Just Saying | Is Hong Kong American or Chinese territory? Beijing’s new national security law seeks to set that straight

So Beijing has decided enough is enough and taken matters into its own hands to bulldoze ahead with a national security law tailor-made for Hong Kong, because the city is utterly incapable of fulfilling its constitutional duty to come up with the necessary legislation of its own, 23 years after its return to Chinese sovereignty.

And now, the very people who brought all this upon us are having conniptions over what it means for our basic freedoms and fundamentals, which the government is insisting will remain untouched.

Smelling blood in the water, certain Western media outlets are in a feeding frenzy of sensational reports and apocalyptic headlines chronicling the “end/death of Hong Kong”, reminiscent of their sanctimonious divinations about the demise of our city during the 1997 handover, which turned out to be greatly exaggerated.

To understand what has really happened here, you have to take a look back at last year’s social turmoil and anti-government protest violence in the context of Beijing’s complaints about the “black hand” of foreign interference in the city’s affairs, particularly with a hostile Washington using Hong Kong as a pawn in the wider Sino-US political game.

We’re not discussing conspiracy theories here, just the relentless, in-your-face provocativeness of protesters openly waving the star-spangled banner and singing the US national anthem on the streets while spitting at and stomping on their own national symbols, loud calls for President Donald Trump to “save” the city from its own sovereign, opposition politicians’ successful campaign to have the US Congress spite Beijing’s face by cutting off Hong Kong’s nose through punitive policy acts, American politicians coming here to preach – on Chinese soil – the anti-China gospel … the list goes on ad nauseam.