“Why now? We can’t wait. We can’t wait,” he said in a press conference on Tuesday.
“While the community as a whole appears very calm and safe, we still have to be wary of potential acts of vandalism and undercurrents trying to stir up trouble,” he added. He pointed to growing geopolitical tensions and the threat to China's development from “some Western countries.”
The proposed new laws cover issues ranging from treason, rebellion and sedition to “theft of state secrets, espionage” and foreign interference in Hong Kong affairs.
In the section of laws dealing with the theft of state secrets, the sensitive areas identified are major economic, social, scientific and technological developments in Hong Kong and the mainland. What constitutes a state secret is not made clear in any meaningful detail – it is a state secret if its disclosure would jeopardize national security.
This is just as vague as the mainland's updated national security “toolbox,” as Chinese authorities have described changes to its laws in the past year.
Using these laws, authorities raided the Beijing offices of foreign management consultants and consulting groups in an apparent attempt to restrict the flow of economic information and corporate data to foreign companies.
'why now? We can't wait. “We can't wait”
Hong Kong CEO John Lee
The blurred lines between China's corporate sector, especially the state-owned sector, its military and its shared technologies, appear to have made this information more sensitive in an environment of increasing geopolitical and trade tensions.
However, these laws and raids on the mainland have not only limited foreign companies' and investors' access to data and insights, and their ability to conduct routine due diligence on proposed investments, but also their ambiguity (and in the context of China's opaque and frightening policy). the judicial system), and it also frightened them.
Not only has foreign investment dried up. China is seeing net outflows despite increasingly urgent efforts by senior party officials to encourage more foreign investment in an economy facing some significant challenges.
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Hong Kong's adoption of Chinese national security laws in 2020, the pandemic — Hong Kong has been subject to the same stringent “elimination-Covid” approach as the mainland — and the ongoing harsh crackdown on dissent have all contributed to a slowdown in its economy, and house prices are the lowest in seven years. Years and the stock market is now about 50 percent below its peak in February 2021. It fell about 14 percent last year, and is down about 8 percent so far this year.
Hong Kong's status as the secure global gateway for Western capital to China, a major regional financial center and a major conduit for global trade, has had a dark cloud since 2020.
The proposed new laws will certainly not enhance its attractiveness, especially for foreign professionals – lawyers, accountants, financial and business executives – who play a crucial role in enabling the exchange of advertising goods and services and the trust in the legal environment that has made Hong Kong so. A vibrant business center in the past.
Now, Hong Kong increasingly seems destined to become just another big Chinese city — which seems like a waste for China, given how positive Hong Kong's special treatment and two-way Sino-West trade window are relative to mainland China. recent decades.
Just last week, Chinese authorities revealed that a British business consultant missing since 2018 had been sentenced to five years in prison in 2022 — before the mainland's most frightening espionage laws were enacted — on charges of illegally providing intelligence to third parties.
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Given the lack of a definition of what would constitute a state secret when the new laws are put in place (not if, given that Hong Kong's legislature is dominated by mainlanders), it is this kind of prospective experience that will weigh heavily on the minds of Hong Kong's military. Expatriates within the city's business community, and perhaps on homes and stock prices as well.
Despite good intentions, Beijing's heavy-handedness has exploded China's real estate market, damaged its once-thriving technology and sharing economy sectors, and scared away foreign investment. Now, its loyalists in Hong Kong seem intent on dulling the luster of what was once a unique and uniquely valuable asset.
