We have just heard two wonderful reports. Let me try to supplement what has been said.
I don't know what the three witnesses told you in the first session this morning, but it would seem to me that you've probably heard five first-class statements already.
I want to point out that, of the three witnesses this afternoon, I represent organizations that have not yet been punished by the national security law, but I suppose we have good prospects.
In the past, I've been happy to co-operate with Freedom House and with the new Hong Kong Democracy Council. Perhaps I can rely, as Samuel's father has, on old age as a defence against actual imprisonment, but I can't guarantee anything about conviction.
Let me give some perspective. I first went to Hong Kong in 1961. I lived there in 1962 and 1963. I've been a frequent visitor. I lived there again at the beginning of 1979. I've seen Hong Kong's connection to China develop over many years. Initially, in the sixties, in the early part of the decade, Hong Kong was a classic British colony. To be sure, it was controlled by the colonial authorities, including the special branch of the police, and there were no conventional democratic freedoms. People couldn't elect their own government.
But Hong Kong, despite its severe social and economic problems of the era—which were largely the product of events in China, including the starvation of tens of millions of people in China at the end of the fifties, as a result of the failure of the Great Leap Forward and the political repression that began again in 1957 and 1958 in the so-called “anti-rightist” movement—received many people at its doors. In April and May of 1962, 60,000 people crossed the border from Guangdong province to Hong Kong before the British finally had to close it, because there would have been hundreds of thousands of people waiting on the other side.
Hong Kong had enormous problems then, but it was, essentially, a free society. Indeed, I could say what I wanted. The Brits thought my study of China from a base in Hong Kong suggested that maybe I was a CIA agent or something else, but they were very discreet. Nobody ever tried to stop me from setting up a research institute there. I could say what I wanted, and other people could say what they wanted. So Hong Kong, while not a bastion of liberal democracy, still was a liberal society with many troubles at that point.
Of course, as a result of the Cultural Revolution in China in the late sixties, Hong Kong went through a terrible period of turmoil. The police had to be very active, and by and large, they had popular support. That's a very important thing to understand—the police had popular support.
When I went back to live in Hong Kong at the beginning of 1979, it was a different place. Deng Xiaoping had brought China to a different place. He had presented hope to the people of China and Hong Kong. As a result, the eighties were a dynamic, optimistic, increasingly prosperous time in Hong Kong. You had 1984 marking the joint declaration between the U.K. and China for Hong Kong's future handover in 1997.
However, everything changed, as Samuel's remarks remind us, with the horrific slaughter near Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, and other suppression throughout China. That made it more important to try to adapt the Basic Law that was to come out the next year. Too, new fear was marking Hong Kong's population, and only limited impact was made on the new law. But when Chris Patten became the last governor of Hong Kong's colonial rule, he spent five years trying to prepare Hong Kong by guaranteeing people greater political freedoms and protection of human rights, all over the opposition of the pro-Beijing forces in Hong Kong and of the People's Republic government in Beijing. That's why he was denounced in such terrible terms by the Beijing government.
Since the handover in 1997, we have seen a progressive narrowing of freedoms in Hong Kong and increasing control of the Hong Kong government as the instrument, you might say, of the People's Republic in Beijing rather than the representative of the people of Hong Kong. That culminated last year in the enormous popular protest by a couple of million people, at one point, against the attempt to provide for extradition, rendition, from Hong Kong to China of people wanted by the central government for trial.
It's remarkable that although the People's Republic has managed to make, I think, over 40 extradition agreements with other countries, none of the Anglo-American common-law countries has ever ratified an extradition agreement with China. Australia came close. The fact is that Hong Kong has never had a similar agreement with its own central government, because the people of Hong Kong have long known that there is only political justice in the mainland under the Communist regime. That's what they fear. That's what they fought back. Now the new national security law, as you know, has brought extradition to Hong Kong. Indeed, it's brought a whole administration of criminal justice from the mainland to Hong Kong. You don't have to be extradited now to be under the control of the security police of the mainland government. They've come to Hong Kong. That's the principal accomplishment of the national security law.
You ought to know that Hong Kong has had national security laws inherited from the British colonial period, and hasn't hesitated to invoke them. It's nonsense to say that everyone else has a national security law, so why shouldn't we? Of course national security laws have different content. The content of this one is to install a repressive regime. The central government's security authorities will decide whether they want to transport Jimmy Lai, and even Samuel Chu, if they can get their hands on him, and not only try them in Hong Kong but also transfer them to the mainland for long incommunicado detention, potential torture, denial of access to counsel, inability to meet with family or friends and then a trial before a Communist-dominated court.
If you're tried in Hong Kong, the vaunted independent legal system in Hong Kong has been truncated by the new law. National security offences will be tried before special judges and without a jury. If you think you can challenge it by saying you've misinterpreted the law, that it's too broad, or that you don't understand that it's unconstitutional, given Hong Kong's constitutional background and heritage, that question will [Technical difficulty—Editor] Hong Kong, even the court will find on appeal. That question will be decided by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress.
So Hong Kong is a very different place from what it was in 1997 and what it was when I first got there in 1961.