Why use tanks when you can weaponize the law (Stephen Vines)
Why did Beijing not send in the tanks to crush the Hong Kong protests last year? The answer has been provided with the introduction of the national security law. Instead of using actual weapons, the Communist Party has chosen to weaponize the law.
The Party realizes that there are problems with images of blood oozing out on the streets as soldiers level their weapons at unarmed demonstrators. So, it has chosen to go for a kind of crackdown that can be carried out by men in suits, firmly behind closed doors where torture may well take place but will not be on public display.
But last August, it looked as though the prospects of a bloody crackdown were high as Mainland media whipped up fears by airing images of large scale anti-riot exercises by the People’s Armed Police in Shenzhen.
It very much seemed as though Hong Kong would be witnessing a repetition of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. However, Beijing learned a lot from that lesson and is now planning a crackdown that will be every bit as effective with the added benefit of being carried out in a manner that the Communist Party hopes will yield far fewer repercussions.
It does not want its actions in Hong Kong to make it an international pariah and while the Party is determined to expunge the SAR’s freedoms, Beijing is very anxious to preserve the façade of an independent international business centre.
This is vital because Hong Kong serves as a conduit for the Mainland’s commerce and, far more importantly, it is the place where families of the ruling elite bury ill-gotten gains and clean up the eye-watering billions of dollars that are made from outright corruption and the guanxi system(cronyism) of political to business connections.
For this reason, Beijing genuinely wants to preserve the differentiated business systems. To this end, the Party has succeeded in forcing practically every large-scale business to publicly associate itself with the new law. Some eagerly volunteered to do so, others like HSBC, naively assumed that they would not have to get involved but quickly succumbed to pressure and abjectly kowtowed.
Under the banner of restoring stability, the same blood-stained banner carried by the Nazis in Germany and the Soviet Union at the height of purges, the Chinese Communist Party has developed a narrative of Hong Kong gripped by terrorism, battered by the intervention of malicious foreign agents and sliding into anarchy.
Only the most feeble-minded actually believe that any of this is true but it gives the business leaders in their shinny suits a plausible opportunity to explain why they have signed up for a law that will shake the “one country, two systems” principle to its very core.
As night follows day, it will undermine the very pillars upon which an international business center operates, namely the rule of law, the free flow of information and the ease of communication and cooperation on an international level.
However, at least for now, the grand people who have signed up for this law, have chosen to believe that its real impact will be borne by citizens who have had the courage to stand up to the regime. They don’t mind if literally thousands of people are thrown into jail, subject to torture by the notorious Chinese secret police and indeed expelled from Hong Kong.
As ever, the rich and powerful believe that they will be subject to none of this and that somehow their businesses can continue to flourish, indeed may well do better once dissidents have been dealt with.
In theory the big tycoons, bankers and others who run business in Hong Kong know that this cannot possibly be true. They know, not least because of their own family’s experience after they fled across the border from Communist China to British-controlled Hong Kong, but they chose to believe that the New China is different.
In some ways they are right because the Communist Party of today is infinitely more sophisticated than it was back in 1949 when the PRC was established but in essence nothing has changed. The Party remains focused on preserving itself, exerting control and enriching those at the center of power.
The introduction of the new national security law does much to expose the iron fist that always lurked behind the velvet glove that the Party chose to wear in the first two decades of reunification. However the challenge facing Beijing, a challenge that never existed on the Mainland, is that this iron fist is being deployed against people who have tasted liberty and are highly unlikely to acquire a taste for the kind of oppression that brings Hong Kong into line with the rest of the nation.
Obviously the avoidance of a bloody massacre to mark the new era of oppression is a great relief but it is hard to underestimate how much real suffering will ensue. Right now Beijing is confident that liberty can be expunged while business continues to thrive and that the deployment of force will cow most of Hong Kong’s people into silence. The reality is that both these assumptions are deeply flawed and may well be tested sooner rather than later.
(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. Vines 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 and Market Panic and most recently, Food Gurus. He hosts a weekly television current affairs programme: The Pulse")
---------------------------------
Apple Daily’s all-new English Edition is now available on the mobile app
To know more:
https://bit.ly/2yMMfQE Apple Daily mobile app latest version
DOWNLOAD NOW