Taipei, Taiwan – For decades, Hong Kong has advertised the rule of law as the cornerstone of the city’s success as an international business center.
Today, however, the Hong Kong government often seems unwilling or unable to explain what the law actually is.
Leading up to the June 4 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, Hong Kong officials were repeatedly asked by journalists whether commemorating the event would be a crime under a national security law (NSL) enacted by Beijing that was imposed in the wake of mass protests in 2019.
On each occasion, the officials, including Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee, declined to provide a direct answer.
“Everyone should act in accordance with the law and think about what they are doing so they are ready to face the consequences,” Lee said in response to questions from reporters at a regular news conference last month.
When asked this week to explain why dozens of Hong Kongers had been detained after peacefully celebrating the birthday on Sunday, Lee said only that everyone “must act in accordance with the law” and that the “law is already very clearly laid down “.
For more than two decades after Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty, the June 4 commemorations, including a candlelight vigil in the city’s Victoria Park, served as a marker of the freedoms guaranteed by a settlement known as as “one country, two systems”.
But since the NSL was passed in 2020, commemorations of the crackdown, which saw the People’s Liberation Army violently end months of student-led protests, have fallen silent.
After tightening Covid-19 restrictions to ban the annual vigil in 2020 and 2021, authorities this year approved the use of the park for a pro-Beijing carnival and deployed about 6,000 police officers across the city to prevent unauthorized avoid meetings.
Authorities arrested 24 Hong Kongers on Sunday for “violation of public peace”, including people apparently targeted for holding a candle or bouquet of flowers, and seized a car with the registration number “US8964”, the date of the Tiananmen performance.
The Hong Kong government’s reticence over the legal status of the June 4 commemorations reflects an overall atmosphere of legal uncertainty that has descended on the territory under the NSL, which has seen the vaguely defined crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and conspiracy with foreign forces established.
Eric Lai, a non-resident fellow at the Georgetown Center for Asian Law, said Hong Kong officials’ refusal to clarify the law was deliberate.
“The more ambiguous the red lines, the more efficiently the authorities can control society, or use the government’s terms to regulate ‘soft resistance,'” Lai told Al Jazeera.
“The examples can be found on the day of June 4, when authorities used preventive detention to prevent individuals from taking part in public actions, without any legal basis.”
The legal ambiguity has raised concerns among Hong Kong’s foreign business community, who have long pointed to the British-inherited legal system as a key consideration in choosing the city as a business base over other Asian metropolises.
In a survey conducted earlier this year by the US Chamber of Commerce, 35 percent of participants said they felt the rule of law in Hong Kong had “worsened” and 19 percent said they thought it had “deteriorated a lot.” Another 40 percent said they had been influenced by the NSL, mainly through the departure of Hong Kong staff or decisions about Hong Kong as a future headquarters.
About 19 percent of respondents said they have high confidence in the rule of law, and 44 percent said moderate confidence. However, another 27 percent said they had no confidence or “had no confidence at all”.
Lai said business confidence in Hong Kong could decline further if the former British colony loses the features that set it apart from mainland China, where legal processes are opaque and subservient to the ruling communist party.
“This [feeling] would worsen when the government continues to arbitrarily use laws and courts to achieve political goals, and when the courts have fewer options to impose restrictions on government action that would ultimately affect business activities in Hong Kong,” Lai said.
Hong Kong’s legal community is becoming increasingly uneasy, with the political environment affecting future career decisions by lawyers, even those specializing in non-political commercial and corporate law, said Kevin Yam, a former Hong Kong lawyer and activist who now based in Australia.
“It has a downstream impact, although the [judges] who hear the commercial cases are not the same who hear NSL or deal with cases,” Yam told Al Jazeera.
“It is not as simplistic as saying that the NSL is here, which is why business confidence has fallen. The impact is about two steps away, but in some ways the impact is even more insidious and under the radar.”
Similarly, the legal atmosphere in Hong Kong can affect long-term decisions by companies, such as extending a long-term commercial lease or replacing departing employees with new hires, Yam said.
Regional headquarters for foreign companies in Hong Kong fell from 1,541 in 2019 to 1,411 in 2022, according to the Statistics Census Department, though part of that decline can also be attributed to the city’s since-abandoned pandemic border controls, which lasted much longer than elsewhere .
Nearly 60,000 staff were lost during the same period, while a record 13 million square feet of office space is currently vacant across the city, including some of the poshest spaces typically reserved for multinational corporations.
“This stuff that’s going on behind the scenes is dripping, dripping, slowly dripping, eating away, and it’s fueling a vicious cycle,” Yam said.
Charles Mok, a former Hong Kong legislator who represented the IT sector, said some companies may stay in Hong Kong but approach doing business more like mainland China, which has traditionally had a much more volatile business environment.
“At the moment, many foreign companies are clearly evaluating the risks in Hong Kong and China, hence the talk of risk mitigation and so on. But it is also true that many companies hang on to a profitable market until they can’t anymore,” Mok told Al Jazeera.
“The lack of clarity hurts businesses in Hong Kong, but ultimately the thought may be, if these foreign companies can live with such operating conditions in China, why can’t they do the same in Hong Kong?
“You might think this is a demotion, but the Hong Kong authorities may think this puts Hong Kong on par with the emerging mother country.”