Hong Kong is more Chinese, but don’t call it ‘another Chinese city’

“Asia’s World City,” as Hong Kong calls itself, has seen a mass departure of expatriates, mostly from Western countries. Foreign teachers at international schools and university professors have left. Foreign law firms have closed their Hong Kong offices. Some foreign correspondents in the city packed up for other pastures, many to rival city Singapore.

Much of this exodus was spurred by the covid pandemic; Hong Kong’s draconian quarantine rules curtailed overseas flights, canceled school and strictly enforced mask-wearing. Then came Beijing’s national security law, which stifled free speech, leading to the closure of media outlets and forcing scores of civil society groups to shut down. Earlier this year, Hong Kong authorities, newly obsessed with the tinfoil-hat theory of the city being infiltrated and influenced by “foreign forces,” doubled down on repression by passing their own local security law.

Officials profess to be unfazed by the expat departures. In their view, the troublesome foreigners can be easily replaced by patriotic mainland Chinese, who can do the same jobs better. Various new government schemes to attract “global talent” brought in more than 100,000 new arrivals last year — 90 percent of them from mainland China. Mandarin is slowly replacing English as the city’s second language, after Cantonese.

But among the thousands of expats pulling up stakes, one seems to have left local officials particularly peeved: Jonathan Sumption, a British judge who stepped down from Hong Kong’s highest court in June.

It wasn’t Sumption’s leaving that upset local officials so much as his remarks after he landed back in Britain. In an op-ed in the Financial Times and an interview with the BBC, he said Hong Kong is “slowly becoming a totalitarian state,” and the security laws were being used to “crush peaceful political dissent.” The city has become gripped by a “paranoid atmosphere” since pro-democracy protests broke out in 2019, he said, and the rule of law has been “profoundly compromised.”

Hong Kong is one of the rare common law jurisdictions that allows foreign judges on its court. At the time of the handover, a new Court of Final Appeal was established to replace the Privy Council in London as the city’s top court. Allowing seasoned foreign judges to sit on a nonpermanent basis was seen as a sign of international confidence in the city’s legal system.

But the continued presence of the foreign judges has led to criticism from human rights groups and Hong Kong political exiles, who say they are giving credibility to a repressive system. Foreign judges are not allowed to preside over national security cases.

Several foreign judges have resigned or announced their intention to step down. Another British judge, Lawrence Collins, resigned along with Sumption, and a third, Canadian Beverley McLachlin, who is 80, said she will retire when her term ends in late July, leaving seven foreign judges on the court. But only Sumption has offered such unbridled criticism. To many, he was only saying out loud what everyone in Hong Kong already knows.

Sumption’s critiques came just after guilty verdicts were handed down for 14 of the 47 pro-democracy politicians and activists who were arrested in 2021 for taking part in an unofficial primary election — a dire threat to China’s security, according to Beijing and Hong Kong officials. (Most of the others had already pleaded guilty, hoping to get a reduced sentence.) Sumption called that case “a major indication of the lengths to which some judges are prepared to go to ensure that Beijing’s campaign against those who have supported democracy succeeds.”

One sign that his broadside hit home was the government’s 2,800-word response. “There is absolutely no truth that the [Hong Kong] courts are under any political pressure,” the statement read. “Anyone who suggested otherwise … would be utterly wrong, totally baseless, and must be righteously refuted.”

Some people close to the government have begun to question whether foreign judges are needed anymore. Ronny Tong, a pro-China lawyer and government adviser, penned an op-ed asking, “do we still need British judges to shore up our reputation?”

Sumption’s response may have stung also because it echoes criticism recently leveled by prominent American economist Stephen Roach, a former head of Morgan Stanley Asia and longtime Hong Kong booster. “It pains me to admit it, but Hong Kong is now over,” Roach wrote in a February op-ed for the Financial Times. In a June speech to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong, he elaborated: “The Hong Kong economy has effectively been swallowed up by the mainland economy — hook, line and sinker.”

Roach also provoked a government retort, which said (without mentioning his name) that the criticism ignored Hong Kong’s great prospects as part of the vast region in southern China called the “Greater Bay Area.” Roach, once safely back in Connecticut, said the government’s response to his constructive criticism showed “a worrisome sense of denial.”

Hong Kong officials’ words belie their internal contradictions. They dismiss the expat exodus as wholly insignificant. But when outsiders say Hong Kong is becoming just another mainland city, they fire back indignantly — still keenly sensitive to any foreign criticism and eager to defend the city’s status as distinct from China.

They are finding out how difficult it is to tell both stories at once.