China’s state security apparatus has largely worked in the shadows, while Communist Party leader Xi Jinping expanded it in recent years into a bulwark against threats to party government, law and order and unity national.
Hong Kong could change that low profile.
Under a national security law that went into effect this week, China will openly locate security officials in Hong Kong to subject opposition to the party government. The law empowers these officers to investigate cases, collect information, and help monitor enforcement of the rules in schools, the media, and social organizations. Until now, Chinese agents were operating undercover in Hong Kong.
“When I was kidnapped to China, it was done in secret. Now it can be done openly, ”said Lam Wing-kee, the owner of a Hong Kong bookstore that was hijacked in 2015 and moved to mainland China. He said security officials placed him in solitary confinement for five months and interrogated him about the publication of gossip-laden books about Mr. Xi and other party leaders.
“Now that Chinese national security agencies have official protection in Hong Kong, Hong Kong will essentially be no different than anywhere in China,” said Mr. Lam, who now lives in Taiwan.
The new law for Hong Kong has drawn criticism for introducing ambiguous crimes, such as separatism and collusion, which can be used to quell the protest. On Wednesday, the first full day the law went into effect, city police flexed the new muscle by arresting mostly peaceful protesters for behavior believed to defy Chinese rule of the territory.
But the law also extends China’s security status to Hong Kong, where it will operate beyond the scrutiny of local laws and courts. The open but untouchable nature of these forces signals a drastic change for the territory, which has promoted itself as an oasis for the rule of law.
For Mr. Xi, Hong Kong represents the next logical step for his expansion of party control over society. Since coming to power in 2012, Mr. Xi has overseen an offensive that has extinguished political dissent, worker protests, student activism and ethnic unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang, several experts said.
“There are many parallels between what China has at the national level and what they are imposing on Hong Kong,” said Ryan Hass, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. When Hass was director for China on the White House National Security Council from 2013 to 2017, he dealt with members of the Chinese national security apparatus.
“They are like clouds looming over society,” Hass said. “They can decide when the sun is allowed in, and they can decide when to block it.”
Communist Party leaders see Hong Kong, a former British colony, as a dangerous enclave of western influence, anti-party sentiment, and traitorous separatists on the southern tip of China. After its handover to China in 1997, Hong Kong retained its own legal system and civil liberties.
Chinese leaders became increasingly alarmed and frustrated last year when pro-democracy protests hit Hong Kong for months, sometimes erupting in violent clashes with the police.
“Hong Kong is perceived as a vulnerable link in the internal security of all of China,” said Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, who studied China’s national security system. “When the Hong Kong people protest on the street, it immediately makes Beijing look bad, because these people are asking questions about China’s authoritarian regime.”
A Communist Party meeting in October raised a vague proposal to create a national security system for the territory, leaving outsiders wondering what Mr. Xi had in mind. The law released this week revealed an expansion of China’s security presence in Hong Kong that surprised many by its scope.
The law establishes a host of new agencies in Hong Kong to enforce the rules against the challenge of Chinese rule, even peacefully.
They include a national security committee in the Hong Kong government and units in the local police and prosecutor’s office to handle cases under the new law. Beijing will also assign an adviser to the Hong Kong committee and establish its own security office in the territory, made up of staff from mainland China.
“They will have the effect of intimidating activities by NGOs and other social groups,” said Willy Wo-Lap Lam, a scholar of Chinese politics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “Just knowing they are there will have its own effect.”
Beijing brusquely dismissed the criticism, more or less telling Hong Kong people to get used to much more forceful and intrusive surveillance to maintain order after last year’s riots.
The new law also allows authorities to prosecute individuals for political crimes committed abroad, increasing the intimidating possibility that migrants from the territory living in, say, Britain or Canada, may be arrested if they return to Hong Kong. after protesting peacefully in their adopted countries. .
“Central authorities have the power and responsibility to take all necessary measures to protect national security,” Zhang Xiaoming, deputy director of the Chinese government’s office for Hong Kong, told reporters in Beijing this week. Asked about the sanctions imposed by Western countries, he said: “What does this have to do with you? This is completely our home business. “
However, China’s conception of “national security” differs from the standard Western idea that focuses on terrorism, external threats, and diplomatic rivalry. In Chinese, the same term for this, guojia anquan, also means “state security,” and official policy is more focused on internal threats and protection of the Communist Party.
China’s Central National Security Commission, which Xi first convened in 2014 to direct policymaking, is controlled by the leadership of the Communist Party, rather than the civil administration, making it, like the People’s Army of Liberation, in a direct arm of the party.
“China’s conception of national security goes far beyond what normal foreign policy would cover,” said Ms. Sun of the Stimson Center. “The fundamental starting point is the security of the regime.”
Even by China’s strict standards, its security agencies are surprisingly secret.
The Ministry of State Security, which investigates serious national security cases and gathers intelligence information at home and abroad, rarely makes public comments and does not have a phone number to answer journalists’ questions. The Homeland Security Commission rarely appears in public, and clues to its activities must be found scattered on local government websites, which sometimes mention its meetings and directives.
The Commission last met a few months ago, when China was struggling to manage its coronavirus crisis. Mr. Xi called a meeting that focused on threats facing the country in a world affected by a pandemic, according to brief reports on Chinese government websites.
“We are facing more and more non-traditional security threats,” Chen Wenqing, the Chinese state security minister, wrote in an article for a Communist Party newspaper in April, one of his rare public statements. “In the face of the schemes of hostile forces at home and abroad to challenge our core interests, we have to take a clear position and not be afraid to show our hand.”
Hong Kong law also requires stricter supervision of schools, the media, the media, and Internet associations. Beijing advisers can help introduce, probably in a more subdued way, some of the monitoring and pressure tactics used in China to stifle potential troublemakers, opponents of the law said.
“We used to think of the ‘secret police’ as something abstract,” Nathan Law, a leading leader of the Hong Kong protests, said in a statement issued by the Hong Kong Democracy Council. “Now it is a very real fear.”
Law later indicated in a Facebook post that he had fled Hong Kong out of fear of the security law. He did not reveal his fate.
