What Happens to Freedom Deferred?

A conversation with Human Rights Watch’s Maya Wang on Beijing’s Hong Kong clampdown and why there’s reason for hope.

An estimated 100,000 people gather peacefully in Hong Kong’s Tamar Park to mourn the death of a pro-democracy activist, Nov. 9, 2019. (Wiki Commons)

By Michael Judge

The news out of Hong Kong has gone from bad to worse recently with the former British colony’s Legislative Council passing a draconian national-security law that makes it easier to try citizens behind closed doors and imprison them for “treason,” “sedition,” or possessing “state secrets.” The Orwellian sounding Article 23, passed by the Beijing-controlled LegCo in March, “eliminates the last vestiges of fundamental freedoms in the city,” according to Human Rights Watch, and is a gut punch for anyone who ever believed Beijing would honor its “one country, two systems” pledge to maintain Hong Kong’s autonomy.

Maya Wang, Human Rights Watch’s acting China director, brought this fall from grace into stark relief in a recent New York Times guest essay titled, “Hong Kongers Are Purging the Evidence of Their Lost Freedom.” In it, sh…