Hong Kong needs more support from Taiwan as the city has entered into a state of de-facto martial law following Beijing’s imposition of the national security law, a scholar from the self-ruled island says.

The mainland has snuffed out any possibility of representative democracy in Hong Kong and isolated the city’s dissenting voices from foriegn countries through the draconian law, in effect ending the “one country, two systems” framework guaranteeing freedoms in the former

British colony, said Wu Jieh-min, a research fellow at Academia Sinica’s sociology institute in Taiwan.

Hong Kong is facing a grim outlook with the introduction of national security police and special agents to the system of governance. This amounts to an undeclared state of martial law in which dissent will be driven underground and which will be worse than what Taiwan experienced under the four decades of marital law that ended in 1987, Wu said during a seminar held in the southern Taiwan city of Tainan.

“This is only the beginning stage of Hong Kong’s White Terror period,” he added.

The situation will deteriorate further if the Chinese Communist Party launches a “Cultural Revolution” to clamp down on pro-democracy academics in Hong Kong universities, Wu said

Taiwan should step up its aid to Hong Kong, such as passing on its own experience in resisting authoritarian rule and increasing transparency in its mechanism for receiving refugees, he said.

The recent jailing of activist Agnes Chow showed that the younger generations are the main targets of Hong Kong’s government, said Chiu Chui-cheng, deputy minister of Taiwan’s mainland affairs council.

Mainland China is turning Hong Kong into East Berlin with its all-encompassing suppression in the legislature, media and schools, said Lin Fei-fan, a deputy secretary-general of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party.

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