It took decades for Hong Kong’s new security legislation to be passed. Here’s what you need to know.

Hong Kong passed national security legislation on Tuesday, giving officials in the Chinese territory more power to curb dissent, 21 years after mass protests forced the government to backtrack on a plan to introduce such laws.

The legislation targets political crimes such as treason and insurrection, with penalties as severe as life imprisonment, and expands the scope of what can be considered criminal behavior. Local officials have said it will plug gaps in a security law the Chinese government imposed on the area in 2020 after months of huge anti-government protests.

The security legislation marks another significant erosion of freedoms in a former British colony once known for its free politics and relative autonomy from China. It also highlights how weak Hong Kong’s once vocal civil society and political opposition have become in the past four years.

Here you can read how Hong Kong got here and what the law says.

Big plans and setbacks

When Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, the financial center’s mini-constitution promised residents freedoms unavailable on the mainland, including a free press and an independent judiciary. But it also called for the eventual adoption of national security laws to replace the colonial laws left behind by the British.

The laws, known collectively as Article 23 for the part of the mini-constitution that makes them mandatory, would have allowed for warrantless searches and the closure of newspapers deemed seditious. After hundreds of thousands of people protested in the streets that summer, some top officials resigned and the territory’s top leader withdrew the legislation, saying it would not be reintroduced until there was greater public support.

That support never got off the ground, and other attempts to undermine Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy also met with fierce resistance.

In 2014, demonstrators demanding that Hong Kong people have a greater say in the election of the country’s top political leader, the CEO, camped for months among high-rise buildings in the city’s downtown. They didn’t get what they demanded, but their efforts sparked an even bigger wave of resistance five years later.

In 2019, mass protests broke out over a bill that would have allowed extraditions to mainland China. They dragged on for months, often turned violent and posed the greatest challenge to the authority of the central government in decades. The unrest ended with the imposition of Beijing’s 2020 national security law and mass arrests of protesters and opposition lawmakers.

The small print

Hong Kong’s new security law, which local lawmakers hastily passed under pressure from their bosses in Beijing, picks up where the central government’s version left off.

It focuses on treason, rebellion, sabotage, espionage, outside interference and theft of state secrets. Hong Kong officials have said it will supplement the 2020 law and protect the city from “foreign forces” – something China’s powerful leader Xi Jinping has also warned about over the years.

The effects of the legislation on daily life and personal safety were not immediately clear at XXXX. The local government has said it would not ban Facebook or other social media platforms.

But it is clear that the legislation will make public criticism of government policy even riskier than it was under the 2020 law.

Takeaways

That the law was passed at all shows how much has changed since public backlash forced the Hong Kong government to back down in 2003. This time there were no major protests, just criticism from foreign diplomats, rights groups and business officials.

The Hong Kong government has done that said the legislation is popular, but the ease with which it was passed is hardly evidence of that. It came after a four-year crackdown on dissent by a largely pro-Beijing legislature.

It has become harder to know what the Hong Kong public thinks, in part because the government has forced independent news outlets to close and limited independent polling.

Days after Beijing’s 2020 security law came into effect, police raided the office of an independent polling agency. It had just released the results of a poll asking whether Hong Kong was “still a free city.”

Sixty-one percent of respondents answered no.

Tiffany May reporting contributed.