We have heard it thousands of times in the short span of just one month, from the Chief Executive’s inane press conferences to the brainless editorials of Wen Wei Po: the National Security Law will bring “stability” to Hong Kong.

But no one has articulated how this works. How exactly will the National Security Law bring stability? Or, to cut through the empty Pekingese sloganeering that has increasingly come to dominate the Hong Kong government’s public statements, how are draconian pseudo-laws forced on Hong Kong in violation of standard legislative processes going to contribute to stability? How is stability enhanced by enabling indefinite extra-legal detention and show trials in China on made-up political charges?

There is actually an amazingly simple reason why no one has explained how this will work: it will not work. Rather than enhancing stability, China is in fact destabilizing Hong Kong.

Since the coup and massacre of 1989, the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) has talked endlessly about stability. Stability is the iron rule. Stability takes precedence over all other matters. Stability is the secret to China’s economic success.

You would think that all this stability talk might mean China is stable, but having lived in China for a number of years over the past two decades, I can tell you that it is without a doubt one of the least stable nations in the world today.

Propaganda celebrates the warmth of a big happy national family, but few things could be further from the truth. Interpersonal trust is virtually non-existent, and people invariably assume strangers on the street have the worst of intentions. Mirroring the Tiananmen model that might makes right, cars refuse to yield to pedestrians, and I have witnessed countless violent fights over the smallest of misunderstandings.

People cannot even trust that domestic milk powder has not been adulterated with poisons that could kill their infants, and are left to purchase milk powder from the same “foreigners” who they claim are trying to block their country’s rise to glory.

Propaganda also celebrates the idea of the government serving the people, ensuring stability and happiness, but of course we all know that few things could be further from the truth. If you live in a small town in China and the local government decides they are going to build a polluting factory near your home, really the only way to stop this project is full-scale rioting.

I am not referring here to the type of “rioting” that CCP servants like Wen Wei Po claim to see in Hong Kong: I’m talking about real violent uprisings where government buildings are burnt to the ground and officials are held hostage. When dealing with a government that uses violence indiscriminately to silence even those who work peacefully yet futilely within the system, people in China know from experience that the only option they have is to wield real violence in return.

For all of its talk about stability, I doubt even the senior leadership believes it. China’s “stability” is in fact a superficial stability that exists only in the minds of a few naïve visitors on short stays at the Shanghai Four Seasons. Anyone who hangs around a little longer will see billions of grievances boiling below the surface with no realistic path to resolution save an eventual violent revolution. Stability is then just a pleasant pseudonym for the Party-state’s program of repression and zero accountability until that moment arrives.

Hong Kong, by contrast, has long been a genuinely stable society. In fleeting everyday interactions from crossing the street to making a purchase, people can think of one another, can understand one another, and can even trust one another: a trust that is reinforced by a robust legal system. There is confidence in the safety of products, affirmed in recent years by the expansive cross-border trade in purchases from Hong Kong. There is legal and media oversight of the government, and thanks to freedom of speech and assembly, there are channels for people to participate in the political process and make their opinions heard.

There has been, one must admit, a certain comfort in Hong Kong’s distinct culture, social contract, and stable institutions, which have shown that there is a better way than the “China model.” All that the CCP had to do was sit back, control itself, and not destroy those institutions.

Unfortunately, however, that is not what the CCP does. Particularly since Xi Jinping’s rise to power, from political reform to the Causeway Bay Books kidnappings, to disqualifications, to the National Anthem Ordinance, to the extradition amendments, to the National Security Law, China seems increasingly determined to destroy Hong Kong’s genuine social stability in favor of its superficial short-term stability.

Over the past two decades, I have never seen Hong Kong society as anxious and uncertain as it has been over the past year: people are concerned about the corruption of institutions that they once trusted, from the police to the courts; the firewall that once prevented overly brazen PRC interference in Hong Kong seems to be perpetually on the verge of collapse; mildly satirical television shows are being canceled and publishers are even uncertain about which books they should include in their displays at the upcoming book fair; and people who have been critical of the government, including myself, are being stalked and intimidated on the streets by servants of the CCP.

This is stability with CCP characteristics. It misinterprets national security as false security for a regime that precisely in its own irredeemable illegitimacy can never actually feel secure enough until any and all criticisms are silenced. This pseudo-stability may be able, in the short term, to destroy social trust and force people to repeat falsehoods until ever fewer people dare to stand up and point out the truth.

But the one thing the CCP cannot do is make this falsehood into truth, nor make wrong into right: which is why its search for security produces insecurity, its search for stability produces growing instability. One day, these suppressed truths will re-emerge from this forced mirage of stability, destroying everything in their path.

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

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