In 2020, Beijing suddenly amped up its efforts in an aggressive and successful crackdown against the insubordinate city. It acts as a sign of the increasingly belligerent attitude that the People’s Republic of China has developed to enact and enforce its will, whether it be for internal or external affairs.
Asif Sattar | 1 December 2021
Passed just weeks after it was announced, the utilization of the “Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region” has been gravely concerning due to the loss of rights that Hong Kong denizens hold so dear. Passed on 30 June 2020, the bill has brought upon a great deal of uncertainty towards Hong Kong’s future, with its broad nature providing Beijing legislators and pro-mainland Hong Kong politicians the ability to act against protestors and the democratic opposition with ease.
Of course, China has taken countless measures before this bill to see its authoritarianism imposed upon the city. Activists and protestors have often been arrested in the past, with many pro-democratic legislators being forced out by the Chinese government due to their views. Laws focused upon the judicial system and extradition, the education system, the treatment of foreign companies and more have preceded the national security law for decades. However, it is the state of this bill being a culmination of all of this combined with the Chinese government’s abject cruelty when imposing the law that is most worrying.
The broadness of the language used within the bill provides room for pro-mainland legislators and Beijing to use it for any case containing “secession”, “subversion”, “terrorism” and “collusion with foreign forces”. In essence, the bill acts as a blank check to act against anyone remotely not in line with the party. One can see how this could be abused, and one could also see the level of aggressiveness that the bill displays.
Such displays of willingness to act are not necessarily a new phenomenon for the China that we see today; one only needs to look at the Tiananmen Square massacre or crackdown of Falun Gong practitioners to see a brash readiness to utilize aggression and hostility when it acts in favor of the party. And yet, China has always been uniquely coy with the City of Hong Kong, fearing the international and economic ramifications that a heavy handed act could trigger. Before the rise of Xi Jinping, the risks were calculated as too high to truly push the city towards a National Security Bill likened to now.
Xi Jinping is an individual both willing to and capable of taking this risk. The bill was enacted under years of various preparations beforehand, and with the nation being the second largest in GDP (and growing), it can now afford to take the soft power risks that its counterpart in the 1970s-1990s was too nervous to move forward with at the time.
The willingness to act against a city built upon impartiality and the value of civil rights to subsequently erase these two facets of its culture is a sign that China no longer fears the outside world as much as it did prior. Rather, it expects that the outside world will come to fear / respect Beijing, likened to the treatment of the United States on the world stage. One would therefore expect this aggressiveness in social policy to expand to politics and external affairs in the years to come.
The expansion of authoritarianism is always a worrying facet of politics, and it is concerning to many that the popularity of neoliberalism may potentially be met by Chinese state capitalism on an equal basis within the near future. Such is what Xi Jinping likely intends to accomplish, with economic systems and bases being the best place to aggressively expand one’s power on the world stage. It is what the United States and Europe did, is what Xi Jinping would likely argue; why are we barred from the same practice?
With the potentiality of a continuing rise of China in this degree, it would be vital for the United States to fight against this aggressiveness through other means, such as an expansion of foreign advisors or a dusting off of the former military/economic alliances that held the first world together during the cold war. For now, however, the nation and its denizens must only wait to see the ripples of what China plans to do in the future, and what the best point of attack against their authoritative will may be.
