The Telegraph: 'Twenty-six years since the Hong Kong handover, China has ripped up its promises', Benedict Rogers

If there is one lesson from the city's suffering, it is that China cannot be trusted on any commitments it makes to the West

Twenty-six years ago today, Hong Kong was handed over to China on a promise.

Beijing made the commitment, under an international treaty, to protect Hong Kong’s freedoms, the rule of law, human rights, way of life and autonomy for at least fifty years. Over the past decade, and especially in the past few years, Beijing has completely broken its promises, torn up the treaty and dismantled Hong Kong’s freedoms. It has turned Hong Kong from one of Asia’s most open cities into one of its most repressive police states.

The erosion of Hong Kong’s freedoms began a decade or more ago, but Beijing dealt a hammer-blow to whatever was left of liberty when it imposed a draconian National Security Law on the city, with no debate, no discussion and precious little warning. 

In the three years since this law was introduced, all of Hong Kong’s major independent media has been forced to shut down, over 60 civil society organisations – including political parties, trade unions, student unions and human rights groups – have disbanded, books have been banned and the legislature has been transformed from a vibrant centre of debate into a zombie quisling puppet show. 

According to legal scholar Johannes Chan, by late May this year, 251 people had been arrested for national security offences. Someone was arrested every 4.2 days. They include legislators, journalists, students, academics and political activists. Nearly four in five of those charged are denied bail, and some have spent over two years in jail awaiting trial. The conviction rate is 100%.

This has chilling echoes of the legal system in mainland China. This week I hosted two remarkably courageous men who served several years in jail in China. Both are foreign nationals. Peter Humphrey, a British citizen, is a former Reuters journalist and due diligence investigator with almost half a century of experience in China, while Marius Balo is a Romanian theologian. Peter and his wife spent two years in jail in Shanghai, and Marius served eight years, for crimes they did not commit. 

On Monday they testified in Parliament to the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission, and Peter made the point that in China “police, prosecutors and judges are all part of the same family – the Communist Party”. The police do not conduct investigations with any detective or forensic procedures.

“They rely on extracting confessions from detainees while being interrogated day by day locked inside a cage,” Peter told our hearing. In addition, witness statements are coerced, prosecution witnesses are not cross-examined – or even required to appear in court – and, in Peter’s words, “no contradictory evidence is allowed”. Forced televised confessions are often used, and no defence witnesses are called to court. No wonder the Chinese system achieves an almost 100% success rate in convictions.

This is the legal system into which Hong Kong has morphed. A city that until recently prided itself on the rule of law is becoming part of the Chinese Communist Party’s family. That is why the authorities have denied Hong Kong media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai the right to choose his own lawyer, and blocked British barrister Tim Owen, KC from representing him, despite rulings by the Court of Final Appeal that Mr Owen should be permitted to act for Mr Lai.

There are three sobering lessons in all of this.

First, the mendacious regime in Beijing simply cannot be trusted to keep its word. Its promises in any treaty are not worth the paper they are written on.

Second, there are huge risks to doing business in China. Not only financial risks, but physical, moral and ethical risks. If you try to do due diligence, especially now with a new espionage law that takes effect today and that interprets corporate due diligence investigations as spying, you could end up in jail for a long time. Peter Humphrey’s case is a trail blazer – the recent crackdown on Mintz, Bain and other corporate investigators signals worse to come. Yet if you cannot do due diligence, you are highly likely to be unwittingly using forced labour or prison labour in your supply chains, and turning a blind eye to corruption. 

Third, China only respects strength. If we continue the policy of the past few decades, of kowtowing, naively thinking that trying to befriend the dictators in Beijing will soften their hearts, we will only embolden Beijing’s increasing repression against its own peoples and aggression beyond its borders. 

We have to show strength. That means speaking out for our citizens when they are jailed, defending international agreements when they are violated, promoting our values when they are attacked and ensuring there are consequences for Beijing’s crimes.

Rumours abound that Foreign Secretary James Cleverly may visit Beijing soon. I have reservations about this, but for me, the more important debate about such a visit is not whether or not it should happen, but what are the conditions and objectives of it. If he uses the visit to deliver very clear, robust demands seeking the release of British citizens in jail in China – including Mr Lai in Hong Kong – and spells out what the consequences will be if the current trajectory of repression, aggression, slave labour and atrocity crimes continues, then I have an open mind. If he sacrifices human rights as he kowtows at the altar of Xi Jinping, then he will have betrayed Britain.

As we mark the anniversaries of the handover of Hong Kong and the imposition of the security law, let us reflect on our relationship with the regime in Beijing with a sober and informed mind. Can we trust them? On the basis of the evidence, the answer is no. And so we must stand up to them. Failure to do so will not only be a betrayal of our values – it will be an invitation to them to further assault, infiltrate, intimidate, influence and threaten us. That’s not an invitation I think we should give on this anniversary, as we survey the carnage of broken promises.

This article was published in The Telegraph on 1 July 2023. (Photo: The Telegraph)