Chinese state-run media also touted it, with the China Daily calling the treaty “long overdue.” Hongkongers were furious, seeing the move as a naked attempt by China’s leaders to assert more control over Hong Kong, and they took to the streets. It’s a skill set they’ve honed since June 4, 1989, when they sent in the People’s Liberation Army to open fire on the hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy protesters gathered at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, with official figures placing the number of dead at 300, though estimates range as high as10,000. And in 1992, they instituted a nationwide patriotic education curriculum in schools that played up China’s historic victimization at the hands of foreign powers and presented loyalty to country and party as a primary virtue. Chinese youth today, unlike their peers 30 years ago, are far less likely to admire democracy or Western-style freedoms, and far more likely to say that one-party rule is a better system for China. Participants may be disappeared and put into “black jails,” or off-books detention centers, beaten up by plainclothes thugs, or formally arrested and charged with “creating a disturbance” or, more seriously, “inciting subversion of state power.” Some have been sent to forced labor prisons. And fourth, in recent years Chinese leaders have sought to construct a comprehensive surveillance state utilizing facial recognition technology, mass data collection, and artificial intelligence. It’s important to note, however, that Chinese authorities do actually permit many protests, particularly local demonstrations with modest demands, such as to reroute a proposed road or improve working conditions in a factory. Hongkongers are committing a cardinal sin: turning the party’s preferred historical narrative of victimization by Western colonial powers on its head. For years now, the people of Hong Kong have been fighting to preserve the political legacy left to them by British colonizers, while rejecting what the Chinese Communist Party wants to replace it with. Under the British system, Hong Kong gradually developed strong traditions of judicial independence, freedoms of speech and assembly, and some degree of representative government. The British did not, however, implement universal suffrage in elections for the city’s top leader, leaving that task to China’s Communist rulers as specified in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, which laid out the framework for Hong Kong’s 1997 handover back to mainland Chinese sovereignty. Since as early as 2003, China has attempted to push through legal changes that would allow authorities to crack down on political freedoms in Hong Kong when desired. That year, Communist Party officials in Beijing pushed Hong Kong’s leaders to introduce a sedition act that would have allowed city officials to ban speech, outlaw organizations, and conduct searches withoutwarrants if there were suspicions of “treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People’s Government.” But the proposed bill was shelved after Hong Kong erupted in massive protests that filled the streets — the first sign that Hongkongers were not going to simply surrender to the same fate as mainland China. Protesters, led by high school and college students, occupied downtown areas to demand that Hong Kong residents be grantedthe true universal suffrage they had been promised under the Sino-British Joint Declaration. The disruptive demonstrations that came to be known as the Umbrella Movement polarized the city, pitting powerful pro-China business interests against students and pro-democracy activists. Demoralized, activists were unable to maintain mass interest in their cause, and many observers, including the Chinese Communist Party itself, believed the 2014 movement had been Hong Kong’s last stand. An unprecedented cascade of prosecutions followed, with the pro-democracy movement’s top leaders arrested and jailed on dubious charges ranging from contempt of court to conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. That demoralization is likely what emboldened Beijing to think that they would finally be able to achieve their goal of subverting Hong Kong’s independent judiciary, this time through an extradition treaty. This time, what’s at stake isn’t just the democratic ideal of free and universal elections, which business interests and other groups have in the past been willing to give up in exchange for economic opportunity on the mainland. “They know if they give up, the crackdown is going to be worse than what happened after the Umbrella movement,” Victoria Tin-Bor Hui, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, told me. By attempting to apply mainland-style repression in a city with entrenched political freedoms, the Chinese Communist Party has needlessly alienated an entire generation of Hongkongers.
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