This interview with David Barboza was originally published in The Wire China on September 26, 2021 and is republished with permission.
Q: Let’s start with Hong Kong. There were violent protests there, then a new national security law was introduced in 2020. It looks like “one country, two systems” no longer applies. You were for a long time the editor of the city’s English-language daily, the South China Morning Post, and you write a column for the paper. How do you see things?
A: As someone who has lived in
Hong Kong for more than 20 years, and who proudly calls it my home, it saddens and pains me to see what has transpired in Hong Kong over the past two years. The quagmire that Hong Kong has found itself in is no surprise to me. I came to Hong Kong as a young journalist, and I had the privilege of getting a front-row seat while working for the
South China Morning Post.
I witnessed the excitement and anxiety in the run-up to the 1997 handover, the successful transfer of sovereignty, and the first five or six years of a honeymoon period. At the time, the Chinese government and the local authorities in Hong Kong wanted to show the world that this “one country, two systems” formula could work, and perhaps this model could even be applied to
Taiwan. The two sides saw things with rose-tinted glasses. And there was this impression that the only thing that had changed in Hong Kong was the flag.
But things changed when the city failed to legislate its own version of the national security law, as required by the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution. Since then, there have been missteps and mistrust by both the pro-democracy camp in Hong Kong and the officials in Beijing, which has gradually led them to a point of no return.
Many people in Hong Kong believe that Beijing tried to tighten controls over the city. Officials in Beijing believed they were losing control of the city. This kind of paranoia has driven Hong Kong to where we are today, after the mass protests against
anti-national education in 2012, the
umbrella movements in 2014 over Beijing’s decision to pre-screen candidates for the election of Hong Kong chief executives, followed by the mayhem of the
protests and riots in 2019.
After the disputes over the extradition bill, Beijing finally lost its patience. And then came the
national security law, which is much tougher than expected in its scope. And this was imposed just hours before the July 1 anniversary.
