Opinion | National security law: blue or yellow, Hong Kong lawmakers have let down Hongkongers

The protest movement and divisive politics have become Beijing’s justifications for the security law. The opposition and pro-Beijing camp helped put Hong Kong in this predicament, yet few are protecting Hongkongers’ interests now

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Democratic Party legislator Ted Hui Chi-fung throws what he says is a bottle of rotten plants during a debate in the Legislative Council on May 28. Photo: Nora Tam

Published: 9:30am, 1 Jun 2020Updated: 9:43am, 1 Jun 2020

Hong Kong’s constitutional obligations to enact laws on our own to prohibit treason, secession, sedition, subversion and a whole slew of espionage activities had been simmering on the back burner since 2003, and it was only a matter of time before Beijing gave up waiting.

In 2018, Tam Yiu Chung, Hong Kong’s sole delegate to the National People's Congress Standing Committee, the top echelon of the national legislature, came away from the Two Sessions gatherings with some thoughts.

He aired concerns that Hongkongers chanting slogans calling for an end to “one-party dictatorship” on the mainland could one day be disqualified from running in elections. He was giving Hongkongers a sense of what Beijing meant by implementing the “one country, two systems” policy “comprehensively and accurately”, and it foretold what transpired at the NPC last week.

Months of violence and social unrest, the binary politics of blue and yellow ribbons, social polarisation and the few who made spectacles of themselves by asking foreign governments to intervene: all these issues have become the central government’s justifications for its new-found assertiveness.

They have made national security legislation for Hong Kong more than just a constitutional obligation. And once the necessity for the legislation has been established, anything goes, as has been the case in many countries.

Hong Kong was once a sophisticated international city on a par with London and New York, but it is now in a rotten state, with parliamentary politics degenerating into sophomoric stunts like the hurling of foul-smelling, decaying plant matter. But, of course, the flaws in our political system have been glaring for years.