Stephen Vines is a Hong Kong-based journalist who hosts current affairs TV show The Pulse. He has lived in Hong Kong for over three decades. His latest book, Defying the Dragon, tells the story of the Hong Kong-China relationship, right up to the unprecedented protests and crackdown today.
The National Security Law, imposed on Hong Kong by the Chinese Communist Party in June of last year, seems to be the nail in the coffin for “one country, two systems”. It’s clear that the mainland wants to bring Hong Kong under its control. Would you agree?
I do agree with that. I think that the direction of travel even before the introduction of the law was pretty substantively in a direction of demolishing “one country, two systems”. And the way that it was done was by a unilateral act of China's rubber stamp parliament, there was no consultation with the Hong Kong government. They didn't even know what the law contained. This was despite all promises that nothing of that kind would ever happen. Secondly, it is enacted in line with the Chinese mainland method of law, which is not the same as the common law jurisdiction that Hong Kong is supposed to be in ... The law is very vaguely drafted. It’s all encompassing.
Can you give us some examples?
Well last week, the government declared that they have the right to censor films, under the National Security Law. People had no idea that was going to come up. They've already invoked the law to abolish Liberal Studies teaching in schools and replace it with a new patriotic agenda. So everywhere you look, there are new examples of the tentacles of the law reaching into civil society. So it's very, very far reaching.
And, of course, the law has been used as a justification (but not incidentally the reason) for effectively abolishing the election system and introducing a new election system, which effectively means that all candidates have to be screened by Beijing surrogates and the possibilities of anybody who is a real democrat being able to stand in these elections is now nil.
What happens to people who break the law?
Well, charges can be brought in a wide manner of ways without recourse. It’s even possible that suspects will be rendered to the mainland courts themselves – which, of course, means that there's the danger of torture, very heavy punishment, long sentences. Over 99 per cent of people appearing in a Chinese court of law are found to be guilty.
But even if the cases are tried here in Hong Kong, they won't be tried by the regular rota of judges, they will be tried by judges handpicked by the Chief Executive, there will be no right to jury trial. And nobody who's been arrested under this law has been granted bail so far. Because the charges are so wide ranging. The government can always argue, “well, you know, we're still looking into this, it’s a complex matter, these people are very dangerous, they're likely to reoffend”. What even people like me didn't suspect is how far the tentacles of the law would reach into various aspects of society.
Despite huge numbers of citizens on the streets of Hong Kong, there have been no tanks rolling in, no blood spilled – for now, at least. Is it simply that using the legal system is a more effective way to suppress dissent?
Well, China always says that they couldn't care less what the rest of the world thinks. You know, they're the classic Millwall [football] supporters, “everyone hates us and we don't care”. But the fact of the matter is that they do care. If they didn't care, they wouldn't put so much money into propaganda. I mean, they're spending millions upon millions of dollars on their international TV stations and on various other forms of propaganda.
That they didn't send the tanks in to crush the uprising in Hong Kong, I think is partly explained by China's worry about the international reaction to that. And partly explained by the fact that the families of the Chinese leadership have so much wealth passing through Hong Kong, invested in Hong Kong, and they're very worried about literally destroying Hong Kong.
Do you feel at all nervous yourself, as a journalist working in Hong Kong?
I think anybody who is in the media is nervous. It's a very worrying time. Not least because journalists have been arrested (much braver journalists than I am, needless to say). And people who write for a living, who teach for a living, who think for a living – putting it a bit pompously, but, you know, thought is part of the process – are vulnerable in the new order.
How many arrests have there been?
Over 10,000 people have been arrested here for politically related offences [since June 2019, when the last wave of protests began]. That's of a tiny Hong Kong population of 7.5 million. That's more than the people who've been arrested on the Chinese mainland during that same time, population 1.4 billion. It's staggering. In the short space of time since the National Security Law was introduced, there have been over 100 arrests, but the charges are very serious. They are charges of subversion, which could well lead to lifetime imprisonment.
You write about the identity and spirit of the place, which persuaded you to make it home. What's distinctive about Hong Kong?
First of all, Hong Kong is an immigrant society, always has been, mainly composed of immigrants from the Chinese mainland, people escaping political turmoil, famine and persecution. And it was, like all immigrant societies, it was people fighting to survive. But what happened in the mid 1980s was that the structure of the population changed and the majority of people living here were actually born in Hong Kong and their focus was on Hong Kong. There was an enormous flourishing of Hong Kong culture, in the movies, in music, in the development of the Cantonese language. It formed an identity, which was not just distinctive because of the two different systems between the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong, but between the mindsets of those two communities.
I personally happen to come from an immigrant family, but you know, a whole society of immigrants? It's a very dynamic society. In a place like Britain, the immigrants are always on the periphery. In Hong Kong, they were the whole society. It was tremendously exciting to me. And I think that's what captured my interest. And then, when 1989 came around, and the lie – the great lie that Hong Kong people were only interested in making money, had no concern for their brothers and sisters on the mainland – that lie was exposed, because there was this spontaneous response here .... it was a big realisation for me.
How does this dynamic spirit relate to the protests happening now?
So I had bought into this terrible story, that the Hong Kong people are far too selfish to get involved in anything outside their own lives. It's just not true. And it's increasingly being proved not to be true. In the recent events, it's very hard to exaggerate how widespread they were. I make it my business to go around localities and see what is going on. And you'd see people from the housing estates coming out with bottles of water to give to the protesters, helping to shield them when they were under attack. It was an extraordinary atmosphere.
Given mainland China’s power and size, resisting can look like an impossible battle. But the CCP is clearly worried and remembers that the Soviet Union was brought down by the periphery. Does political turmoil in Hong Kong pose a real threat to the party?
History does show precisely that authoritarian regimes tend to be brought down from the periphery, not necessarily from the centre. I think that the Communist Party of China, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary next month, thinks that they have some special recipe for longevity … they would never say this in public, but virtually they say “we accept that this is a dictatorship, but it's a different kind. It mixes national pride with this all-embracing control of society.” But from where I'm sitting, all dictatorships say exactly the same thing. If they continue to rule China for another couple of years, it will in fact be the longest lasting dictatorship of the modern era. So you know, there may be something in what they say, but that doesn't mean that they have perpetual staying power.
