Hong Kong’s Bureaucrats Don’t Make Good Authoritarians

In late July, the Hong Kong judiciary quashed the city’s attempt to ban “Glory to Hong Kong,” a pro-democracy anthem that rose to popularity during the 2019 protests in the territory. In his ruling, High Court Judge Anthony Chan dismissed concerns that the ban would violate freedom of speech or stifle dissent. Instead, Chan threw out the authorities’ injunction because it was vague, ill-defined, and unenforceable. “The evidence contains little in terms of specificities on how the Injunction would … reduce the prevalence of the Song,” he wrote. “In truth, the answer to much of [the government’s] contentions rests in effective enforcement … I am unable to see how the Injunction would assist.”

It’s not often that a legal opinion takes on an authoritarian government for not being good at authoritarianism, but that’s what Chan’s ruling amounts to. As it turns out, in the Hong Kong of 2023—a city lurching into oppression while clinging onto the remnants of the rule of law—Beijing’s enforcers often aren’t all that good at their jobs.

In the aftermath of pro-democracy protests in 2019 and 2020, the Chinese Communist Party passed a draconian national security law that all but quashed dissent in the previously autonomous city. Since then, Beijing has leaned heavily on a team of hand-picked local officials to maintain an increasingly repressive status quo.

Indeed, in Hong Kong’s bewildering new political reality, strategic missteps now pass for official policy. Take the proposal to ban “Glory to Hong Kong.” Even before the judiciary’s intervention, the government’s misguided efforts had already brought more, not less, attention to the anthem. In a classic example of the Streisand effect, as soon as plans to restrict “Glory to Hong Kong” were announced, the song soared to the top of the city’s iTunes charts.

Other attempts at censorship have gone wildly overboard. In May, the Leisure and Cultural Services Department ordered a crackdown on politically sensitive books with the potential to offend Beijing. Scrambling to comply, workers pulled titles such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm—both of which are widely available in mainland China—off library and school bookshelves. Even more inexplicable was the removal of works by Lu Xun, an early 20th-century writer lauded as a revolutionary hero and taught in the Chinese school system. “Lu Xun’s books were not censored even during the height of the Cultural Revolution, but they are censored in today’s Hong Kong,” a local editorial opined. “We’ve become a laughingstock.”

Then, in early July, Hong Kong sparked international outrage when officials placed bounties on the heads of overseas dissidents living in the United States, Britain, and Australia. The plan, which authorities acknowledged was a largely empty threat, quickly backfired: Instead of stifling opposition, the bounties emboldened the dissidents, who landed high-profile media appearances and brought renewed attention to Hong Kong’s authoritarian plight. The decision also upturned officials’ attempts to reassure Western businesses that the city was open for business as usual. “It’s confusing why you would do something like the bounties that create a news story about repression when it was kind of going away,” said Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian who studies modern China.

More of these ill-conceived measures are coming down the pipeline. The government announced in March that it plans to pass an amendment prohibiting discrimination against mainland Chinese visitors by the end of the year. How exactly authorities intend to monitor and prosecute discrimination between people of the same ethnicity and nationality remains uncertain.

To be clear, the Hong Kong government’s tendency to get in its own way is not for a lack of loyalty. Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee, whom Beijing hand-picked through a sham election, has pledged that Chinese President Xi Jinping’s directives have become Hong Kong’s “blueprint for governance” adding that authorities are “fully committed to live up to the mandate.” Over in the local legislature—which Beijing stripped of all pro-democracy parties in 2021—lawmakers frequently and enthusiastically invoke Xi by name.

Instead, the issue is that Hong Kong leaders have very little experience working closely with the mainland Chinese political system—and as a result, have very little idea how to implement Beijing’s directives.

Under Xi’s rule, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has adopted an increasingly centralized, top-down governance approach in which senior officials issue directives to their subordinates, who are then expected to obey without question. Given that the directives can sometimes be notoriously vague—Xi has been known to issue one-sentence notes on major policy matters—subordinates have to scramble to correctly interpret directives from above.

In the mainland, this system (more or less) functions because Chinese officials spend years rising  through the ranks of municipal- and provincial-level governments, learning how to interpret the will of their superiors. At the upper echelons, leaders are promoted according to their personal ties to Xi, further ensuring that his directives are correctly understood. Plus, when it comes to regional leadership, Xi has a track record of choosing former scientific administrators—relatively technocratic officials with a proven ability to follow directions—to run prominent cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Chongqing.

Not so for Hong Kong. Despite his loyalty to Beijing, Lee is a consummate outsider and Hong Kong native who has never been a member of the CCP, let alone worked his way through party ranks. As a Cantonese speaker and practicing Catholic who spent 20 years working under the British colonial government, Lee is highly unlikely to share any kind of connection with Xi, nor does he have the kind of tightly built mainland networks that his CCP counterparts enjoy.

Lee is not even seen as a skilled politician or a competent technocrat. The chief executive spent four decades as a blue-collar, career police officer before being passed over for the department’s top job in 2011. The combination of these factors means that Lee and his colleagues are constantly overcompensating—although they have pushed hard-line policies aimed at building their credit with Beijing, their decisions have largely ended up backfiring.

Of course, the mainland government faces its own host of issues. Even without the involvement of faulty officials, Xi’s centralization of power has already led to a spate of unwanted consequences; the recent economic slowdown threatening China’s long-term growth is largely a product of Xi’s unwillingness to listen to his own policymakers and enact pragmatic reforms.

But it turns out that faulty officials are also pervasive throughout the mainland. Although Hong Kong’s dysfunction tends to attract more attention due to the city’s status as an international finance hub, the problem posed by loyal but incompetent officials is widespread in China. The disconnect between Beijing and regional authorities was especially prominent during China’s zero-COVID period, when local governments often imposed implausibly strict quarantine controls to demonstrate adherence to Beijing’s policies. (A small city in the western Yunnan province, for example, paid billions of yuan to set up a facial recognition camera system that tracked the precise movements of all 270,000 residents.) By mid-2022, even the central government was forced to admit some local officials had been too overzealous in setting zero-COVID policies and fired administrators involved in particularly egregious cases.

Unlike in the mainland, however, Beijing has no easy way to make large-scale course corrections in Hong Kong without attracting undue attention and looking weak. For now, the central government has little choice other than to stand behind Hong Kong and present a united front.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s judiciary, which has to rule on these decisions, is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. The city’s courts, which maintain a common law system inherited from the British, ostensibly operate independent of both the Hong Kong government and the mainland; Hong Kong judges are acutely aware that international businesses rely on their courts to enforce the rule of law. Yet judges are also acutely aware that they must correctly interpret Beijing’s will—or risk being overruled by the CCP’s decidedly noncommon law system. Going forward, figures such as Chan, the judge in the “Glory to Hong Kong” case, will have the unenviable task of choosing between obeying Beijing or sustaining Hong Kong’s patchwork rule of law.

Beijing’s tolerance for Hong Kong’s flailing leadership could eventually change. Carrie Lam, Lee’s predecessor as chief executive, assumed that passing a contentious extradition bill on her own initiative would prove her loyalty to Beijing. Instead, the bill kicked off the 2019 pro-democracy protests and plunged Hong Kong into chaos. As punishment, Lam was forced to retire at the expiration of her first term and was denied a position on China’s central political advisory body, an honor awarded to all but one previous Hong Kong chief executive.

Lam’s successor hasn’t sparked widespread protests, but Lee’s policies—as overzealous, haphazard, and erratic as they already are—still threaten to draw the mainland’s ire. It’s impossible to predict under what circumstances Lee will exit his office, but the issues at play here aren’t endemic to Hong Kong’s current batch of officials.

Beijing may have wrested control of Hong Kong, but as long as the central government relies on local leaders to oversee even the most innocuous of policies, missteps and tensions will inevitably arise—which, in a place such as Hong Kong, can still prove to be deadly.