HONG KONG — Before dawn, Facebook news feeds here began filling up, post upon post detailing arrest after arrest. A crackdown on the city’s democracy movement was unfolding.
By late morning on Wednesday, at least 53 Hong Kong residents – former lawmakers, activists and an American lawyer among them – had been detained under Beijing’s new national security law, and their offices and homes raided. Accused of subversion, they face up to life in prison for holding a primary vote last year ahead of legislative elections that were ultimately postponed and which many of them were barred from contesting.
The raids, which involved more than 1,000 officers, marked the most dramatic onslaught in Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s transformation of once-freewheeling Hong Kong into a city gripped by fear under authoritarian rule. China has moved in recent months to reshape Hong Kong institutions, from schools to the media to the legislature, and observers warned that the sweep signaled worse to come.
Far from preserving Hong Kong’s way of life in the post-colonial era, as it promised, Beijing is deploying a variation of tactics honed in its repressive campaigns in Tibet and Xinjiang to crush Hong Kong civil society and political opposition.
“The idea of ‘political opposition,’ a common phenomenon in democratic systems, is seen by Beijing as inherently illegitimate,” said Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It is tragic yet predictable that the Xi administration will continue to squeeze [Hong Kong] until there’s total submission.”
Carl Minzner, an expert on Chinese law and governance at Fordham University, added that Beijing’s control in Hong Kong, as in China’s other restive peripheral regions, involves “a particular emphasis on remodeling communities viewed as insufficiently patriotic and loyal” through ideological education and mass arrests, and efforts to co-opt “institutions that Beijing feels it does not fully control.”
