In most world cities, protest organizers who managed to keep a crowd of half a million marchers peaceful and law-abiding would be hailed as heroes. Not in Hong Kong. Last week police arrested five leaders of the protest march July 1 on charges of . . . walking too slowly.
The legal harassment of Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement is petty but paradoxically may be useful. It neatly encapsulates how the city's way of life is under threat from Beijing. And because it will further anger local people, turnout at future protests is likely to increase.
Hong Kong's prosperity and attractiveness depend on an impartially administered rule of law, guaranteed by an independent judiciary. The predictable enforcement of contracts explains why the former colony remains China's largest financial center despite government efforts to promote Shanghai.
That legal foundation is now under threat.And Hong Kong people know it: Some 1,800 of the city's lawyers dressed in black and marched to the Court of Final Appeal on June 27 to protest a central government white paper that called judges "administrators" who must"love the country."
That vaguely Orwellian language would be less threatening if it weren't for periodic comments by Beijing officials that suggest judicial independence is not valued and even resented. When China's current supreme leader Xi Jinping visited the city in 2008, he asked the three branches of government to "support each other, intimately coordinate [their work] and concentrate their energy on developing the economy."
Beijing has stepped in several times to overturn court judgments of which it disapproved. The most important case arose in 1999 when the Court of Final Appeal ruled that Hong Kong's Basic Law gave children born on the mainland to a Hong Kong parent the right to live in the city. The National People's Congress promptly reinterpreted the Basic Law to exclude the children.
More recently, Beijing officials and pro-Beijing voices within Hong Kong have begun to call on the police to crackdown on protesters. Under Andy Tsang Wai-hung, commissioner since 2011, the police have responded with greater force and more detentions, including against journalists and peaceful protesters. Last year a U.S. State Department report accused the police of using abusive and aggressive tactics. NPC Chairman Zhang Dejiang praised them for protecting national security and social order.
That's hard to credit since triad groups have targeted Beijing's critics for violent reprisals. In February, newspaper editor Kevin Lau Chun-to was nearly stabbed to death on the street. The following month, two media executives were beaten up. A group calling itself Care for the Youth Group Association has begun to harass with impunity the Falun Gong religious group, which is banned in China.
The Hong Kong police and judiciary still have deep reserves of professionalism within their ranks that make it impossible for the Chinese Communist Party to lock up dissenters as it does on the mainland.Nevertheless, it has begun to undermine their independence at the margin. The realization that what has made Hong Kong unique is under threat has led to sadness and anger. Beijing ignores this at its peril.