Crackdown

Hong Kong Faces Tiananmen 2.0

Bibliographic Data

ID6288159
AuthorsVictoria Tin-Bor Hui (0000-0001-6497-6449, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume31
Issue4
Pages122-137
Publication date2020-01-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of democracy (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1045-5736 • E-ISSN: 1086-3214
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/jod.2020.0060
OpenAlexW3091770142
LanguageEN
Citations received14

Hong Kong, a place where liberty once bloomed, has now been crushed by the People's Republic of China (PRC). On 30 June 2020, the PRC imposed a draconian national-security law on the city, seeking to "prevent, stop, and punish" a string of vaguely defined crimes of "secession," "subversion," "terrorism," and "collusion with foreign forces." The crackdown is the latest response by the Chinese Communist party-state to the campaign in defense of freedom and democracy that Hong Kong's citizens have been waging for decades. The "one country, two systems" constitutional structure that Hong Kong was given at the time of the 1997 handover from Britain was troubled from birth. The radicalization of the 2019 protests against the PRC's extradition law gave Beijing the perfect excuse to impose its own preferred answer—which might be called "Tiananmen-lite"—to the long-running problem that Hong Kong posed as a thorn of liberty embedded in the side of the PRC's one-party dictatorship

Beijing · China · Communism · Democracy · Dictatorship · Excuse · Extortion · Political science · Sedition · Subversion · Terrorism · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Law

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