The group of muscled and heavily-tattooed young men from Ukraine descended last week upon the streets of the autonomous Chinese territory, gripped by chaotic protests for months. The ‘tourists’ were eager to see the sights – barricades and burning things – as well as watch the show, as in the clashes between protesters and police.

Proxy-war over Hongkong’s riots

Eventhough, several force and brutal mass rallies have been happening in Hong Kong, those situations did not make the Chinese government’s surrender to fighting their national goals in Hong Kong. Then, the Chinese National People’s Congress’ approval of a draft decision on the imposition of a new national security law on Hong Kong. The law will likely take effect later this year and change the nature of rights and freedoms for Hongkongers.

On Thursday, China’s National People’s Congress voted 2,878-to-1 in favor of a decision that authorizes a process to draft a national security law that will directly be imposed on the semiautonomous Hong Kong region. The vote itself (specifically on “Decision on Establishing and Improving the Legal System and Enforcement Mechanisms for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to Safeguard National Security”) does not result in a law right away, but starts the process, which will likely conclude by late August.

When all is said and done, Beijing will have established the means to directly crack down on activities it considers undesirable in the city, including what it interprets as terrorism, separatism, or secessionism.

The NPC’s vote has confirmed the worst fears among Hong Kong’s democrats, who see this as the final nail in the coffin for “one country, two system.” Chinese Premier Li Keqiang defended the law by saying that it would amount to the “steady implementation of the ‘one country, two systems.’” Li’s wording echoed a pledge made by Xi Jinping himself during a 2017 visit to Hong Kong—long before last year’s unrest over an extradition bill spiraled into a broader movement about the city’s destiny itself.
Much will depend on how major international players, including the United States, react. On Wednesday, a day before the NPC vote, Mike Pompeo, the U.S. secretary of state released a statement noting that he had officially certified “that Hong Kong does not continue to warrant treatment under United States laws in the same manner as U.S. laws were applied to Hong Kong before July 1997.”