What Does Hong Kong’s National Security Law Mean?
What is the new law in Hong Kong? What changes with the new national security law and who does it affect? The made-in-China law is keeping Hongkongers guessing whether they’re guilty.
Bloomberg reporters Karen Leigh and Iain Marlow discuss with QuickTake’s Kurumi Mori. Join in live to hear your questions answered.
Chinese officials have described Hong Kong’s new national security law as “tailor-made” for the former British colony. Lawyers in the city, however, say the statute may be open to abuse and difficult to apply.
The 35-page legislation drafted behind closed doors in Beijing represents an uneasy marriage between China’s “socialist legal system with Chinese characteristics” and the common law preserved in Hong Kong after the British left in 1997. Key provisions against terrorism, secession, subversion of state power and collusion with foreign forces feature the harsh sentences — as long as life in prison — and sweeping wording of similar offenses on the mainland.
“It’s deliberately vague,” said Antony Dapiran, a lawyer and author with more than 20 years of experience working in Beijing and Hong Kong, where he currently lives. “That’s the way that the Chinese legal system works. It leaves plenty of scope for interpretation, plenty of scope for the authorities to target whoever they want.”
That will likely fuel uncertainty not only among Hong Kong’s 7.5 million residents, but the some 1,300 foreign companies that have set up regional headquarters there in part due to its civil liberties and professional courts. The ambiguity may deter many people from behavior that they’re not sure is illegal, an effect that Zhang Xiaoming, a top mainland official overseeing Hong Kong, referred to as a “sword of Damocles” when describing the law on Wednesday.
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