The article goes on to talk about how HK lacks the democratic restraints which would make a law like this in a genuine democracy (as opposed to an insulting farce of an electoral college pretending to be a democracy) reasonable.
I know there are at least a few posters here who live in Hong Kong (we had lunch together a year or so ago - Abe, Hemlock, and Jovan in from Japan). Is this a cause for alarm? The South China Morning Post reports that the government are refusing to publish this as a draft paper for public discussion, which strikes me as an effort to ram this into law without consideration by the public. The President of the HK Law Society was initially against it, but flip-flopped in the space of a day, suggesting political pressure is being exerted.
This looks seriously to me as if the one country-two systems accord is on the ropes. Freedom of speech is one of HK’s joys, compared to the rest of China, especially in respect of the vibrant press - I wonder if this came about when a reporter from the Apple Daily asked Jiang Zemin if a directive from the PRC a few years back was an “imperial decree”, which sent him into an apoplexy?
So, are on the edge of being under firmer domestic control from Beijing, in respect of democratic freedoms? On the face of it, to me, it seems we are.
“The quicker we get this over with, the happier everyone will be…” And am I the only one who thinks it’s kinda spooky to hear another world government invoking “National Security”?
The problem is not that these laws are on their face bad, but that China has a long history of abusing them. In China, complaining to a foriegner about police brutality can get you thrown in jail for “releasing state secrets.” This is the sort of “so-wide-your-brain-falls-out” thinking that the Chinese government often uses to interpret their own laws, which gives them both face validity AND a blank check to do anything they please.
My favorite description of legal situaiton in China is the description of how local elites play a game called “let’s make a regulation” wherein they simply declare that some action is in violation of some unobscure regulation that no one’s ever heard of. A little money or too much attention can often change their minds about whether there really is or isn’t such a regulation.
It also should be noted that the “law as written” is not relevant in China. In the U.S. and U.K., for instance, what is important is the written letter of the law. In China, as in many Asian countries, the letter of the law is not as important as the “intent” of the law. Which means that interpretation is more important that what’s written.