If you have even any understanding of how the Chinese Communist Party works, you will know that it either saw this as an opportunity to impose a greater degree of control over Hong Kong or felt it had no other option than to do so.

Very few in Hong Kong, of whichever camp, wanted to see rules imposed by the party: not yellow, not green and not blue. Enacting a national security law for the special administrative region should have and could have been done through the channels available to us in Hong Kong. But the pro-democratic camp, as it has so often done, opposed it for the sake of opposition, without providing a viable alternative or workable changes that could have led to a document drafted in the Legislative Council and put through public consultation.

With Hong Kong in political paralysis, no wonder Beijing is stepping in

There seems to be no better example of the age-old expression that “you reap what you sow” than the Hong Kong political situation. So shame on the pro-democracy camp and to those who conducted, assisted and abetted the illegal protests and violence.