When Hong Kong was handed over from Britain to China with great fanfare on 1 July 1997, there was a cloud which hung over the process. The shadow of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre loomed large, casting doubt on whether the promises that Beijing had made in international law could be trusted.
23 years later, and Beijing has chosen 1 July to enact a constitutional coup. The handover anniversary has been chosen to theatrically signal that this is a kind of second handover, as one-country, two-systems becomes ‘one-country, one-system.’
The move is drenched in symbolism. The Chinese Communist Party considers the illusion of Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy to be so irrelevant that the city’s puppet leader, Carrie Lam, had still not seen the law hours after it had been passed. Gone are the days where the CCP’s mantra was ‘hide your strength, bide your time, never take the lead’. This is public muscle flexing.
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