'Palpable fear': 3 years after Beijing tightened control, Hong Kongers speak in cautious whispers

If the setting was anywhere else in China, no one would have given it a second glance.

Red banners and breathless speeches extolling Beijing's leadership. Music glorifying the police. A pageant featuring smiling youngsters in martial arts gear. 

"Remember, dear children," a local security official announced during the April event, "our nation must be secure for our homes to be safe."

But it was Hong Kong, where four years ago, millions took to the streets to protest against exactly this — Beijing's influence and the police. Even today, the reason behind this "celebration" choreographed by the Communist Party is widely disliked.

It was a ceremony — cheerfully hyped — to mark the imposition of China's harsh national security law on the former British colony, a means to tighten Beijing's control over the only part of its territory where elements of democracy have been tolerated.

Using a vaguely defined but sweeping ban on sedition, subversion and incitement, along with a prohibition on "collusion with foreign and external forces," the law has stifled free speech and political opposition.

This despite China's promise, enshrined in the territory's 1997 Basic Law, that Hong Kong's "way of life shall remain unchanged for 50 years." 

"For Hong Kong people, who are used to a very different Hong Kong, a city with a lot more freedom, with a lot more space to do whatever you want to do, to say whatever you want to say, obviously, the development has been something rather like a heart attack," said Francis Lee, a communications professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. 

Lee is among the very few here who are willing to speak publicly about the law's impact.

Since it came into effect three years ago this week, the national security law has been used directly to take some 250 Hong Kongers to court. Many more have been sent to jail with related convictions, including colonial-era laws against printing "seditious" material, fraud and pandemic restrictions on gatherings.

Beijing also changed Hong Kong's electoral system, only allowing candidates designated as "true patriots" to run.

Critical media outlets have been raided by the police and shut down, including Stand News and Apple Daily, whose founder, Jimmy Lai, has been in prison since 2020, after being the first prominent Hong Konger to be charged under the national security law. More than a dozen other Apple Daily editors and executives were also jailed.

Meanwhile, 47 pro-democracy politicians, academics and activists are still on trial, accused of multiple crimes and infractions, a process that has kept them in custody and tied up in court for years.

"They promised us that we can be free, be safe and to fight for democracy. But now, of course, people are very frightened," said Emily Lau, a former journalist and pro-democracy councillor first elected to the Hong Kong legislature in 1991 and now retired.