Opinion

As Hong Kong is stripped of its autonomy and special status, how will the next chapter play out?

While the international community cannot shape the ultimate outcome, it can still create an atmosphere that leads Beijing to take a more cautious approach in implementing the national security law

Hongkongers should continue making the economic case for the city’s freedoms with the aim of ensuring a smooth transition rather than a tragedy

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Scott Kennedy is Senior Adviser, Freeman Chair in China Studies and director of the Project on Chinese Business and Political Economy at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

Published: 1:00am, 30 May 2020Updated: 4:26am, 30 May 2020

In May 2012, as the contest for power among China’s top political elite was heating up to see who would succeed president Hu Jintao, I went looking for insight in one of Beijing’s best bookstores, All Sage Books, which sits just outside the campus of Tsinghua University.

But I found nothing of the sort. Its top 10 titles that week were from the poetry, history and calligraphy sections. The Chinese politics section was limited to the selected works of top leaders, texts of recent laws, formal descriptions of China’s government institutions, and whitewashed histories of the Communist Party. Even a politics junkie like me could not get excited with such empty propaganda.

By good luck, the same week I took a trip down to Hong Kong, and upon arrival, made my way to Cosmos Books on Johnston Road. Heaven! Right in the middle of the store were stacks of detailed accounts of the public and private lives of Xi Jinping, his nemesis Bo Xilai, Bo’s wife Gu Kailai, and many others. Sure, they mixed facts with unsubstantiated rumours, but their authors had little to go on, given the system’s opacity.

This is my personal metric of whether “one country, two systems” is fully functioning. The website of Cosmos still carries titles on the 1989 protests, Xi and Communist Party history. You can even find a translation of Peter Navarro and Greg Autry’s Death by China, far from my favourite, but nevertheless a reassuring sign.