Hong Kong is in a state of shock. It should not have been for those who are familiar with the history of the Chinese Communist Party behavior.

On May 22, Beijing announced it would unilaterally enact national security laws that will apply to Hong Kong, bypassing the local Legislative Council, the proper body to do so under the Basic Law, HK’s Constitution, which China had signed off.

Beijing, angry at HK’s pro-democracy protests, finally dropped its pretense to abide by the “one country two systems” framework that had granted high local autonomy to erect its own laws. The new national laws would allow Beijing to act against anyone in HK deemed a “danger” to its “security” as if HK were just another mainland city.

The process of “Mainlandization” has entered its final stage of incorporating Hong Kong into a “One Country One System” despite Beijing’s denial. The rest is just details.

The word was derived from its local Chinese term “大陸化”. It gained currency in HK even before 1997 that described the process of mainland moral values and political behaviors encroaching on Hong Kong’s liberal democratic ones.

The first clear salvo began shortly after July 1997 when China resumed sovereignty over the former British colony. Under the first Chief Executive, Tung Chee-hwa, a Beijing appointee, an organized boycott started against this paper Apple Daily with an order to local real estate developers not to place ads with it. Apple Daily’s founder-owner Jimmy Lai was and remains an ardent proponent of democracy and a defender of civil liberties and is a thorn to Beijing’s side.

Depriving Apple Daily of the single largest source of ad revenue against a newspaper was a loud announcement from Beijing that if you do not bow you will be punished. HK officials who arranged the boycott did not see the irony as they had always touted it as the freest capitalist economy in the world.

Since the boycott, “Mainlandization” has entailed kidnapping of local booksellers to land in mainland jails. Their “crime” was publishing books Beijing leaders did not like. Arbitrary arrests of citizens on the flimsiest excuses, routine in the mainland, extended to Hong Kong residents regardless of nationalities.

In 2001 a HK academic, an American of Chinese origin, Li Shaoming, was imprisoned in China. His “crime” was doing research in China on “sensitive” issues. Luckily he is an alumnus of Princeton, an elite institution with powerful alumni. After a high-profile Princeton-led campaign to save him, he was expelled after only 6 months in prison. Details are HERE .

In 2019 Hong Kong erupted in an unprecedented scale with up to 2 million citizens peacefully marching to protest against an extradition bill that would allow Beijing to extradite anyone in HK deemed seditious and anti-China. The police, emboldened by Beijing’s open media hostility towards protestors, unleashed an avalanche of tear gas and rubber bullets unprecedented in magnitude against unarmed protestors.

The signs of the breakdown of “One Country Two Systems” have been on the wall all along since 1997. The May 22 announcement simply moved up the timetable of a 50 years promise of “home rule” ending 2047 to the present.

The growing sense of frustration among Hong Kong’s young is worrying and ominous. With the impending new laws, the police can be expected to feel even less restrained with mainland security officials as supervisors.

Beijing has been clear in describing many Hong Kong protestors as agents of “foreign influence”, “thugs” or worse, out to subvert China’s sovereignty, a serious charge tantamount to treason. Going forward enforcing law and order could degenerate into a Vietnam War style “pacification” treating protestors as enemies of the State with deadly results.

It would be wrong to view “Mainlandization” merely as a localized Hong Kong event.

Globalization and the decades of Western ignorance of a China thought only bent on “making money” resulted in an “open door” policy welcoming Chinese students, “scholars” and researchers to their campuses. It was thought by doing so, “they” would become “more like us.”

Harvard University, the most famous in America, is just now waking up to the consequence of its “open door” policy. It has accepted many thousands of mainland students and Chinese military personnel into their classrooms. See the latest development HERE .

Is there any evidence of Harvard’s highly touted“liberal values” in the way Beijing has treated its disappeared scholars and dissidents?

Harvard Law School canceled a scheduled talk by a visiting mainland dissident for fear of offending Beijing’s leaders on the eve of Harvard’s scheduled meeting with Chairman Xi. Click HERE for details. At Columbia University and other elite institutions, mainland Chinese students frequently brought with them Communist illiberal values and behavior with no appreciation of the value of a classical liberal education they presumably went to the US to receive, one they did not have in China.

These mainland students, often instructed by CCP officials overseas, frequently forced the cancellations of students meetings on topics that they insisted were offensive to Communist Chinese pride. Click HERE for details. Alarmingly, many university officials bowed to their pressure. First invisibly, then increasingly in the open, “Mainlandization” is now a global phenomenon encroaching on liberal democratic values and institutions in open societies just as “globalization” has done in trade and finance.

Hong Kong’s current situation should serve as the “canary in the coal mine” for other liberal democratic countries.

(Sin-ming Shaw, a private investor, was a columnist at Time and Newsweek Asia and former visiting fellow at Harvard, Oxford and Columbia.)

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