On the other hand, government officials and their allies in the legislature, of course, say the proposed legislation is just right.

The public response, meanwhile, has been distinctly underwhelming. Back in 2003, compounded by public frustration with the government’s handling of the Sars outbreak, hundreds of thousands took to the streets against the article’s legislation, which is a constitutional requirement. Beijing caved, and both the chief executive and security secretary ended up having to resign. Today, the resistance has been broken.

Back then, many were driven by fears that with the domestic security legislation, Beijing would be free to define “treason, secession, sedition, subversion and state secrets”, target individuals with those charges whenever it wanted, and interfere in the city’s affairs and freedoms.

The irony is that Beijing ended up in 2020 imposing the national security law in response to the 2019 anti-government riots; and that has made Article 23 legislation both unavoidable and without resistance. So now, instead of one security law, we will have two, not to mention the colonial-era law on sedition.

Things could have been different

The conventional narrative of the opposition and its Western supporters is that the central government had been tightening its grip on Hong Kong ever since 1997, whose dominance and control culminated with the national security law. Article 23 is just icing on the cake for Beijing. The undermining of Hong Kong’s freedoms was always the plan.

I don’t believe the historical records support such claims. It also completely misses the tug of war between the opposition and Beijing over the years, with the Hong Kong government caught in the middle, and the periodic if moderate victories scored by the opposition for their version of democracy.

A good case can be made that if the pan-democrats and their opposition movement had been more realistic, and that their nominal leaders had shown more leadership, Hong Kong could have been on a very different political trajectory.

A speech for the opening of the legal year of 2003 by former chief justice Li Kwok-nang was almost prescient.

“[Debate] is not and should not be regarded as a tussle of strength involving government and polarised sections of the community, with victories and defeats. It would be a very sad day if this were so.”

That day has come and gone. And so here we are. There is no going back.

What is undeniable is that even without Article 23 legislation, Beijing was willing to compromise well into the mid-2010s, a fact that is often ignored.

Fresh from its success over Article 23, the opposition focused its next fight on universal suffrage for the chief executive election in 2007 and the Legislative Council election in 2008.

It’s true that Beijing pushed back by having the National People’s Congress Standing Committee interpret electoral provisions in the Basic Law to make universal suffrage impossible for those dates. But the interpretation also came with the commitment that full democracy in 2017 and 2020 – or thereafter – was possible for the election of chief executive and the legislature, respectively.

Any impartial observer would have to conclude that from the time of the handover in 1997 to 2012, there was an undeniably significant if gradual expansion of the franchise for both the chief executive and legislative council elections.

They increased both the levels of competitiveness between candidates and the numbers of citizen participation. Whether it was too fast or too slow was in the eye of the beholder.

Beijing was open to democratisation in Hong Kong, but not fully fledged competitive party democracy of the Western-style models, for example, the Westminster or Washington systems.

Above all, it wanted to avoid the periodic rotation of political parties in power, and the danger of foreign infiltration, influence and subversion. Given the rising hostilities of the US and the West in general, who could blame them?

Beijing’s bottom line

Beijing could accept universal suffrage but only with the safeguard that the election of the chief executive must come with a “primary” for candidate selection that was subject to its control. In short, it had no problem with very broad political representation, but not one that was to be based on Western models.

The universal suffrage model offered by Beijing in 2014 was therefore rejected by the opposition, triggering the Occupy protests. It was formally vetoed in the legislature the next year. People have been arguing ever since whether opposition lawmakers should have accepted Beijing’s offer as a strategic move and then fought on for universalising the primary for the selection of candidates down the road. That way, they could have secured close to universal suffrage for the legislature in 2020. Who knows? The energy that went into the destruction of Hong Kong during the 2019 unrest might have been channelled towards more constructive engagement with the elections of lawmakers.

Did the opposition lawmakers make an error of judgement of historic proportion?

Whatever the case, what Beijing thought was a reasonable compromise was seen by the radicals of the Occupy movement as a betrayal.

Hong Kong’s Article 23 law likely to state maximum penalties for offences: minister

There was a lull between 2015 and 2019. But gradual and imperceptible pressure built up, and the dam finally burst in the summer of 2019 with unprecedented violence and destructiveness.

Security vs democracy

The contrasting constitutional visions embedded in the Basic Law were violently played out in the streets of Hong Kong in the second half of 2019.

The unnerving violence made me realise for the first time that constitutional law wasn’t boring, but a life-and-death matter for a people, their society and their way of life.

Article 45 of the Basic Law embodies the promise of universal suffrage for Hong Kong people. Article 23 aims to satisfy Beijing’s need for security and stability.

They in turn express the conflicting demands of “one country, two systems”. Beijing believes there can be no “two systems” without “one country”, united and strong against both domestic disturbance and foreign interference.

We now know that by the end of the Occupy movement in December 2014, Beijing was already thinking about introducing its own national security law in Hong Kong in the absence of the city’s self-legislation of Article 23. Unrest like Occupy and then the riots of 2019 might or might not have been a “colour revolution” but they could have turned into one as they threatened the very constitutional and political makeups of both Hong Kong and the mainland.

The fact the many leading opposition figures made high-profile visits to Western capitals, but especially Washington, to openly lobby for sanctions and other punishments against Hong Kong and mainland officials – while “advising” Western officials how they could help with Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy – confirmed Beijing’s long-standing fears that the city was being turned into a conduit for foreign interference.

As it turned out, “a high degree of autonomy” as guaranteed in the Joint Declaration was not enough to achieve the type of universal suffrage the opposition demanded. Whether or not it admitted it openly, that would have required something close to “full autonomy”. The logic was, so far as Beijing was concerned, just one step to independence and completely unacceptable.

So, 2019 made the national security law inevitable, and which in turn paved an easy way for John Lee to complete the last act of this long-standing tragedy, in which both sides could claim moral, legal and political rights on their side, but only one side could prevail.