How Should Democracies Respond to China’s New National Security Law for Hong Kong?

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Bernhard Bartsch, Yu-Jie Chen & more on June 30, 2020

July 1 will mark 23 years since Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty. Each of those years—and many that preceded them—has seen its share of disquiet over the future of the territory’s way of life and about the resilience of “one country, two systems,” Beijing’s shorthand for its professed acquiescence to keeping its hands off Hong Kong’s democratic political institutions. But never has the sense of alarm, both within Hong Kong and internationally, been more acute than on this year’s anniversary. Today, Xi Jinping signed a new sweeping national security law for Hong Kong, drafted and voted on in secrecy by China’s National People’s Congress, circumventing Hong Kong’s own legislative process. While the text of the law calls for the respect and protection of human rights, as well as protecting Hong Kong’s regulations related to “freedom of speech, media, publishing, assembly and protest,” it is widely feared that its prohibitions on secession and subversion—punishable by life in prison—and collusion with “outside forces” could be broadly interpreted, as they are in the mainland, in a manner that would effectively criminalize the exercise of Hong Kong’s political and civil liberties.

Bernhard Bartsch

on June 29, 2020

Bernhard Bartsch is a Senior Expert in the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s program “Germany and Asia.” Before joining the foundation, he spent more than a decade in China, working as East Asia Correspondent for major German media.

Bartsch has lived half of his life in Asia. As a teenager, he spent six years in Hong Kong. He went on to study Chinese, Economics, Politics, and Journalism at the University of Hamburg. In 1999, he enrolled in the Beijing Film Academy on a scholarship provided by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). In 2004, he completed a Master of Science in Public Policy and Management at the University of London.

Bartsch’s career as a journalist began in 2000 in the Beijing office of the German business weekly WirtschaftsWoche. Between 2003 and 2013, he worked as a correspondent for several German-language media, including the daily newspapers Neue Zuercher Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau, and Berliner Zeitung, as well as magazines including Internationale Politik, Cicero, and the monthly business journal brand eins. He reported on political, social, economic, and cultural issues in China, Japan, and South and North Korea.

In 2013, he joined the Bertelsmann Stiftung’s Asia team, where he continues to address the political, economic, and social developments in Asia and their impact on Germany and Europe.

Lindsay Gorman

on June 16, 2020

Lindsay Gorman is the Emerging Technology Fellow at the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy and is a consultant for Schmidt Futures. A physicist and computer scientist by training, she previously ran a technology consulting firm, Politech Advisory, advising start-ups and venture capital, and she has worked with cybersecurity companies in Silicon Valley. Her commentary and analysis has appeared in outlets including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg, Foreign Policy, and Lawfare. As an expert in technology and national security policy, including artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, she has been interviewed on TV and radio by CBS News, NPR, Bloomberg, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and CBC Radio. Her research focuses on understanding and crafting a transatlantic response to China’s techno-authoritarian rise, from 5G and the future Internet to information manipulation and censorship. Gorman regularly briefs senior leaders across the Atlantic on these topics and on building a democratic approach to emerging technologies. She is also a member of the Truman National Security Project and an awardee of the U.S. State Department Speaker Program.

Gorman has spent over a decade at the intersection of technology development and national security policy, including in the Office of U.S. Senator Mark Warner, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the National Academy of Sciences. In the latter post, she supported the Committee on International Security and Arms Control in track II nuclear and cyber security dialogues with Chinese and Russian experts. She was also an adjunct fellow in the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Technology Policy Program. Her technical expertise lies in artificial intelligence, statistical machine learning, and quantum materials. She has published a Nature Physics paper on topological insulators and programmed computer vision AI systems for a self-driving car in the DARPA Urban Challenge.

Gorman holds an A.B. in Physics from Princeton University, where she graduated magna cum laude, and a M.S. in Applied Physics from Stanford University.

Hong Kong’s Forthcoming Security Law and Its Potential Effect on International Non-Profits

on June 16, 2020

Is Hong Kong about to get its own Foreign NGO Law in the name of ‘national security’? In our Analysis section, Thomas Kellogg and Alison Sile Chen ask how a planned national security law, as announced by the National People’s Congress in Beijing on May 28, might affect the international non-profit sector in Hong Kong. Though any provisions related to foreign NGOs would probably look different than they do in the rest of mainland China, they could still sever funding relationships between local and international NGOs, or limit the type of work groups can carry out in Hong Kong.

China’s Zoom Bomb

A ChinaFile Conversation

By Wang Dan, Donald Clarke & more on June 16, 2020

In the lead-up to the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations this spring, Zoom, the U.S.-based company whose online meeting platform has rocketed to global prominence amid the COVID-19 pandemic, received requests from China’s government to help it suppress commemoration of the June 4, 1989 massacre. Zoom acceded to this request, blocking Zoom accounts affiliated with two prominent Tiananmen activists—Wang Dan and Zhou Fengsuo—both of whom live in exile in the United States, as well as a Hong Kong-based account used by Lee Cheuk-Yan, a former Hong Kong legislator and longtime labor activist who was a key progenitor of the territory’s annual Tiananmen vigil. After Axios broke the news of the shuttering of Zhou’s and Lee’s accounts last week, Zoom issued a public statement explaining that, in order to ensure “compliance with local laws,” it had also shut down three memorial meetings on its platform, after “Chinese authorities demanded we take action,” as Zoom put it, because the meetings were being attended by Zoom users in mainland China.

Jeffrey Knockel

on June 15, 2020

Jeffrey Knockel is a Research Associate at The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. In his research, he seeks to bring transparency to Internet censorship and surveillance.

Jeffrey Ding

on June 15, 2020

Jeffrey Ding is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford University Center for International Security and Cooperation, sponsored by Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. His research has been published in European Journal of International Security, Foreign Affairs, Review of International Political Economy, and Security Studies, and his work has been cited in The Washington Post, The Financial Times, and other outlets. He also writes a weekly “ChinAI” newsletter, which features translations of Chinese conversations about AI development, to 14,000+ subscribers including the field’s leading policymakers, scholars, and journalists. Ding holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes scholar.

Is Hong Kong about to Get Its Own Foreign NGO Law in the Name of ‘National Security’?

By Thomas Kellogg & Alison Sile Chen on June 13, 2020

On May 28, China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) issued a much-anticipated Decision on preservation of national security in Hong Kong. The key paragraph in the short document authorized the NPC’s Standing Committee to “draft laws related to . . .

Alison Sile Chen

on June 12, 2020

Alison Sile Chen is a Ph.D. student in the Political Science department at the University of California, San Diego, studying authoritarian surveillance. Before coming to the U.S. to pursue an academic career, Chen was a journalist and columnist focusing on social movements and political repression in China. Most of her work is published under the pen name Zhao Sile (赵思乐). She is the winner of two Society of Asian Publishers Awards, the highest honor for covering Asia. Chen also received the Hong Kong Human Rights Press Award six times between 2011 and 2017.

Chen’s first book, Her Battles, was selected as one of the Ten Best Chinese Books in 2017 by Yazhou Zhoukan (Asia Weekly). She was a Fellow at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy from 2017 to 2018, where she conducted research on the effect of China’s political restriction on Taiwanese civil society. She has served as an advisor for many organizations within the community of Chinese youth activists. Chen now studies comparative politics and social movements concerning China.