Five years of 'no drama' politics: Has Hong Kong made it count?

The national security law has given the city's leaders unprecedented power, but they haven't used it to make bold reforms to raise revenues or improve education.

- Bhavan Jaipragas

Conspicuously missing from most discussions about Hong Kong's national security crackdown is an awkward truth: The democratic campaigners it swept up were hardly saints.

To say such things these days is perhaps heretical in progressive circles, especially in the West, where the protests and political crisis that led to Beijing's 2020 security law — imposed on June 30 that year — were cast in simplistic good-versus-evil terms, with the so-called "pan-democrats" as heroes and the central government and its Hong Kong surrogates as villains.

The reality during Hong Kong's earlier, freewheeling era was messier. For all the welcome progressivism the democratic camp brought to a system otherwise dominated by the conservative pro-Beijing establishment, there were also arch-obstructionists among its ranks who frequently proved self-serving and destructive to the city's cause.

One notorious example comes to mind from 2015, when filibustering against a copyright Bill included quorum calls almost every 10 minutes, turning the legislature into farce and alienating even moderate pan-democracy supporters.

The point of revisiting this history is not to kick the pan-democrats while they are down — many are now serving lengthy jail terms — but to underline the windfall Hong Kong's present-day leaders have inherited as the national security law marks this fifth-year milestone.

With the obstructionists gone, Chief Executive John Lee and his Cabinet enjoy a legislative blank cheque their predecessors could only dream of. The transformation has been total. Five years of rolling crackdowns, a second security law in 2024, and electoral overhauls have virtually eliminated the pan-democracy camp.