I have to confess that I have over the past decades rarely opened the pages of Harper’s Magazine despite its awesome reputation and its formidable 170-year history. But its “Letter on Justice and Open Debate”, released last week and signed by more than 150 prominent literary figures, journalists and academics, caught my eye, and seems to have stirred a storm. Its publication, unsurprisingly, has been triggered by alarming changes in the US, as the country prepares for what seems likely to be the most vicious presidential election campaign on record, and as the Black Lives Matter campaign convulses the entire society over race and inequality. “The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy,” the letter said. But the letter is not just for American readers. It has resonance across the world, and provides food for thought even here in Hong Kong, where ferociously judgmental debates are breaking out over the new national security law , and where we watch in shock as Western opinion leaders who should know better have with scant logic assailed China as an existential global threat, and the source of most of the 21st century’s significant evils – not least preposterous claims from the likes of Trump adviser Peter Navarro that China deliberately unleashed the Covid-19 pandemic on the world. When the letter talked about “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty”, the force of the words must surely have reverberated everywhere. So, too, the complaint that “institutional leaders … are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms”, which include firing editors for running controversial articles, barring journalists from writing on particular topics, withdrawing books, investigating professors and sacking heads of organisations for “just clumsy mistakes”. The signatories, who included authors Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, J.K. Rowling, Malcolm Gladwell, linguist Noam Chomsky, psychologist Steven Pinker, surgeon Atul Gawande, political scientist Francis Fukuyama and chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov, called clearly for a free exchange of information and ideas: “As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.” It was impossible to read the letter without reflecting on the shockingly disappointing prejudice that has been brought to bear by the international media on Beijing’s decision to introduce a national security law here in Hong Kong. This is intended to end 23 years of politically-charged procrastination over such a law, which Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law, instructed us to introduce after 1997, and to quell the appalling street violence that shuttered Hong Kong for the second half of 2019. Here’s the real reason Hongkongers are looking to leave Let us be in no doubt Beijing has earned a brutish reputation over the past decades with its treatment of dissent, in particular its handling of the Tiananmen catastrophe in 1989. Its intolerance of free speech is legendary. But its hands-off record in Hong Kong since 1997 in accordance with the “one country, two systems” arrangements to ensure a high level of autonomy has been surprisingly consistent – and clearly contradicts the dire predictions of most opposition politicians. At present, the honest position to take should be to acknowledge that a national security law is legitimately needed, to acknowledge that the local administration had procrastinated for far too long about drafting such a law, to express anxiety over the potential for abusive implementation, to warn forcefully that the world is on watch, and emphasise that Hong Kong’s standing as an international business hub in Asia depends on how Beijing respects our autonomy. Instead, there has been a rush “to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty”. Even James Kynge, one of the Financial Times’ most experienced China correspondents, has joined the herd. The security law, he said, was imposed to “end several months of sometimes violent protests for greater democracy in the territory” and it “paves the way for mainland China to dispatch its agents to Hong Kong to effectively oversee local authorities”. Kynge knows well that Hong Kong suffered much more than “sometimes violent protests”, and that these crippled the city and brought normal life to a standstill for much of half a year. He knows that the real target of the security law is not those who seek democracy, but the minority who seek independence. He also knows that there is no evidence at this point to suggest whether or how mainland officials would “effectively oversee” our government or our legal system. It is probably unfair to single out Kynge, because many other correspondents and commentators have been immensely more histrionic and judgmental. But the rush to condemn has run far ahead of any facts, and says more about prejudice than the true situation in Hong Kong. Like many others in Hong Kong, I can understand and sympathise with the anxieties. There have been hard-to-swallow examples of attacks by Beijing on free speech here – like the disappearance of booksellers who sold banned publications, and the expulsion of Financial Times correspondent Victor Mallet for the sin of chairing at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club a lunch presentation by independence campaigner Andy Chan Ho-tin. But the evidence that Hong Kong’s freedoms have been suppressed is poor, and those claims are daily contradicted by continuing protests, feisty press freedom, and a robust community of independent and cantankerous lawyers and judges. Heaven help us if these freedoms are suppressed or swept away, but as of now there is no evidence of this. My heart is with those who drafted Harper’s Magazine ’s open letter, calling for room for experimentation and disagreement. Those freedoms should belong not just to me, or Hong Kong’s courageous street demonstrators, but to our government officials and our political leaders. The crux is the imperative to protect “good-faith disagreement”. My present concern is that much has been said and done in recent weeks that is clearly in bad faith. David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view