Hong Kong has a new mayor before Beijing’s grace: last Sunday, John Lee, the city’s former deputy police chief, was “elected” to office with 99 percent of the vote. The prospects for the democracy movement in the special administrative region are bleak.
There was no opposing candidate. Lee has worked his way up through the ranks of the police force and was already influencing the agency by the time protests against Beijing’s attempts to subjugate the autonomous city began. It was 2003 when a so-called “security law” should have been passed to signal the people of Hong Kong that the tide had turned irreversibly after the former crown colony was returned to the People’s Republic of China.
Alexander Görlach is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York. The PhD linguist and theologian teaches democratic theory in Germany, Austria and Spain as an honorary professor at Leuphana University. In the 2017-18 academic year, he was at National Taiwan University and City University Hong Kong to conduct research on China’s rise. He is currently researching new technologies at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute and how they are used in democracies and abused in dictatorships.
The “security law” was intended to undermine Hong Kong’s own jurisdiction by providing for extradition to the People’s Republic of China for certain “offenses”. , with success.
In 2014, when John Lee was already deputy minister for security in the city, the next wave of protests erupted when Beijing, once again, wanted to break its contractual commitments to Hong Kong and deny the people free elections. The hitherto largest protest movement was given the name “umbrella protests” because the demonstrators resisted water cannons and tear gas with open umbrellas. The protests lasted from September to December and ended without the demonstrators achieving any substantive changes.
Lee’s predecessor, Carrie Lam, pulled out the “security law” in 2019 to endear herself to Beijing and achieve what her 2003 predecessor failed to do. There were mass protests that the city had not seen before. More than a million of the seven million inhabitants took part in one of the demonstrations. John Lee had already been Secretary of Security for two years and therefore had full responsibility. For him, the use of water cannons and rubber bullets was a matter of course.
He was not interested in the health and lives of the protesters, who, among other things, demanded an end to police violence in Hong Kong. Because boss Carrie Lam had miscalculated in her plan and assured Beijing that this time the “security law” could be passed without difficulty.
It was Lee’s moment when he began to position himself for the highest office in the city. Carrie Lam had to withdraw the “extradition decree”, as the “security law” was also known. In November 2019, Beijing received the biggest slap in the face that the people of Beijing’s nomenklatura could give: in the regional elections, 17 of the 19 districts went to the democracy camp. Lam was finally duped and it was clear that Beijing would not be able to push his candidate through in the parliamentary elections that were to be held in autumn 2020.
Then came the pandemic, the protests had to stop. In the summer, John Lee then played a key role in a coup: with his support, the “security law” was resubmitted and passed. It is valid since July 1, 2020. Since then, Lee has been involved in arresting pro-democracy activists, pushing for more surveillance and draconian punishments. Not just to please Beijing. His and the CP’s convictions coincide here. For Xi Jinping, that’s why he was the only candidate to succeed Carrie Lam, who was no longer allowed to run.
His election does not bode well for the people of Hong Kong. A security fanatic who wants to control every convolution of Hong Kongers’ minds. The only “candidate” then fought his “election campaign” monothematically: the further implementation of the security decree would have top priority under him.
From Xi Jinping’s point of view, life in the subjugated city is finally going the way he always imagined, after almost twenty years of constant attempts to break Hong Kongers’ will to freedom. It is to be feared that the ruler will get drunk on his success and launch his next blow: the invasion of independent Taiwan, which Xi has repeatedly threatened to annex.
