On January 13, Xia Baolong, director of the Chinese State Council’s Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office, delivered calling for the “complete and accurate” implementation of Hong Kong’s National Security Law (NSL).
Beijing imposed the sweeping security law on Hong Kong in June 2020, after anti-government protests, the largest in the city’s history, convulsed the former British colony the previous year.
gave Beijing broad power to silence and punish dissent from the ruling Chinese Communist Party line. It provides for harsh penalties – up to life sentences – for a set of broadly defined national security offenses.
In his speech, Xia boasted of the law’s efficacy in “restor[ing] social order” in Hong Kong:
That is false.
On the contrary, as Polygraph.info has previously , there is abundant evidence that the NSL undermines justice and further Hong Kongers’ rights and freedoms.
The NSL criminalizes four categories of activities: secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign entities. Those offenses are defined with sweeping language that has given authorities power to severely punish even peaceful acts of dissent.
The New York Times in 2020:
From the enactment of the NSL in June 2020 to September 25, 2022, 213 individuals were arrested for alleged national security crimes, the online magazine , citing Hong Kong police data. Of these, 125 were charged and 30 convicted.
Those arrests, made by the Hong Kong police National Security Department (NSD), a branch created under the law, “were mostly related to the NSL, but also to other crimes, such as sedition,” the magazine .
Hong Kong’s , a relic from the city's colonial area, had not been used for more than half a century until the 2019 protests. The NSD has been making national security arrests citing either the NSL or the sedition law and other criminal statutes.
According to the police statistics cited by ChinaFile, 75 individuals were arrested for alleged “seditious” or “secessionist” speech or materials, 69 for alleged “subversion,” 19 for alleged “collusion” with foreign entities and 19 for alleged “terrorism.”
“[T]he vast majority of arrests targeted activities that would be considered peaceful and constitutionally protected exercise of basic political and civil rights in other jurisdictions,” ChinaFile reported. “In fact, such activities would have been protected in Hong Kong itself prior to the NSL’s enactment in July 2020.”
A recent case was the arrest of six people on January 17 for allegedly producing, publishing and selling a “seditious” book about the 2019 pro-democracy protests.
Police officers from the National Security Department raided a stall at the fair in Hong Kong’s Mong Kok district, detaining three people. The others were arrested in Kowloon and the New Territories, Hong Kong Free Press (HKFP) . All six remain in custody on suspicion of engaging in “acts with seditious intention.”
According to multiple news reports, the police said the book advocated for Hong Kong’s independence and “incited others to overthrow the central and Hong Kong governments.”
“The 400-page volume of photographs and text chronicles the 2019 protests, and its cover is a picture of a police standoff with protesters in which a flag emblazoned with the now banned slogan ‘Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times’ is visible,” The .
“In the past, political and satirical products were a staple at Lunar New Year fairs,” .
A college student, Lui Sai-yu, was charged with inciting secession in April 2021 for messages calling for "acts to be taken to unlawfully change the regime" in Hong Kong. He was sentenced to five years in jail in April 2022.
“The court heard that Lui had posted messages like ‘Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Time’ and ‘Hong Kong independence. The only way out,’ which were protest slogans during pro-democracy demonstrations in 2019,” Reuters . Lui has been in prison since his arrest in September 2020.
Similar accounts abound. Information on each of 213 arrests made by the National Security Department can be found .
In its latest assessment of the situation in Hong Kong, the British government reiterated its concern over Beijing’s clamp down on the rights and freedoms in its former territory.
“Hong Kong’s autonomy is declining, and the pervasive, chilling effect of the National Security Law seeps into all aspects of society,” U.K. Foreign Secretary James Cleverly wrote in the foreword to London’s on Hong Kong.