsels, replacing the system where they have been selected by their peers on the basis of experience and good standing.

More or less at the same time the government came up with a plan to strip the accountancy profession of the right to govern its own affairs by taking away powers to supervise the appointment of auditors and being responsible for their conduct. Instead, these powers would be transferred to the government.

Therefore, in the crucial areas of legal and accountancy services, the independence and integrity of the professions is destined to be overtaken by political interference from the state.

This forms part of the Communist Party’s overall plan to ensure that there is no such thing as separation of powers in Hong Kong. Moreover, it is punishment for the Bar Association which has the temerity to stand up for rule of law and is a shot across the bows for the generally conservative accountancy profession that had the temerity to elect pro-democracy members to the governing body of the Hong Kong Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Meanwhile the government is busy dreaming up ways of reducing the transparency of companies registered in Hong Kong by removing the home addresses and identification card numbers of owners and directors, both of which help to verify identification when due diligence is undertaken on company information.

The fact that the official databases have been used to track the wealth shovelled into Hong Kong by families of senior Mainland leaders and, more recently, was used to identify thugs responsible for the infamous attack at Yuen Long station, explains why the non-existent problem of so-called doxing arising from these databases has suddenly become an issue.

Transparency matters to the business world and Hong Kong is defiantly standing against a global trend to ramp up transparency. Decision makers in companies thinking of locating in Hong Kong will draw their own conclusions as to why the SAR is choosing to travel in another direction.

Meanwhile the frontal attack on freedom of expression goes on unabated and puts into question the continued ability of Hong Kong to provide an open space for the conduct of business where unfettered access to information is a must. And a new immigration law will soon come into force curbing freedom of movement that is allegedly protected in Hong Kong under Article 31 of the Basic Law.

The dunderheads who declared that the freezing of assets of political opponents and, in the case of Jimmy Lai, his removal from participation in the companies he founded, would have no impact on business as a whole, have seriously underestimated the Communist Party’s desire for control at all costs.

They simply do not understand that the hammer blows initially directed against political opponents inevitably find other targets with alarming speed. And the apologists for authoritarian government have not even contemplated the willingness of Hong Kong’s leading Quislings to collaborate in this frenzy of destructive behavior.

(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, was published earlier this 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.)

Stephen Vines’s article can be found in our Columnist section.

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