Hong Kong’s Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu applauds with lawmakers following the passing of the Article 23 national security legislation at the Legislative Council in Hong Kong on March 19. Photo: AP
Opinion
Regina Ip
Regina Ip
Article 23: after the victory lap, what’s next for Hong Kong?
In passing Hong Kong’s domestic national security law, John Lee has pulled off a historic feat which none of his predecessors were able to accomplish
But, much explanation and clarification are needed to assuage concerns. Now, the campaign to tell the real story about the legislation begins
Article 23 of the Basic Law, a law made by China’s National People’s Congress which sets out the constitutional arrangements for Hong Kong, requires the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to enact laws on its own to prohibit seven offences which threaten national security.
Despite the best intentions of the officials in charge, the first campaign to implement Article 23 ended in mass protests in mid-2003, and the national security bill was aborted after the Liberal Party, which held eight votes in the Legislative Council then, withdrew its support. The bill lapsed at the end of the first term of Tung Chee-hwa’s administration.
National security legislation became a political taboo that successive chief executives were reluctant to touch.
To avoid controversy and get on the right side of the then powerful “pro-democracy” bloc in Legco, Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, who succeeded Tung in 2005, prioritised democratic reform instead of national security.
He succeeded in securing legislative approval for a constitutional reform package in 2010. The reform created five “super seats” in the legislature, in effect five at-large constituencies spanning the city.
Tsang was replaced by Leung Chun-ying, an avowed patriot, in 2012. Shortly after Leung took over, his agenda was thrown off course by popular protests against the government’s plan to implement national education in schools.
Protesters gather outside the government headquarters in Hong Kong’s Admiralty district to protest against the introduction of national education in Hong Kong schools, on September 8, 2012. Photo: Felix Wong
The new subject and the funding for its implementation had been approved by Legco, but with Legco elections coming up that September, the pro-democracy camp smeared national education as “brainwashing” to appeal to voters. After thousands of protesters laid siege to the government headquarters for 10 days, Leung withdrew the subject.
The pushback against national education alarmed Beijing. A greater shock to the system came in the autumn of 2014, when protesters laid siege to Central, Admiralty, Causeway Bay and Mong Kok to put pressure on Beijing to relax the criteria for selecting the chief executive by universal suffrage. After 79 days of illegal occupation which paralysed large swathes of Hong Kong, the demonstrators ran out of public support and were peacefully dispersed.
But by 2015, to Beijing’s even greater alarm, a Hong Kong independence movement appeared to be sprouting. In his policy address on January 14, 2015, Leung chided Undergrad, a time-honoured publication of the students of the University of Hong Kong, for spreading the idea of self-determination in a book titled Hong Kong Nationalism.
A group of students who took part in the 2014 Occupy protests set up a Hong Kong National Party in 2016. It was eventually prohibited by the secretary for security on national security grounds under the Societies Ordinance in September 2018.
Challenges to Beijing’s authority continued in 2016, when a group of newly elected legislators deliberately defied Beijing by taking their oath of allegiance in an insulting way. Thereafter, following the National People’s Congress Standing Committee’s interpretation of Article 104 of the Basic Law governing the oath-taking requirement, those six legislators were disqualified.
In 2017, Leung was replaced by Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, a career civil servant, who appeared to have more popular support and was on better terms with the pro-democracy bloc in the legislature, which had solidified into a highly potent opposition for filibustering and blocking the government’s agenda.
Lawmaker Abraham Razack, bottom centre, is surrounded by other legislators during a meeting on the extradition bill in the Legislative Council on May 11, 2019. Photo: Edmond So
Lam assumed office in mid-2017 without putting forward any timetable for implementing Article 23 legislation. By the end of 2018, voices from Beijing urging Hong Kong to fulfil its constitutional duty – such as former senior officials in charge of Hong Kong and Macau affairs Chen Zuo’er and Wang Guangya and then director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office Zhang Xiaoming – were getting louder and louder.
Yet Lam chose instead to prioritise legislation on fugitive offenders, to enable Hong Kong to send fugitives hiding in the city to mainland China, Taiwan and Macau.
This piece of legislation proved even more controversial than the national security bill of 2003. It triggered mass protests, which became more violent over months, with stronger anti-China overtones and whiffs of Hong Kong independence. The riots stopped after Beijing enacted a law to safeguard national security in Hong Kong.
Although China’s national security legislation achieved immediate success in quelling the rebellion, Hong Kong had yet to fulfil its constitutional, legal and moral duty to safeguard national security, an obligation which had been outstanding for almost 27 years.
Offences like treason, sedition, espionage and theft of state secrets have been on our statute books for decades. But many provisions are ineffective and outdated.
For both constitutional and practical reasons, Hong Kong needs to update existing laws, and introduce new offences in accordance with the holistic view of national security introduced by President Xi Jinping on April 15, 2014 and international trends.
The current international trend is to guard against external interference which does not necessarily adopt forceful means, but can include political infiltration, electoral interference, open lobbying or other more subtle means. Australia, Singapore and the United Kingdom have all enacted new laws to pre-empt improper external interference.
Hong Kong has now introduced a similar offence of external interference endangering national security. Given that it is a new offence, concerns have understandably been raised by academia, professional bodies, business chambers and think tanks which thrive on external liaison.
In passing the national security bill, Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu and his administration have pulled off a historic feat which none of their predecessors could; 6.53pm on March 19 will go down in Hong Kong’s history as a milestone. But, after the victory lap, much explanation and clarification are needed to assuage concerns. Let the campaign to tell the real story about Hong Kong’s national security law begin.
Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee is convenor of the Executive Council, a lawmaker and chairwoman of the New People’s Party
