In 1997, the people of Hong Kong did not expect that the evil rule of law would come so quickly. The so-called “evil rule of law” means that the British rule of law in Hong Kong is replaced by the Chinese Communist Party’s evil law, and the traditional independence of judges in Hong Kong has turned into judges who help the Chinese Communist Party.
After Beijing implemented the National Security Law in Hong Kong, Hong Kong people’s original freedom of demonstration was cancelled in disguise, and Lai Chi-ying was even sentenced to imprisonment for this reason; and the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece Ta Kung Pao published an article claiming that the Apple Daily should be banned. Recently, the editorial director of Radio Television Hong Kong’s “Clanging Collection”, Choi Yuk-ling, was prosecuted by the police and fined by the judge for producing a follow-up report on the July 21 attack in Yuen Long and discovering what the authorities were trying to hide.
Hong Kong is now similar to Shanghai in 1950. When the Chinese Communist Party occupied Shanghai, its smiling face and promises of “business as usual” to the business community when it entered the city turned into an authoritarian face in the blink of an eye; first it took over the security and judicial systems, then it controlled all the media, then it cracked down on businessmen, and finally it promoted the Communist Party. At the same time, Hong Kong under British rule rose rapidly, replacing Shanghai’s economic and financial status, and by the time of China’s reform and opening up, it had become a modern cosmopolitan city in the hearts of mainlanders, and the whole of China relied on Hong Kong to build bridges and pave the way for foreign business and foreign investment. Now, the “unchanged” system of Hong Kong has changed its face, and Beijing has started to openly and fully take over, and the same set of practices that the Chinese Communist Party operated in Shanghai and Guangzhou has been moved to Hong Kong step by step.
For Hong Kong, the British rule of law used to be the institutional guarantee of Hong Kong’s free economy and free society; once the Communist-style “rule of law” was imported into Hong Kong, the freedom of the entire Hong Kong society was gradually reduced to a suffocating degree. For generations, Hong Kong people have lived under a system of freedom to which they have become accustomed, and this suffocation is particularly painful today.
The introduction of “party over law” into Hong Kong
The most important feature of the Communist-style “rule of law” is that the Party is above the law, the law serves the Party, and the legal and judicial systems are merely tools of Party rule and means of repression. These characteristics reached their peak during the Cultural Revolution, when not only were the laws replaced by Mao’s “Quotations from Mao”, but also the police, prosecutors, and courts were united and headed by military cadres, who “dictated” the country at will according to the “spirit” of the central government. The arrests, imprisonments, killings, and releases were not related to the law, but were decided by the officials in power at all levels.
The last unjust case of the Cultural Revolution happened in 1977, when the “Gang of Four” fell and the Cultural Revolution ended. At that time, the officials sent from Beijing to Shanghai in the previous autumn to combat the Shanghai henchmen of the Gang of Four and to control the situation in Shanghai were “instructed” by Hua Guofeng to kill a group of so-called “counter-revolutionaries” in the spring of 1977 in order to suppress them. In the spring of 1977, under the “instruction” of Hua Guofeng, a group of so-called “counter-revolutionaries” were killed to suppress them. As a result, the city’s leading officials met and approved 56 death sentences in one day. Among them was Wang Shen You, a student of East China Normal University, who was imprisoned for privately expressing his discontent during the Cultural Revolution, and who had been sentenced to a reprieve from death during the Mao era, but became a “ghost under the knife” of the Cultural Revolution at the behest of Hua Guofeng. Peng Chong, one of the leaders of the Shanghai Municipal Government who was involved in this decision, was later transferred to the Central Committee of Political and Legal Affairs, and was promoted to Vice Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress.
During Hu Yaobang’s tenure in the mid-1980s, the political atmosphere was a little more relaxed, and there was a discussion within the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress about whether “the law is greater than the party”. Literally, the NPC Standing Committee is the national legislature and the “supreme organ of state power” according to the Chinese Constitution. This time, Hong Kong’s national security law comes from this body, but it is not its decision. Although this body is the “supreme organ of state power”, there is a boss above it, namely the Central Political Bureau, which has to approve all legislative planning, legislative process and draft laws. At that time, there was a proposal within the NPC Standing Committee that “the party should obey the law, and the law is bigger than the party”. Peng Zhen, then chairman of the NPC Standing Committee, gave permission for this discussion, but in the end could only conclude with a bunch of ambiguous and contradictory words: the law is greater than the Party, but the legislative process should be led by the Party, and the entire political and legal work should be subordinated to the Party Central Committee.
The essence of the Communist-style “rule of law” can be seen clearly in Hong Kong today; although the Communist Party has implemented reform and opening up, its totalitarian rule has never changed.
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