The city’s government may be caving in to the Communist authorities in Beijing. But its residents are not.
If Hong Kong’s undoing comes much earlier than 2047, the year that the city’s special arrangement with mainland China formally ends, it may be because of a love story that ended in murder.
On Sunday, several hundred thousand — possibly upward of one million — Hong Kong people marched to protest their government’s attempt to turn that single incident into an excuse to subjugate the city to the ever-encroaching authoritarianism of the Chinese authorities in Beijing.
Chan Tong-kai, a young man from Hong Kong, is wanted in the strangling death of his girlfriend while the couple was vacationing in Taiwan last year. He is back in Hong Kong and, though a suspect in the killing, cannot be sent to Taiwan to stand trial because Hong Kong and Taiwan do not have an extradition agreement. (Nor can he be tried in Hong Kong, whose courts do not have jurisdiction over crimes committed outside of the city.)
Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s highest-ranking official, offered to solve the problem in March by proposing, and fast-tracking, a bill to amend existing extradition laws, which, among other things, would allow the rendition of criminal suspects between Taiwan and Hong Kong. She said this would improve the rule of law.
She also said she wished to “plug a loophole” by allowing a similar arrangement between Hong Kong and China — a loophole, another official lamented, that Hong Kong has ignored “like an ostrich for 22 years,” or since Britain handed over control of the city to the Chinese authorities in Beijing.
For many Hong Kongers, the proposed bill hit like a political bombshell: It seemed to pave the way for China to target anyone in Hong Kong on almost any pretense and try them on the mainland. In the past, the Chinese authorities at least have had to stoop to ugly, and manifestly illegal, kidnappings to get their hands on their opponents in the city.
Various pro-democracy camps in Hong Kong and many legal professionals were quickly up in arms. So were some members of the business sector. Christian churches also cried out: Shipping copies of the Bible to the mainland could attract severe punishment under Chinese law. Even recent immigrants from China spoke up.
