11 Nov 20 | China, Hong Kong, News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
In 2019, the world looked on as millions of ordinary Hongkongers took to the streets to protest a proposed extradition law and to demand democratic reform. People around the globe were witnessing a piece of this great city’s history and feeling every ripe emotion alongside Hong Kong’s determined protesters.
That moment is where this narrative begins. It is the story of a city whose people, since the handover in 1997, have felt the full catalog of emotions inspired by the onslaught of authoritarianism—anxiety, hope, despair, trepidation, and fear. Anxiety has always been part of Hong Kong’s handover story. Hope rose both from the signing of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration and the passage of the 1990 Hong Kong Basic Law, as well as from later widely-supported popular protests for political reform. Despair was fueled by Beijing’s ignoring of such popular demands. Trepidation stemmed from the violence on the streets and a worry that Beijing might respond with heavy-handed repression. Fear is what has now settled on the community.
One year after the protests began, and twenty-three years after the handover, 2020 has given way mostly to a level of fear, unseen before in Hong Kong, about the future. At the center of it all is anxiety about the arrest of anyone who might have once dared to speak up, brought on by the new national security law. Beijing’s direct intervention has exposed its profound distrust of Hong Kong’s institutions, as it installs various direct controls at all levels of the criminal justice process, including the executive, the police, the Justice Department, and the courts. This intervention has brought a chill to Hong Kong’s much vaunted rule of law, its dynamic press, its world-class universities, and its status as Asia’s leading financial center.
This chilling effect is especially dramatic because of Hong Kong’s long-established status as the freest economy in Asia and the world. This freedom, however, is not limited to economics: there are many dramatic distinctions between life in Hong Kong and life on the mainland. These differences have breathed a very distinct identity into Hong Kong, and they have driven the passions that have exploded in the Hong Kong protests.
In fact, it is this very freedom that China sought to preserve with the “one country, two systems” model embodied in the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law, which was enacted to carry out the 1984 treaty. This is a point that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seems to have long forgotten, as a lack of political will to uphold these commitments has taken over.
But to understand what is now lost for Hong Kong and the world, we must acknowledge what this city long had, and how it differed from the systemic repression in mainland China. Perhaps the most celebrated distinction is Hong Kong’s annual vigil of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen massacre in Beijing. Hong Kong was long the only place on Chinese soil where such a remembrance was permitted—at least until 2020, when it was disallowed due to the coronavirus pandemic. I have attended most memorials since that violent day in 1989. And now, I fear that a similar fate by another means awaits those who continue to ardently defend their city’s dying democracy. For Hong Kong, this fate may arrive by a slow burn instead of tanks in the street, but the destination may be the same.
…..
For the first time in my thirty years of teaching human rights and constitutionalism at two of Hong Kong’s top universities, the contents of my syllabus might be cause for arrest or dismissal. Every year I have lamented that my course was illegal just thirty miles away on the mainland, joking wryly with my students that one of the starkest differences between Hong Kong and the mainland is found in our classroom. The entire syllabus is prohibited on the mainland by China’s famous Document 9, which forbids promoting topics like constitutionalism, the separation of powers, and Western notions of human rights.
Many in the academy now wonder whether this national security law brings something akin to Document 9 to Hong Kong. A rash of dismissals of Hong Kong secondary teachers for supporting the 2019 protests had already raised concern that only a syllabus friendly to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) can now be taught, or that teachers who differ with such directives will soon be exposed. Will such pressures threaten the global preeminence of Hong Kong’s universities, with several now ranked among the top fifty in the world? Will professors who speak up, or who freely teach sensitive topics, and encourage or inspire dedication to the same, risk arrest or dismissal under the new law? …
Looking beyond academics, Hong Kong’s legal profession has special cause for concern with the changed conditions under the new law. Several changes strike at the very heart of Hong Kong’s rule of law. Hong Kong has long had a very active and progressive bar, which has recently expressed deep concern about the new national security law. The Hong Kong Law Society, the membership organization of solicitors under Hong Kong’s divided profession, has also had many active human rights defenders.
Both law associations are right to be concerned. On July 7, 2015, in the so-called 709 Incident, Chinese authorities on the mainland rounded up around 250 lawyers, advocates, and other human rights defenders. The bulk of them were charged under China’s national security laws, either with “subversion of state power” or “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” and possibly incitement of the same. These lawyers, who were generally found guilty, were mostly organizing and providing legal defense to human rights activists and protesters. … Will the mainland system regarding the treatment of human rights defenders now come to Hong Kong under the heading of national security?
Groups of Hong Kong lawyers have been providing pro bono or low-cost defense of the many protesters who were arrested in 2019. A progressive lawyers’ group has also politically advocated against human rights violations in relation to the protests. What risks do these lawyers face?
The new national security law raises a host of concerns for national security trials. Under the new law, only a select panel of judges are allowed to try national security cases locally, and those judges can be dismissed from the select list of national security judges if they make statements that are thought to endanger national security. …
The gaping differences with the mainland, easily discernable to the casual observer, of course, go well beyond street protests and academics or the law and lawyers. These differences touch ordinary people’s lives in many ways. Before the new national security law was passed, a bookstore or bookfair in Hong Kong could have a full selection of books commenting on local or global affairs or even criticizing China’s leaders. Such books, including an earlier one of my own, were all banned on the mainland, though the tendency of mainland companies to own most local bookstores in Hong Kong already imposed self-censorship.
Nevertheless, pretty much any book or reading source could be obtained either in stores or online. The availability of a wider selection of books was long an attraction for mainland tourists who would then have to figure out how to smuggle them home. Within a week of the passage of the new national security law, public libraries in Hong Kong were already removing sensitive books from the shelves, and schools were being told to ban certain forms of protest speech.
…
These freedoms and much more are now at stake under the national security law. This new fear was clearly understood, when just hours before the new national security law went into effect, several organizations, including an activist group called Studentlocalism and the prominent local political party, Demosisto, disbanded. Demosisto had planned to run candidates for the Legislative Council in the coming September 2020 election. The party’s alleged sin was its earlier—and later dropped—promotion of self-determination for Hong Kong. Compared to those few who advocated for independence, this is a moderate position. Four former members of Studentlocalism would later be arrested, allegedly for organizing a new pro-independence group and calling for a “republic of Hong Kong.”
Though it was not introduced as such, the new national security law is effectively an amendment to the Hong Kong Basic Law. Like the Basic Law, it expressly provides for its own superiority over all Hong Kong’s local laws. It is also seemingly superior, where any conflicts exist, to the Hong Kong Basic Law. The Basic Law and the national security law are both national laws of the PRC. Under principles contained in the PRC Legislative Law, a national law that is enacted later in time and that is more specific in content is superior to an earlier, more general national law. Independent of such legal niceties, a local Hong Kong court would be in no position to declare any part of the new national security law invalid for being inconsistent with the human rights guarantees in the Basic Law.
Earlier, when a Hong Kong court had the temerity to declare invalid a government ban on the wearing of face masks, which protesters were wearing during the 2019 demonstrations to hide their identity, officials in Beijing immediately slammed the court. They declared that there was no separation of powers in Hong Kong and thus no basis for the judicial review of legislation—a claim long disputed by local judges. Intimidation was clearly intended and the court of appeals backed off, reversing the trial court and upholding most of the ban. In an ironic twist, with the pandemic in 2020, masks are required to be worn in public areas.
Such constitutional judicial review, long a bedrock of the Hong Kong legal system, has frequently come under mainland official threat. In the national security law, Beijing has again demonstrated its distrust of the Hong Kong courts by expressly assigning the power to interpret the new law to the standing committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), and by blocking judicial review of national security officials.
With this new national security law incorporated into the Basic Law fabric, Hong Kong effectively has a new hardline national security constitution. No heed was taken of the deep concerns about the city’s evolving character expressed eloquently by millions of Hongkongers marching through Hong Kong’s sweat-drenched streets in the summer of 2019.
Michael C. Davis is visiting professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong, where he teaches core courses on international human rights. His book Making Hong Kong China: The Rollback of Human Rights and the Rule of Law is published this November by Columbia University Press.
It assesses the current state of the “one country, two systems” model that applies in Hong Kong, juxtaposing the people’s inspiring cries for freedom and the rule of law against the PRC’s increasing efforts at control. Chapters look at the constitutional journey of modern Hong Kong, discussing the Basic Law; Beijing’s interventions and the recent historical road to the current crisis; Beijing’s increased interference leading up to the 2019 protests; the 2019 protests and growing threats to the rule of law; the national security law launched in mid-2020; international interaction and support; and finally, the current status of Basic Law guarantees as they may shape the road ahead. Click here for more on the book.
…[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
21 Sep 20 | Academic Freedom, China, Hong Kong, News and features
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”114944″ img_size=”full” add_caption=”yes” alignment=”right”][vc_column_text]A 12-year-old girl tackled by police and pinned to the ground, a media tycoon in handcuffs, dozens of activists in court – these have become the familiar images from Hong Kong since the passage of the national security law. But there’s another victim of the amplified censorship and persecution happening in the city – academia. Hong Kong’s classrooms and lecture theatres are increasingly at the receiving end of pressure to conform – or else.
Within days of the new law, Hong Kong’s education bureau ordered schools to review all reading materials in the curriculum.
“If any teaching materials have content which is outdated or involves the four crimes under the law, unless they are being used to positively teach pupils about their national security awareness or sense of safeguarding national security, otherwise if they involve other serious crime or socially and morally unacceptable act, they should be removed,” the Education Bureau said in a statement.
Politically sensitive books, including those written by pro-democracy leader Joshua Wong, and titles related to China’s Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square massacre, were removed from library shelves. Textbooks censored out phrases like “separation of powers”. Gone too were illustrations showing anti-government protesters and criticism of the mainland Chinese government.
But the purge hasn’t stopped at reading material. Teachers have been fired. Just hours before the law came into effect, a secondary school visual arts teacher, who is too fearful to reveal his real name and goes by the moniker Vawongsir on Instagram, was laid off. He had received a complaint months earlier about critical artwork he’d done outside of work and yet no firm action had been taken against him. Then the new law was announced and he was fired. At the same time, a middle school music teacher’s contract wasn’t renewed after she failed to prevent students from performing a protest anthem during midterm exams.
“If you look at primary and secondary education it’s really obvious what they’re doing. They’re not hiding it,” said Lokman Tsui, assistant professor at Hong Kong’s School of Journalism and Communication, in an interview with Index. Tsui, who formerly held the position of head of free expression at Google in Asia and the Pacific, focuses his research and teaching on digital rights, security, democracy and human rights in general and in China and Hong Kong.
Tsui says the censorship is less obvious in higher education. Less obvious though does not mean less controlling. “They won’t tell you to not do x, y and z but it’s clear it’s not rewarded,” said Tsui.
Tsui himself is an example. Earlier this year he lost his tenure which, as he described in a letter he wrote at the time, “is important for academic freedom, because it provides job security, so you will not be afraid to lose your job if you take on controversial or challenging research topics.” Tsui was unsure whether this was politically motivated, but it cannot be ruled out.
“Maybe it is true that I would have gotten tenure if I had spent my time exclusively and only on ‘safe’ research and nothing else. But that would not have been me,” he wrote in the letter, which received a plethora of responses in solidarity with him and what he had done and in support of his teaching.
Even tenure doesn’t fully protect you in Hong Kong today. Benny Tai, who was associate professor of law at the University of Hong Kong and one of the Umbrella Movement leaders, was fired in July. Shui-ka Chun, another university educator known for his political activism, was laid off. China’s liaison office in Hong Kong hailed the terminations as a “purification of the teaching environment.”
Unsurprisingly the result is an atmosphere of self-censorship and an environment in which “the good people leave”.
“It’s a storm and no one wants to go outside, even with an umbrella,” said Tsui.
A battle over independence is nothing new for Hong Kong’s educators. Earlier attempts to introduce a patriotic “national education” curriculum into Hong Kong schools resulted in tens of thousands protesting in 2012, forcing it to be shelved. In 2018, charges of “brainwashing” were once again levelled at the government and at Beijing after attempts were made to alter the way history was taught (more focus on mainland China; less on Hong Kong’s colonial past).
To ensure that teachers fall in line, organisations have been established to report on those who might say the wrong thing. A complaint to the Education Bureau was what led to the aforementioned visual arts teacher Vawongsir being flagged and later fired.
Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing chief executive, has made it quite clear that she isn’t going to go easy on education. The city’s schools and universities are often accused of radicalising Hong Kong’s young with Western ideals and preventing a Chinese national identity from flourishing, accusations reinforced by Lam publicly. At an education forum in 2017 she highlighted that many people arrested for participating in illegal protests over the last year were students.
With each attack usually comes defence, often fierce and determined. And rightly so: minds are shaped in the classroom. But fears are this defence, already strained, will not continue.
As Tsui says, the lines have become further blurred since the passage of the national security law. He describes the law as a “clarion call for the entire society to encourage and amplify everything on the pro-government side” and an “open field-day for harassing anyone” who speaks in favour of the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement.
“I think you have freedom even in China, it’s just the price you want to pay for it and they’ve been raising the price of it. It’s going up and up and up.”
“Realistically it will be difficult for me to find a professorship in Hong Kong,” he said, explaining that there are few universities as is and those that do exist are under pressure to follow the party line.
“While I was trying to get tenure, a lot people told me to keep my head low in order to get it. But I disagreed.”
The costs aren’t just professional.
“There are all kinds of social costs. My mother has said ‘Can you please not be so outspoken?’ Even your friends and your romantic partner will say that.”
Tsui is originally from the Netherlands. Will he be one of the good people forced to leave?
“I’m not leaving until they kick me out. We need people here.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][three_column_post title=”You might also like to read” category_id=”85″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
15 Sep 20 | Magazine, Magazine Contents, Volume 49.03 Autumn 2020
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Special report”][vc_column_text]Government hits activists’ online profiles by Arzu Geybulla: Journalists and activists are finding their social media profiles hacked and sometimes deleted in a clear harassment campaign in Azerbaijan
Presiding over bloodshed by Issa Sikiti da Silva: The voice of the opposition is increasingly missing in action as Uganda approaches election day
“Silence got us nowhere. We need to speak up” by Rushan Abbas: One woman’s anguish and outrage over her sister’s disappearance and the millions of others into the concentration camp network in Xinjiang, China
“The idea is to kill journalism” by Bilal Ahmad Pandow: Kashmiri journalists on what it’s like working under lockdown, an internet blackout and a new draconian media law
What has the government got to hide? by Jessica Ní Mhainín: The new Irish government has to decide whether to block access to historic child abuse records
Don’t show and tell by Orna Herr: In a bid to avoid offence, TV shows are disappearing from the airwaves. Are we poorer for it?
Restaurants scrub off protest walls by Oliver Farry: All signs of the city’s recent protest past are being removed in Hong Kong’s restaurants, shops and even libraries following the new security law
Closure means no closure by Stefano Pozzebon and Morena Pérez Joachin: The library housing documents on the disappeared of Guatemala’s brutal civil war has been closed and with it the disappeared have disappeared further
The unknown quantity by Alessio Perrone: The Italian government is making efforts to cover up who and how many are trying to cross the Mediterranean
Tracing Turkey’s disappeared by Kaya Genç: A centre looks into the forced disappearances of Kurds in Turkey. Will they find answers or obstacles?
“There’s nobody left to speak” by Somak Ghoshal: First they came for the journalists. Then they came for the lawyers and activists. Who can speak out in today’s India?
Out of sight, but never out of mind by Laura Silvia Battaglia: Our interview with the director of a new documentary about the disappeared in Syria
Blogger flees Tunisia after arrest by Layli Foroudi: After telling a joke, one Tunisian blogger had to flee her country to avoid prison
Becoming tongue-tied by Sally Gimson: China is one country that is forcing people to give up their minority languages. Others have also attempted it
Spain’s lonely voices by Silvia Nortes: We trace the demise of many minority Spanish languages and look at whether others will survive[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Global view”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Why Index has never been needed more by Ruth Smeeth: The world is witnessing an acceleration of illiberalism. We all need to be vigilant[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”In focus”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Ecce homo sovieticus by Andrey Arkhangelsky: Decades after the end of the Soviet Union, Russians are still plagued by totalitarianism. It’s getting worse
“I have suffered death threats and they killed my pet dogs” by Stephen Woodman: Mexican journalists work in war-like conditions. Many are suffering terrible mental illnesses because of it
Nonsense and sensibility by Jemimah Steinfeld: An interview with the bestselling author Dave Eggers about society’s slide into a total surveillance state
Fighting the laws that are silencing journalists by Jessica Ní Mhainín: Vexatious legal threats are part of the European media landscape. We need to take action against them, says a new Index report
2020 by Ben Jennings: Is Alexa censoring the news or is it just that bad? A new cartoon from the award-winning illustrator
Will the centre hold by Michella Oré? They voted for Trump in 2016 because their voices were not being heard. How does middle America feel today?
Who Speaks for Iowa by Jan Fox? The owner of a small-town radio station talks about feeling ignored in the rural USA[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Culture”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Past imperfect by Lisa Appignanesi: The award-winning writer speaks to Rachael Jolley about the inspiration for her new short story, written exclusively for Index, which looks at the idea of ageing, and disappearing memories, and how it plays out during lockdown
The history man by Xue Yiwei: One of China’s most widely read writers discusses a childhood memory of being punished for singing, alongside his short story, published in English for the first time here
Four more years by Mark Frary? Analysis of the upcoming US election looking at the media, plus a new satirical short story by Kaya Genç in which a dog considers Trump’s re-election hopes
Speech patterns by Abraham Zere: The Eritrean writer on escaping one of the world’s most censored countries and now living in Trump’s USA. Plus a new short story of his[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”Index around the world”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]New tactics to close down speech by Orna Herr: The news editor at Rappler speaks to Index about legal threats against the media outlet’s CEO, Maria Ressa, plus a report on Index’s recent work[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”End Note “][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Spraying discontent by Jemimah Steinfeld: With museums closed some of the most powerful art is on the streets. Index speaks to the world’s street artists on why it is suddenly a popular form of protest[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]
