The promulgation of the National Security Law for Hong Kong in the middle of this year brought about earth-shattering changes to Hong Kong’s civil society and political environment. Through arrests, prosecutions and repeated propaganda broadcast by various media outlets, the authoritarian government attempts to restore order and gradually purge society of dissenting voices.

In the latest developments, police and officers from the National Security Department (NSD) stormed a university campus to collect evidence about slogans shouted and banners displayed by students in a demonstration held inside the university. Young people such as Joshua Wong, Ivan Lam and Agnes Chow have been held in custody pending sentencing for their siege of the police headquarters in June last year. Looking at what is happening in Hong Kong from Taiwan, it is necessary for us to understand all those absurd, chilling events from the perspective of a cluster of “stability-maintenance” frameworks now in force in Hong Kong in order to gain a fuller picture.

“Stability-maintenance” is the maintenance of social and political stability. It is taken with orders from the Beijing authorities at the top and conducted through the liaison office in Hong Kong, the Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong, the PLA, Chinese-funded organizations in the city and other units with the cooperation of the SAR government. Since the Umbrella Movement in 2014, “stability-maintenance” actions have been taken against a string of occupy and resistance movements. Such actions have the following characteristics:

Phased and targeted attacks: The crackdown on Hong Kong society is a systematic procedure carried out step by step. Take education. From kindergartens to universities, in each phase, a case or a target is first identified (regardless of private or public educational settings). The target is demonized and deprived of its right to procedural justice. A case in which a teacher is dismissed for his or her unsatisfactory work is blown out of all proportion, so much so that he or she is barred from the education sector, or even a school building, for life. The goal is to give the impression that the education sector should be straightened out, thus preparing for a further purge.

Flagrant and rough interference: Take, for example, the NSD officers who stormed and searched a university campus mentioned above. On the one hand, it shows the lack of spine and commitment to protecting students on the part of university management today. On the other hand, it shows an attempt to further undermine freedom of speech and freedom of thought in universities. Such search actions, conducted with such flagrancy, were not taken to look for any kind of evidence, but to create, in a high-profile manner, an atmosphere of fear and one in which everyone snitches on and distrusts each other. When students can no longer trust their schools and peers, it will be much easier to crackdown on dissenting voices or nativist comments on campus.

Cooperation between police from mainland China, Hong Kong police and national security departments: The banner of “the complete rule of law” is held aloft, even though the rule of law in China is like a joke. Earlier 12 Hong Kong people put to sea in an attempt to flee to Taiwan and seek political asylum. Because of suspected cooperation between mainland and HK police, they were intercepted by the Chinese authorities and have been detained in Shenzhen. Their Hong Kong relatives and the lawyers they appointed have been barred from meeting with them, and even lawyers from mainland China have been pressurized into stopping defending them. The other day there were even letters from the detainees, in which they “confessed” to their wrongdoings. While Hong Kong police have not sunk so low as to interrogate defendants to the point of fatigue or batter them for evidence (?), they have invoked the National Security Law arbitrarily and made indiscriminate arrests and prosecutions, further angering Hong Kong’s civil society. At the same time, the police still have not been held responsible for their suppressive actions in the anti-extradition movement over the past year.

Open and all-pervasive political pressure on the judiciary and judges: Pro-establishment political parties and scholars, for example, argue that the power and roles of judges have been inflated and demand them adjust to the constitutional order of a “new era and a new normal”. Judicial independence and Hong Kong’s legal heritage are under severe challenge. In response to the change, the British government is studying whether to stop British judges from continuing to sit on Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal, dealing another blow to the image of Hong Kong’s common law system.

Gradual construction of a society of surveillance: On the face of it, freedom of publication and freedom of speech still exist, and all kinds of books can still be purchased in ordinary bookstores. Comments critical of the HKSAR government or Beijing are still published by several newspapers. However, local publishers have long refrained from publishing relatively sensitive books (such as those about nativism or critical of Chinese politics, which are now mostly published by Taiwanese publishers). Cameras have begun to be installed in lecture rooms in universities. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, almost all courses have switched to online teaching. University teachers, worried that the teaching materials might be captured on video or reported to the authorities, cannot help but conduct self-censorship on the content and choice of materials.

Through “stability-maintenance”, Beijing is trying to build a new constitutional order in Hong Kong to ensure that the city can be used and controlled by Beijing. To that end, it is leaving no stones unturned to banish all democratically elected lawmakers, ratchet up pressure on judges, eliminate the press’s ability to monitor the government and further suppress civil society’s freedom of assembly and association.

As in the authoritarian rule in Taiwan 30 to 40 years ago, during which surveillance and security officers entered university campuses to arrest students who endangered “national security” and the party-state prosecuted dissidents for participating in and inciting others to participate in illegal assemblies, authoritarian regimes are unwilling to admit the paradox that “the greater the effort to maintain stability, the greater the instability” and the fact that people become more and more disillusioned when they are being suppressed. Hong Kong’s dark night is continuing, when history is repeating itself in all its familiarity and poignancy.

(Wu Si-Bang, Hong Kong Scholar)

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