Defending Beijing’s draconian crackdown on political freedoms in Hong Kong, following the extraordinary protest movement in 2019, the territory’s former leader, Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥), would say that there was no “one-size-fits-all” approach to doing democracy. Such rhetoric was, of course, only ever disingenuous sophistry. The conclusion of Hong Kong’s largest-ever national security trial on Tuesday confirmed the grisly trajectory of recent years under Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee (李家超): A consolidation of nakedly authoritarian rule has led to the suppression of a once vibrant and politically diverse civil society.
Forty-five pro-democracy activists were jailed under Hong Kong’s punitive National Security Law, imposed by Beijing in 2020. Charged the same year with conspiracy to commit subversion against the state, their “crime” had been, in fact, to pursue a peaceful route to goals, including democratic elections for the city’s leader and police accountability.
Through an unofficial primary process — designed to create a shortlist of the strongest pro-democratic candidates ahead of legislative elections — activists had hoped to improve their chances of blocking bills in the legislative council.
However, authorities said they were planning to paralyze government business and used this as a pretext for wiping out the pro-democracy movement once and for all, removing its leading figures from the scene and intimidating sympathizers into silence.
Those sentenced on Tuesday had already been consigned to more than three years of limbo in detention. They comprise figures from across civic life, including social workers and academics, as well as activists such as Joshua Wong (黃之鋒). Defendants such as Claudia Mo (毛孟靜), a former lawmaker who was handed a four-year sentence, were high-profile figures in mainstream public life. The law professor and well-known activist Benny Tai (戴耀廷), cast by prosecutors as the mastermind behind the alleged conspiracy, was given a 10-year term, the harshest judgment to be delivered following the introduction of the NSL.
As a show trial intended to decapitate a movement and intimidate a population reaches its conclusion, it is painful to recall the different future Hong Kong was promised.
The criminalization of legitimate political activity completes the erasure of civil freedoms ostensibly guaranteed for half a century under the “one country, two systems” formula, which accompanied the territory’s 1997 return to Chinese rule. While the mainland has experienced years of growing repression under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), Hong Kong has seen existing rights and freedoms ripped away at astonishing speed.
The jailing of five speech therapists in 2022 for publishing “seditious” children’s books was indicative of the lengths to which authorities now go to quash dissent beyond the political sphere.
As cosignatory of the treaty that supposedly preserved Hong Kong’s relative autonomy until 2047, Britain has a special responsibility to do what it can to focus global attention on a dire situation.
In a meeting on Monday with Xi at the G20 in Rio de Janeiro, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer rightly raised the case of the businessman and pro-democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai (黎智英), who has been detained in solitary confinement for almost four years.
As the National Security Law and other laws are used as a legislative hammer to crush the spirit and independence of Hong Kong’s civil society, many more cases demand attention and condemnation amid the rubble of the hopes of 2019.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
RSS