Martin Regg Cohn is a Toronto-based columnist focusing on Ontario politics and international affairs for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @reggcohn.
There was a time that Hong Kong held out hope.
Hope for a free press. Hope for a free people.
Hope for democratization that might be a model for the rule of law across much of Asia.
Today, the personification of that hope languishes behind bars in Hong Kong.
Jimmy Lai, the defiant newspaper publisher who chronicled Hong Kong’s democracy movement in editions of the popular Apple Daily, was convicted this week of sedition.
His crime? Allegedly trying to topple distant rulers in Beijing, while pressing for self-rule and representative government at home in Hong Kong.
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Lai’s conviction was perhaps a foregone conclusion, but there was a time when expectations were different for the former British colony. Decades ago, Britain and China negotiated a peaceful transition — a treaty — spelling out the handover of power from the era of colonialism to communism but also commercialism.
The rubric was “One country, two systems.” The creative ambiguity allowed for a tension between two legal systems — the common law system of Hong Kong alongside the communist hierarchy and bureaucracy of Beijing.
Underpinning this treaty was its primary article — an article of faith and a matter of belief — that Hong Kong’s status as a manufacturing hub and commercial entrepot was too valuable for Beijing to take for granted. Few believed China would ever kill the goose that laid the golden egg by meddling with Hong Kong’s independent judiciary and fiddling with its political legacy.
Others, however, weren’t so sure. Lai was one of them.
A stowaway from the mainland, he landed in Hong Kong determined to secure his freedom but also his fortune. Later, he risked both by investing in a free press, building the Apple Daily into an inveterate and irreverent campaigner for Hong Kong’s democratization as guaranteed by the handover from British to Chinese control.
There was a time, in the aftermath of the 1997 handover, that Hong Kong held great promise — if not as a bastion of freedom, at least as a building block of democracy tied to a foundation of law and order.
It was freedom for goods and services, if not quite people, that animated Hong Kong’s quest for law and order. The goal was stability and predictability, if not yet full democracy.
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For if the goose was to continue producing gold, there must be transparency and certainty in government. Corporations wanted to avoid the opacity and corruption that bedevil other countries across Asia and the world, and so Hong Kong’s stability as a financial centre was considered a safe bet.
When I took over the Star’s Hong Kong bureau in 1999, the democratization movement was still in full flower. It was led by the Democracy Party and its energetic founder, Martin Lee, and energized by the Apple Daily and its rambunctious publisher, Lai.
I met with Lee and Lai early on, but the balance of power had already started to change as the ground shifted beneath them. Hong Kong’s status as a manufacturing powerhouse was eroded by the explosive growth of neighbouring Shenzhen in mainland China, and its banking power was soon rivalled by the financial muscle of Shanghai.
With China’s economic rise, Hong Kong’s relative clout diminished. The final blow came with China’s political metamorphosis under President Xi Jinping, who consolidated communist rule by crushing dissent on the mainland and outlawing democratization in Hong Kong.
Against that backdrop, the die was cast for Lee and Lai. This week, on the eve of Lai’s court verdict, Lee’s old Democracy Party officially disbanded, announcing that China’s draconian security laws had made any form of independent political activity illegal and unfeasible.
A free press and free elections are vital to democracy, as is the judiciary. The collapse of Hong Kong’s judicial independence has been a long time coming (notwithstanding the self-serving rationalizations of former Canadian Supreme Court chief justice Beverley McLachlin, who foolishly served as a foreign judge on Hong Kong’s highest court until recently).
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Lee, 87, was stripped last year of his title of justice of the peace after being convicted in 2021 for his involvement in democracy rallies (his sentence was suspended).
Lai, 78, was convicted of conspiring to collude with foreign governments to endanger national security and conspiracy to publish seditious charges. Lai is a diabetic who is in poor health after being held in solitary confinement for four years.
He holds British citizenship, and he has family in Canada. Britain, the U.S. and other Western nations including Canada have appealed for Lai’s release.
Given our own experience with unjust detentions by the Chinese government — two Canadian citizens, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, were imprisoned for more than two years as political hostages while Ottawa was left powerless — there is little reason for optimism here, or in Hong Kong.
Perhaps China will ultimately show mercy — or, more likely, use Lai as a bargaining chip, just as it did with the incarcerated Canadian citizens. Whatever Lai’s fate — he faces the possibility of life imprisonment — the only certainty is that this week’s court ruling is a requiem for the death of democracy in Hong Kong.
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