National security law: how residents in a leafy Hong Kong district became neighbours with an intelligence agency
- Metropark Hotel Causeway Bay in Tai Hang was quietly converted into the central government’s Office for Safeguarding National Security and launched on July 8
- Some residents welcomed safety with increased police presence, but constant patrols make others uneasy
A hundred days after Hong Kong adopted a sweeping national security law, residents in a leafy middle-class neighbourhood appear to have taken in their stride the presence of a mysterious new institution in their midst, even as some expressed uneasiness about frequent police patrols.
Neither the local Hong Kong government nor Beijing’s liaison office in the city had made it known that renovation work would begin at the hotel run by a subsidiary of the state-owned China Travel Service. But local media sniffed out a vague announcement on the hotel website that week saying the establishment, just 10 minutes by foot from Causeway Bay, one of the world’s busiest and most expensive shopping districts, was under maintenance.
The hotel’s logo was removed, its parking space was boarded up, and in the small hours of July 8, it was gussied up for a heavily guarded opening ceremony early that morning, at 7am.
After more than three months of getting used to the intelligence agency as a new neighbour, Tai Hang residents said its staff members had kept a low profile and the 33-storey building did not stand out from among the high-rise homes that had popped up there in recent years.