Hong Kong in Revolt. Au Loong-Yu
On 12 February 2019, the Hong Kong government tabled the Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment) Bill 2019 – commonly known as the extradition bill. Hong Kong has extradition agreements with twenty countries, including the UK and the US, but not with mainland China. The pro-Beijing camp, in Hong Kong and overseas, argued that since Hong Kong has extradition agreements with the West, why could it not have an agreement with mainland China? The issue is with the Chinese legal system. China is not only disdainful of the basic due process of law but also of judicial independence. China’s court system has a near-100 percent conviction rate, while Hong Kong conviction rates in 2017 were 53.4 percent in Magistrates’ Court, 69.2 percent in District Court, and 65.3 percent in The Court of First Instance.8 This reflects the non-independent nature of the judiciary in China. When the extradition bill was first tabled, the pro-Beijing camp fiercely defended it. The opposing camp responded by half-jokingly suggesting that the bill would allow those faced with extradition the choice to be tried either by the Hong Kong courts under British common law or by the mainland courts under Chinese law. Despite their patriotic rhetoric, even the pro-Beijing parties would not opt to be tried by the Chinese courts. This distrust of the Chinese legal system is tacitly recognised by Beijing and codified in Article 8 of the Basic Law, which stipulates that ‘the laws previously in force in Hong Kong . . . shall be maintained’, which means that Hong Kong is insulated from China’s legal system. Without this insulation there is no such thing as Hong Kong autonomy or ‘one country, two systems’. If China’s legal system improved significantly then it would be possible to discuss an extradition agreement with China. But in reality it has gone from bad to worse.
There are people within and outside of China who have argued that the bill’s sole purpose was to send wealthy mainland Chinese who are wanted for corruption back to the mainland to be prosecuted. If this was the case, then the bill should have targeted only mainland Chinese (although that is not what this author would argue for). Since the wording of the bill was that ‘anyone’ in Hong Kong would be subject to extradition, not just corrupt, rich mainland people, it implied that the bill could also target both Hong Kong citizens and foreigners alike. It was a bill which potentially targeted everyone, which is why it was met with great hostility at home and abroad. Actually, one pro-Beijing newspaper in Hong Kong reported on a certain mainland authority’s interpretation – commonly believed to be the vice-premier, Han Zheng – which explicitly included ‘Hong Kong residents’ and ‘foreigners’ as the groups targeted by the bill.9 When confronted by Hong Kong lawmakers as to whether the bill could also target foreign visitors who happened to be in Hong Kong, Secretary for Security John Lee Ka-chiu simply evaded the question.10 It is a reasonable assumption that Beijing’s actions were meant to retaliate against the US for the latter’s pressuring of Canada to arrest Meng Wanzhou, CFO of Huawei. The US Department of State and the European Parliament released statements criticising the bill on 10 June and 18 July, respectively. Germany had already warned that the bill was concerning to the German business community who invested in Hong Kong, and that this might prompt Germany to nullify the extradition agreement between Germany and Hong Kong.11
The most ironic aspect of the issue was that it was the local business class who felt betrayed by Beijing. Mingpao reported that the business class worried about the bill as much as the pan-democrats did, because many of the early transactions which earned them their first buckets of gold in mainland China were ‘shady deals’ and could become easy targets for Chinese prosecutors.12 Their representatives successfully lobbied Beijing to water down the bill by exempting nine categories of commercial crimes from extradition. This was not very satisfying to the business class, because Beijing could still extradite any of them using other pretexts. But their political representatives dared not push further, until the democratic camp, with young people as its radical wing, began to rally over a million people to the streets. Now the stage was set for a great revolt. Only at this moment did the former head of the Liberal Party, James Tien, feel emboldened enough to call for his party to support the shelving of the bill.
THE FOUR STAGES OF THE MOVEMENT
While the Umbrella Movement was an offensive movement because it demanded universal suffrage, the 2019 revolt began with a defensive aim: demanding that the government withdraw the extradition bill. Indeed, the movement was first called the anti-extradition bill movement. We can roughly divide the movement into four stages, and through this we will see how it evolved far beyond its original target and became a major revolt.
1. The Prelude (February to May)
On 12 February, Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s administration first proposed the extradition bill. Pan-democrat legislators were quick to voice their opposition to it. On 31 March, the Civil Human Rights Front (a front of more than fifty organisations, most of them civil associations and trade unions, hereafter, the ‘Civil Front’) hosted its first rally, claiming 12,000 participants. After a month of education and agitation, the next rally on 28 April increased tenfold in size. Without this preparation it would not have been possible to wake up the yellow camp or the young generation – they were still largely demoralised after the defeat in 2014. This is to the credit of the pan-democrats and the Civil Front who came out to oppose the bill, but it was also obvious that they were not optimistic about their fight.
2. Taking Off (June and July)
On 6 June more than two thousand lawyers and legal professionals took to the streets in silent protest against the bill. Little were they aware that in three days, on 9 June, one million people would heed the call of the Civil Front and take to the streets. Equally important, the day also brought back the youth. The number of participants came close to that of the movement that had emerged in solidarity with China’s democratic struggle in 1989. The Centre for Communication and Public Opinion Survey (CCPOS) found that on 9 June protesters under 29 years old accounted for 42.8 percent of the total.13 The young protesters were coming back en masse. The unexpected turnout encouraged everyone, first and foremost the young. The latter came back to the stage again on 12 June to besiege the LegCo building to stop the tabling of the bill (although by then the speaker had already postponed the meeting). This time it was chiefly their show. The same CCPOS survey showed that 68.4 percent of the siege participants were below 29 years old (see below). They tried to charge through the police barricades but were driven back with tear gas and rubber bullets, one of which blinded a teacher. Commonly, the yellow camp had never been supporters of physical clashes with police. Carrie Lam probably counted on this. The next day, however, it was obvious that the public was on the protesters’ side. Many people were angry about the police violence and the official characterisation of the ‘6.12’ action as a ‘riot’. This was also the time when the movement began to raise its second demand: to stop labelling protesters as ‘rioters’.
Carrie Lam felt the heat of the furious public and on 15 June she conceded by announcing that the extradition bill would be temporarily suspended. The next day two million people took to the streets, in effect telling Lam they wanted the bill gone for good, and that they were ready to tolerate low-intensity violence from the radical youth. Their reasoning went as follows: now that both Lam and her police force had become the puppets of Beijing and had violently cracked down on the people, wasn’t it logical and worth supporting when the young people, on their behalf, hit back at them? This strong sympathy again reasserted itself very soon after, when the radical youth broke into the LegCo building on 1 July and as Lam continued to refuse to have dialogue with the protesters. The ‘Yuen Long incident’ on 21 July, where members of organised crime syndicates, with the tacit consent of the police, attacked train passengers whom they believed to be protesters, hardened the yellow camp’s support for radical actions against the government. Now they thought that the young people were right from the very beginning when they repeatedly sent out warnings that Hong Kong was dying and that drastic measures had to be taken.
On the night of 21 June, radical youths went to the Liaison Office to spray graffiti on its wall. Some painted the derogative term for Chinese, Zi-naa, which Beijing would make use of in depicting the whole movement as anti-Chinese.
Lam