Overnight, dozens of influential figures in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement were sentenced to lengthy terms under the fiercest application of the city’s National Security Law so far. That these former legislators, activists, and legal academics have only been sentenced three years after their detention is typical of how the Chinese Communist party operates in Hong Kong, described by one academic to me as ‘death by a thousand cuts’. China hopes that, with incremental moves over time, its yoking of the city will be met with minimal international backlash. That calculation looks to have been proven right.
The activists were accused of being involved in an unauthorised democratic primary in 2020, through which they planned to pack the city’s legislature and eventually force the-then chief executive, Carrie Lam, to resign. The elections that year had been postponed – ostensibly due to the pandemic – but a group of democratic parties got together and ran their own primary.