Insight
Hand-wringing for Hong Kong: What else can the EU do more? by Ian Bond 11 June 2020
The EU should not be indifferent to what is happening in Hong Kong. China’s willingness to violate Hong Kong’s autonomy is part of a pattern of increasingly confrontational behaviour. China’s decision to impose a new security law on Hong Kong has been driven off Europe’s front pages by racial tension and violence in America and elsewhere. Beijing may think that it has got away with curtailing Hong Kong’s autonomy. EU leaders may think that having (feebly) protested, they can focus again on their commercial interests in China. But Beijing’s effort to tighten its grip on Hong Kong is one of several indicators that China is becoming less of a partner and more of a problem for Europe. What has China done? The Basic Law (Hong Kong’s 1997 ‘constitution’) instructed Hong Kong to “enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition or subversion” against the Chinese government. Faced with popular opposition, however, Hong Kong’s government never did so. On May 28th, China’s ‘parliament’, the National People’s Congress (NPC), authorised its standing committee to draft a security law and include it in the Basic Law – even though the Basic Law itself makes this the responsibility of the Hong Kong government. The text of the new law has yet to appear, but the NPC resolution says that it is intended to “prevent, stop and punish” separatism, subversion or terrorist activities, as well as “activities by foreign and overseas forces that interfere in the affairs” of Hong Kong. The Chinese Communist Party’s interpretation of such offences in China itself is very broad. The NPC also authorised China’s national security agencies to set up institutions in Hong Kong – something that they have not (legally) been able to do so far. Why act now? China may have judged that the risk of allowing pro-democracy sentiment to grow in Hong Kong outweighed the cost of undermining the principle of ‘one country, two systems’. In 2019, there were widespread pro-democracy street protests in Hong Kong, which alarmed Beijing. And the authorities may have judged that they had an opportunity to act while the rest of the world was distracted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Hong Kong is less vital to China’s economy than it once was. When it passed from British to Chinese control in 1997, Hong Kong accounted for more than 18 per cent of China’s GDP; now it is less than 3 per CER INSIGHT: Hand-wringing for Hong Kong: What else can the EU do? 11 June 2020
info@cer.EU | WWW.CER.EU
1