Silence would have been unthinkable a year or even a month ago. The Asian financial capital is separated from the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen by a river winding. But in early March, a makeshift bridge was erected connecting the two cities. Satellite imagery shows the foundations of the building being laid days before the Hong Kong government announced the project. Since its inception, the two-lane crossing in Hong Kong’s northernmost district has become a natural manifestation of the shrinking space between Beijing and the semi-autonomous region, and this gap has closed faster than ever during the pandemic.
The growing presence of Beijing
A former British colony, Hong Kong returned to China in 1997 as part of a “one country, two systems” agreement negotiated with Britain. The framework allowed the city to retain the rights and freedoms that are not granted across borders for 50 years, allowing it to emerge as a global free wheel hub in the heart of Asia. However, Beijing has been trying to bring the territory under its wing ever since. A tour program introduced in 2003 has made it easier for mainland Chinese travelers to come to Hong Kong. In 2012, with the support of Beijing, Hong Kong proposed a patriotic education program, which sparked protests across the city. Then in 2020, the National Security Act, a response to large-scale demonstrations that erupted in 2019, was passed by Beijing’s supreme legislature and entered into force in Hong Kong a year later without being reviewed by local lawmakers. Dozens of pro-democracy activists have been arrested under the law. But it took a pandemic – in particular, the highly contagious Omicron variant of Covid-19 – to make Beijing’s presence in Hong Kong felt in ways it had never been before. In late February, Hong Kong announced that it would invoke an emergency decree so that the city could “utilize [the] “support for the mainland” and “undertaking major anti-epidemic projects at full speed,” a press release said. In a treatment unit set up at the AsiaWorld-Expo cavernous convention center, elderly patients are now cared for by doctors and nurses from mainland China. Under emergency laws, medical staff were able to bypass the licensing exams and registration procedures typically required for non-locally trained staff. Authorities said computers to record patients’ information had been changed from English to Chinese to accommodate them. Hong Kong CEO Kari Lam said the region “can not let existing laws prevent us from doing what we ought to do” during Covid. Photo: Vincent Yu / AFP / Getty Images Meanwhile, Hong Kong CEO Kari Lam announced during a press conference on the coronavirus on Friday that the city would distribute rapid test kits, face masks and a traditional Chinese medicine – Lianhua Qingwen – to households, donating the mainland. The drug, which has been registered with the city pharmacy council, has been labeled by health authorities in Singapore and the US as being advertised with baseless allegations. “Beijing is trying to turn Hong Kong into another [Chinese] city, “said Lynette Ong, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. “The Covid crisis gives them a legitimate reason to do so.” In addition to building a Covid-19 hospital in Lok Ma Chau, mainland China has already assisted Hong Kong with building five other isolation facilities for patients with mild or no symptoms. China and Hong Kong are among the last countries in the world to continue to isolate or treat stable Covid patients. Infrastructure projects in Hong Kong typically involve construction companies bidding to bid on multi-billion dollar contracts. But all the mainland-built facilities have been handed over to Chinese state-owned construction engineering, a state-owned company. At an inauguration ceremony for the newest center in the northern district of Yuen Long, top Hong Kong officials stood in the spotlight as he played in front of them a video of hardworking construction workers portrayed as heroes working to the bone. A Mandarin song, instead of the Cantonese language spoken in Hong Kong, was played in the background. “The scale and speed with which these projects have been completed is unprecedented,” the Hong Kong leader said at a ceremony on Thursday. “This will go down in the history of Hong Kong’s Covid-19 match.” Lam is accustomed to talking about the crisis in terms of conflict. “In an environment as urgent as this, we can not let existing laws stop us from doing what we have to do; this is not the mentality to fight a war,” he said in February. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, says that “there was once a gap that separated what was happening in Hong Kong from what was happening across the continent.” This gap is getting smaller. Under national security legislation, places such as independent retirement rooms, universities and civil society groups have felt a chill as Beijing seeks to further integrate Hong Kong into its fold. And as Hong Kong prepares to host a batch of traditional Chinese doctors to staff treatment facilities and open more isolation camps built by workers on the mainland, assimilation is now more public than ever. “The way Covid was treated by the Hong Kong authorities has shown that the concept of ‘one country, two systems’ is a faint shadow of what it once was,” says Wasserstrom. This story was originally published in the Hong Kong Free Press
