Rebel City. South China Morning Post Team
to remain anonymous, said: “In private, many expressed fears and said they knew how bad the bill was. But they hesitated to voice their views openly because of the dollar sign. There was a lot of maneuvering.” Then, in March, the American Chamber of Commerce became the first powerful foreign business network to oppose the bill, warning the Hong Kong government it would damage the city’s reputation as a “secure haven for international business.” The same month, former chief secretary Anson Chan Fang On-sang and two pan-democratic lawmakers, Dennis Kwok and Charles Mok, embarked on a 10-day trip to the United States at the invitation of the White House and were received by Vice-President Mike Pence. Chan, now a pro-democracy critic of the government, said they discussed Hong Kong residents’ human rights and the special trading relationship between the city and the US. In a speech she delivered during the trip, she urged Americans doing business in Hong Kong to voice their concerns over the extradition bill “before it is too late.”
These messages began sinking in, if early protests were anything to go by. On March 31, an estimated 12,000 people took to Hong Kong streets to oppose the bill. On April 28, a much larger crowd showed up, with the organizers claiming 130,000 and police putting the number at 22,800. Meanwhile in the legislature, pan-democrats used many methods to stall scrutiny of the bill, leading to the chaos of May 11. Democratic Party lawmaker Kwong said their efforts effectively slowed the legislative process, giving Hongkongers time to grasp the potential impact of the bill. Others said Lam should have sensed the seriousness of the crisis by May, given the lengths to which pan-democrats went to oppose the bill, risking arrest for their antics and criticism by their own moderate supporters. Eventually, seven pan-democrat lawmakers were either arrested or informed of their pending arrest for actions during the chaos of May 11.
One lawmaker from the camp said: “Of course we struggled before switching from our usual peaceful approach, but we were backed up by public support. God gave Lam all the signs, but she refused to back down.”
Lam and other government officials condemned the chaos in Legco, and refused to stop championing the bill. Lam and security chief John Lee Ka-chiu said repeatedly that the bill would not undermine Hongkongers’ rights, and still expected lawmakers to approve it by mid-July. On June 9, however, an estimated 1 million people took part in a march to oppose the bill, firing the starting gun on social unrest that would continue for months to come. On June 12, protesters clashed with police outside Legco, and police fired tear gas for the first time in the city since 2014. On June 15, Lam announced that the bill was being suspended, and would effectively be “dead” by July. But she still rejected demands for its complete withdrawal, prompting another recordbreaking march the next day – drawing 2 million people this time, according to organizers’ estimates.
Members of the pan-democrat camp said it was the very nature of the extradition bill that helped their efforts and denied that they had lied to or misled the public. People could see the dangers, they said, of allowing China to demand the return of suspects from the city. “It’s something even pro-establishment people in Hong Kong are afraid of,” Wu said. Unlike previous controversial legislation, the bill drew opposition from more than “the usual suspects” of opposition lawmakers, legal experts and social workers. It was significant that even the local and international business communities, traditionally close allies of the government, took the rare step of voicing their concerns. Civic Party leader Yeung said Hong Kong’s legal system was probably one of the last lines of defense for the one country, two systems model. “The extradition bill goes directly to the core of the criminal justice system,” he said. “For ordinary people, it is the deep fear of the fate of ‘one country’ over ‘two systems’. They have good reason to share this fear.”
A strained alliance
Gary Cheung and Kimmy Chung
The pro-Beijing camp, always supportive of the government, paid a price for backing the extradition bill.
The pro-establishment Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions (FTU) was in an upbeat mood in early 2019 as its leaders assessed its prospects for the district council elections due near the end of the year. “We set the goal of ensuring the re-election of our 29 incumbent district councilors and winning at least another five seats,” FTU president Stanley Ng Chau-pei recalled in January 2020.
There were many reasons for that optimism, not least the labor and political group’s ample resources, its 420,000 members and strong grassroots network. “Under normal circumstances, the pro-establishment camp usually has an advantage in district council elections which are dominated by bread-and-butter issues,” Ng said. All 18 councils were dominated by the camp, and at the start of 2019, the opposition pandemocrats were in disarray and still smarting from back-to-back defeats in two Legislative Council by-elections the previous year.
Punished at the polls
Nobody foresaw the debacle to come for the pro-establishment camp, as protests against city leader Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s extradition bill snowballed into a wider anti-government movement through much of 2019. In the district council elections on November 24, proestablishment candidates were trounced, winning only 60 out of 452 seats.
Sweeping to a stunning victory, the pan-democrat bloc won 392 seats and seized control of 17 out of 18 councils. As for the FTU, only five of its 62 candidates won, with three of its four Legco members failing to retain their district council seats. (District councilors are eligible to run as Legco members and vice-versa.)
In a postmortem of their pathetic performance, some in the camp conceded afterward that they had failed to read the signs early enough, and did not realize that the extradition bill controversy could end up hurting them so deeply. Most in the camp actually had seen nothing wrong with the bill rolled out by the government to allow the case-by-case extradition of fugitives to jurisdictions with which Hong Kong had no exchange arrangement, including mainland China. When they met residents, they sensed that most were indifferent to the bill.
“They thought it related only to a tiny group of fugitives and had nothing to do with them,” said Tam Yiu-chung, former chairman of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), the largest pro-establishment party. Only 21 of the DAB’s 179 candidates won in November, a massive rout for a party which had 119 district council seats before the polls.
Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee, chairwoman of the pro-government New People’s Party and an Executive Council member, said she rarely came across residents who were unhappy about the extradition bill. It was “something too remote” for most people, she said. Her party fielded 28 candidates in the district council elections, but all lost.
In retrospect, Ip and Tam agreed, the tide turned after a group of Hong Kong pan-democrats, led by former chief secretary Anson Chan Fang On-sang, went to the United States in March 2019. They highlighted concerns that the extradition bill could lead to fugitives being sent from Hong Kong to mainland China, and lobbied support from top US officials and members of Congress. That proved a turning point for Beijing as well. A domestic Hong Kong issue now had become a potential new front in the geopolitical rivalry between the US and China, said Tam, Hong Kong’s sole representative on the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, the nation’s top legislative body.
The following month, Beijing’s liaison office in Hong Kong invited a group of government supporters to set up an alliance to defend the extradition bill. The group then opened street booths across Hong Kong and collected hundreds of thousands of signatures from the public supporting the proposal to change the law. That seemed to be another sign that there was support on the ground for the bill.
The FTU’s Ng, deputy convenor of the alliance, admitted that his labor group misread ground sentiment. “We supported the government’s decision to push the bill because we agreed there was a need to plug the legal loophole in the existing law,” he said. “Our judgment was based on whether the move was in line with justice, not whether it could have a negative political impact.”
The pro-establishment camp remained firmly behind the bill even as its progress through Legco was delayed by pan-democrats. After the chaos and brawling in the legislature