Hong Kong used to be a popular destination for companies, tourists and residents of the People’s Republic who wanted to breathe some air of freedom. Today, ahead of the 25th anniversary of the return of Hong Kong to China, we do not have a lot of good news to report about the situation in the southern Chinese metropolis. This is because the new Chief Executive John Lee also will take office on July 1. Their predecessors were already strictly in line with Beijing. On Top of that, Lee, as a former man of the law, now brings with him the scent of a police state, writes Marcel Grzanna.
In the long term, the dissolution of the rule of law poses a major problem for the local German economy, but in the short term – and in very practical terms – the Covid lockdown weighs more heavily. Our team of correspondents has tracked down cases in which local management has cut itself off loose and company money has disappeared. In such cases, headquarters only realized far too late what was happening. After all, no one was able to check up on the situation on-site for months. So the unease at the Hong Kong location is growing. Not all that long ago, Hong Kong was one of the most business-friendly cities in the world.
Despite all this, the Empire’s withdrawal from Asia remains in itself an anniversary, a day for celebration. The British were colonialists who forcibly seized the territory in southern China and then ruled it undemocratically for 155 years. It is only the contrast that makes the colonial period appear in a good light today. While the British at least upheld a minimum rule of law and freedom of expression, the Hong Kong of today falls short even of these basic standards of civil rights.
A quarter of a century lies between vision and reality. When the 25th anniversary of the return of Hong Kong from Great Britain to the People’s Republic of China is celebrated on Friday, the democratic forces of the metropolis will be faced with the shattered remains of their political goals. Instead of free elections for their head of government and parliament, as once hoped, the approximately 7.5 million citizens will instead look at a pro-Beijing government.
This is exemplified by the presence of China’s President Xi Jinping, who will attend the 25th-anniversary celebrations during a two-day visit. He obviously wants to mark the successful suppression of the democratic opposition in Hong Kong as a personal achievement. For Xi, Hong Kong represents an important trophy for securing additional support within the Communist Party. In the fall, the president wants to finalize his plan for continuing his term as head of state. The fact that he has managed to subdue a society that had been rebellious for years is a valuable argument for lifting his term limits.
Thus, the anniversary on July 1 coincides with the inauguration of former Chief of Police John Lee as the city’s new Chief Executive. The appointment symbolizes the climax of the horror scenarios of all those who still firmly believed in the Chinese promise of “one country, two systems” 25 years ago. The belief that they would be able to maintain a liberal political system and preserve the promised “high degree of autonomy” at the tail end of the authoritarian People’s Republic proved to be an illusion.
Britain’s last governor, Chris Patten, admitted last week that he, too, was wrong. Patten told the news agency AP, “I thought there was a prospect that [China] would keep its word, and I’m sorry that it hasn’t.” The restitution treaty, after 155 years of British rule from the Opium Wars to 1997, had promised the city a “high degree of autonomy” over the following 50 years.
The People’s Republic did not even maintain the guise of adhering to the deal for half of the time. Beijing gradually eroded the autonomy in recent years, constantly accompanied by protests, until ultimately nothing remained that deserved to be called “democratic”.
The new Chief Executive, John Lee, is the preferred candidate of Beijing’s central government. With the help of controversial electoral law reform, the central government has successfully marginalized the will of the people at the polls and crushed political dissent by introducing the National Security Law. The Chinese government wants a rule of security forces for Hong Kong and needs someone who has a grip on these security forces, ex-parliamentarian Ted Hui said in an interview with China.Table. Lee, he said, is an emotionless machine. “He is exactly what Beijing needs.”
Beijing’s new supreme governor defines Hong Kong’s development as a success story that must now be “properly presented” to the world. The 64-year-old criticizes fearmongering and foreign political maneuvers that aim to disparage everything that Hong Kong has achieved. Lee promises progress and stability. The nature of this progress, however, is revealed by the members of the future cabinet.
One example is Secretary for Education Choi Yuk Lin. Back in 2012, Choi wanted to put her mark on education when she sought to “reform” the curriculum in Hong Kong schools. Her bill labeled the Chinese Communist Party as a “united ruling group” that acts selflessly. She envisioned textbooks portraying multi-party systems as the root of chaos and unrest, and the Tiananmen Square massacre as a pivotal event in recent Chinese history to be banished from memory.
“We can expect her to drive an agenda of ‘national education’ that will teach Hong Kong’s youth what it means to ‘develop moral qualities’, to foster ‘national identity’,” commented Lokman Tsui of the University of Toronto’s Citizenlab, whose research includes human rights developments in Hong Kong.
A few years ago, Choi also suggested replacing the Cantonese mother tongue of Hong Kongers with Mandarin in the education system. After an uproar from the public, the government finally spoke of a misunderstanding. “We ‘misunderstand’ that something happened on June Fourth 1989; we ‘misunderstand’ what is going on in Xinjiang; we ‘misunderstand’ the Communist Party; if we understood them, we would understand their intentions are pure and good,” Tsui, a Hong Kong native, said sarcastically. Choi’s mission as the city’s new Secretary for Education, he said, is to make Hong Kong understand.
The appointment of Sun Dong as the new Secretary for Innovation and Technology also indicates things to come. Sun joined Chinese state media in criticizing the University Grants Commission (UGC). The independent body, composed of experts from around the world, influences the funding of research projects of Hong Kong universities and institutions. Foreign influence on the UGC is a “leftover by the British,” Sun said. The prospects for Hong Kong as a research hub become bleak.
And so the city also faces an uncertain future when it comes to its status as the world’s trading and financial center. A survey in March had shown that many Western companies intend to withdraw their staff, or at least parts of it, from Hong Kong. This is because it is becoming harder to find not only adequate employees who want to live in Hong Kong. Local talent is also becoming increasingly scarce, because tens of thousands of native Hongkongers have left the city following the political purge. Most do not see themselves returning to their homeland any time soon. At least being in exile will spare them the CCP’s triumphant display on July 1.
Hong Kong is dressing up for its big anniversary. This Friday marks the 25th anniversary of the city’s return to China. “A New Era – Stability. Prosperity. Opportunity” is the slogan on posters hanging all over the city, promoting the anniversary. However, the slogan does not reflect what Stefan Schmierer is currently experiencing in the financial metropolis.
For the German business lawyer, Hong Kong is not what it used to be. The city has been through a turbulent time. First the mass protests, then Beijing’s strict crackdown, which imposed a security law on its special administrative region with far-reaching consequences for the democracy movement. But for his clients, Schmierer reports, the Covid pandemic was by far the biggest disaster. “The security law made big waves internationally, but it left the economy here more or less untouched,” Schmierer says. But because of Covid, he says, the city has now been almost “silenced” for two years.
The partner of the Hong Kong-based law firm Ravenscroft & Schmierer has just returned from a trip. So he knows exactly how difficult it has become to get into the Asian metropolis, which topped the ranking of the world’s freest business locations just a few years ago.
Anyone who wants to go to Hong Kong these days first has to hope that the flight will not be canceled on short notice. Airlines that bring too many Covid-infected people into the city are repeatedly punished with flight bans. Then there are the quarantine hotels. Those who test positive face hospitalization. Or Penny’s Bay. The whole city fears the notorious quarantine camp, where people are housed in scant containers. A lengthy quarantine before any business trip? “The message from my clients is clear: This is nonsense and has to go,” says Schmierer.
Clients of the lawyer, who actually came to Hong Kong regularly to visit their subsidiaries in the city or on the Chinese mainland, have drawn their conclusions from all this. “For three years, not a single management member from Germany has been neither here in Hong Kong nor China,” Schmierer says.
It is particularly bitter for his clients that the Chinese Mainland is almost inaccessible to them. Even those who are already in Hong Kong have to go through another quarantine in order to get there. According to Schmierer, the Chinese branches of German companies and partners often take shameless advantage of the lack of control visits.
The lawyer reports on the case of a German company whose subsidiary in China got out of control. The local Chinese CFO had begun to systematically divert money. Even for first-class flights and outrageously expensive restaurants, she suddenly used corporate money. The fraud was discovered only very late, because no manager from Germany was able to keep an eye on things for such a long time. “Relatives are being hired, second businesses are being run, money is being extracted from the company. All in the hope that the people in Germany wouldn’t notice anything,” says Schmierer, listing other problems.
Wolfgang Ehmann, Head of the Chamber of Commerce Abroad, recently also clearly felt the bad mood among his member companies. “The frustration and incomprehension are great given the continuing measures, especially since other locations in the region are successfully proving that things can be done differently,” reports Ehmann. “One thing is clear: Hong Kong is at risk of being permanently left behind under the current restrictions.”
However, neither lawyer Schmierer nor chamber head Ehmann think it is too early to write Hong Kong off completely. “The combination of geographic location, efficient infrastructure, and good business environment cannot be found anywhere else in a comparable constellation, at least for the foreseeable future,” Ehmann believes. But any locational advantages Hong Kong continues to have are moot as long as travel restrictions remain in place. Joern Petring/Gregor Koppenburg
Shrek? No, this “horse” is not the hero of an animated movie. The photo shows a tourist and an employee of a souvenir store of the “Gansu Provincial Museum”. The horse mask is based on a green-bronze horse statue that was excavated in 1960 and is exhibited in the museum in Gansu.
Hong Kong used to be a popular destination for companies, tourists and residents of the People’s Republic who wanted to breathe some air of freedom. Today, ahead of the 25th anniversary of the return of Hong Kong to China, we do not have a lot of good news to report about the situation in the southern Chinese metropolis. This is because the new Chief Executive John Lee also will take office on July 1. Their predecessors were already strictly in line with Beijing. On Top of that, Lee, as a former man of the law, now brings with him the scent of a police state, writes Marcel Grzanna.
In the long term, the dissolution of the rule of law poses a major problem for the local German economy, but in the short term – and in very practical terms – the Covid lockdown weighs more heavily. Our team of correspondents has tracked down cases in which local management has cut itself off loose and company money has disappeared. In such cases, headquarters only realized far too late what was happening. After all, no one was able to check up on the situation on-site for months. So the unease at the Hong Kong location is growing. Not all that long ago, Hong Kong was one of the most business-friendly cities in the world.
Despite all this, the Empire’s withdrawal from Asia remains in itself an anniversary, a day for celebration. The British were colonialists who forcibly seized the territory in southern China and then ruled it undemocratically for 155 years. It is only the contrast that makes the colonial period appear in a good light today. While the British at least upheld a minimum rule of law and freedom of expression, the Hong Kong of today falls short even of these basic standards of civil rights.
A quarter of a century lies between vision and reality. When the 25th anniversary of the return of Hong Kong from Great Britain to the People’s Republic of China is celebrated on Friday, the democratic forces of the metropolis will be faced with the shattered remains of their political goals. Instead of free elections for their head of government and parliament, as once hoped, the approximately 7.5 million citizens will instead look at a pro-Beijing government.
This is exemplified by the presence of China’s President Xi Jinping, who will attend the 25th-anniversary celebrations during a two-day visit. He obviously wants to mark the successful suppression of the democratic opposition in Hong Kong as a personal achievement. For Xi, Hong Kong represents an important trophy for securing additional support within the Communist Party. In the fall, the president wants to finalize his plan for continuing his term as head of state. The fact that he has managed to subdue a society that had been rebellious for years is a valuable argument for lifting his term limits.
Thus, the anniversary on July 1 coincides with the inauguration of former Chief of Police John Lee as the city’s new Chief Executive. The appointment symbolizes the climax of the horror scenarios of all those who still firmly believed in the Chinese promise of “one country, two systems” 25 years ago. The belief that they would be able to maintain a liberal political system and preserve the promised “high degree of autonomy” at the tail end of the authoritarian People’s Republic proved to be an illusion.
Britain’s last governor, Chris Patten, admitted last week that he, too, was wrong. Patten told the news agency AP, “I thought there was a prospect that [China] would keep its word, and I’m sorry that it hasn’t.” The restitution treaty, after 155 years of British rule from the Opium Wars to 1997, had promised the city a “high degree of autonomy” over the following 50 years.
The People’s Republic did not even maintain the guise of adhering to the deal for half of the time. Beijing gradually eroded the autonomy in recent years, constantly accompanied by protests, until ultimately nothing remained that deserved to be called “democratic”.
The new Chief Executive, John Lee, is the preferred candidate of Beijing’s central government. With the help of controversial electoral law reform, the central government has successfully marginalized the will of the people at the polls and crushed political dissent by introducing the National Security Law. The Chinese government wants a rule of security forces for Hong Kong and needs someone who has a grip on these security forces, ex-parliamentarian Ted Hui said in an interview with China.Table. Lee, he said, is an emotionless machine. “He is exactly what Beijing needs.”
Beijing’s new supreme governor defines Hong Kong’s development as a success story that must now be “properly presented” to the world. The 64-year-old criticizes fearmongering and foreign political maneuvers that aim to disparage everything that Hong Kong has achieved. Lee promises progress and stability. The nature of this progress, however, is revealed by the members of the future cabinet.
One example is Secretary for Education Choi Yuk Lin. Back in 2012, Choi wanted to put her mark on education when she sought to “reform” the curriculum in Hong Kong schools. Her bill labeled the Chinese Communist Party as a “united ruling group” that acts selflessly. She envisioned textbooks portraying multi-party systems as the root of chaos and unrest, and the Tiananmen Square massacre as a pivotal event in recent Chinese history to be banished from memory.
“We can expect her to drive an agenda of ‘national education’ that will teach Hong Kong’s youth what it means to ‘develop moral qualities’, to foster ‘national identity’,” commented Lokman Tsui of the University of Toronto’s Citizenlab, whose research includes human rights developments in Hong Kong.
A few years ago, Choi also suggested replacing the Cantonese mother tongue of Hong Kongers with Mandarin in the education system. After an uproar from the public, the government finally spoke of a misunderstanding. “We ‘misunderstand’ that something happened on June Fourth 1989; we ‘misunderstand’ what is going on in Xinjiang; we ‘misunderstand’ the Communist Party; if we understood them, we would understand their intentions are pure and good,” Tsui, a Hong Kong native, said sarcastically. Choi’s mission as the city’s new Secretary for Education, he said, is to make Hong Kong understand.
The appointment of Sun Dong as the new Secretary for Innovation and Technology also indicates things to come. Sun joined Chinese state media in criticizing the University Grants Commission (UGC). The independent body, composed of experts from around the world, influences the funding of research projects of Hong Kong universities and institutions. Foreign influence on the UGC is a “leftover by the British,” Sun said. The prospects for Hong Kong as a research hub become bleak.
And so the city also faces an uncertain future when it comes to its status as the world’s trading and financial center. A survey in March had shown that many Western companies intend to withdraw their staff, or at least parts of it, from Hong Kong. This is because it is becoming harder to find not only adequate employees who want to live in Hong Kong. Local talent is also becoming increasingly scarce, because tens of thousands of native Hongkongers have left the city following the political purge. Most do not see themselves returning to their homeland any time soon. At least being in exile will spare them the CCP’s triumphant display on July 1.
Hong Kong is dressing up for its big anniversary. This Friday marks the 25th anniversary of the city’s return to China. “A New Era – Stability. Prosperity. Opportunity” is the slogan on posters hanging all over the city, promoting the anniversary. However, the slogan does not reflect what Stefan Schmierer is currently experiencing in the financial metropolis.
For the German business lawyer, Hong Kong is not what it used to be. The city has been through a turbulent time. First the mass protests, then Beijing’s strict crackdown, which imposed a security law on its special administrative region with far-reaching consequences for the democracy movement. But for his clients, Schmierer reports, the Covid pandemic was by far the biggest disaster. “The security law made big waves internationally, but it left the economy here more or less untouched,” Schmierer says. But because of Covid, he says, the city has now been almost “silenced” for two years.
The partner of the Hong Kong-based law firm Ravenscroft & Schmierer has just returned from a trip. So he knows exactly how difficult it has become to get into the Asian metropolis, which topped the ranking of the world’s freest business locations just a few years ago.
Anyone who wants to go to Hong Kong these days first has to hope that the flight will not be canceled on short notice. Airlines that bring too many Covid-infected people into the city are repeatedly punished with flight bans. Then there are the quarantine hotels. Those who test positive face hospitalization. Or Penny’s Bay. The whole city fears the notorious quarantine camp, where people are housed in scant containers. A lengthy quarantine before any business trip? “The message from my clients is clear: This is nonsense and has to go,” says Schmierer.
Clients of the lawyer, who actually came to Hong Kong regularly to visit their subsidiaries in the city or on the Chinese mainland, have drawn their conclusions from all this. “For three years, not a single management member from Germany has been neither here in Hong Kong nor China,” Schmierer says.
It is particularly bitter for his clients that the Chinese Mainland is almost inaccessible to them. Even those who are already in Hong Kong have to go through another quarantine in order to get there. According to Schmierer, the Chinese branches of German companies and partners often take shameless advantage of the lack of control visits.
The lawyer reports on the case of a German company whose subsidiary in China got out of control. The local Chinese CFO had begun to systematically divert money. Even for first-class flights and outrageously expensive restaurants, she suddenly used corporate money. The fraud was discovered only very late, because no manager from Germany was able to keep an eye on things for such a long time. “Relatives are being hired, second businesses are being run, money is being extracted from the company. All in the hope that the people in Germany wouldn’t notice anything,” says Schmierer, listing other problems.
Wolfgang Ehmann, Head of the Chamber of Commerce Abroad, recently also clearly felt the bad mood among his member companies. “The frustration and incomprehension are great given the continuing measures, especially since other locations in the region are successfully proving that things can be done differently,” reports Ehmann. “One thing is clear: Hong Kong is at risk of being permanently left behind under the current restrictions.”
However, neither lawyer Schmierer nor chamber head Ehmann think it is too early to write Hong Kong off completely. “The combination of geographic location, efficient infrastructure, and good business environment cannot be found anywhere else in a comparable constellation, at least for the foreseeable future,” Ehmann believes. But any locational advantages Hong Kong continues to have are moot as long as travel restrictions remain in place. Joern Petring/Gregor Koppenburg
Shrek? No, this “horse” is not the hero of an animated movie. The photo shows a tourist and an employee of a souvenir store of the “Gansu Provincial Museum”. The horse mask is based on a green-bronze horse statue that was excavated in 1960 and is exhibited in the museum in Gansu.
