Hong Kong's new leader is Beijing's designated 'enforcer' - POLITICO

Link CopiedJohn Lee Ka-chiu’s election as Hong Kong’s new chief executive signals a decisive turn in the territory’s lurch toward Beijing-style authoritarian rule.Lee, the territory’s former secretary of security, won an uncontested vote Sunday as the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s candidate of choice.Lee’s victory underscores Chinese President Xi Jinping’s determination to eradicate rule of law in the former British colony — but it also risks its viability as a regional business center as foreign businesses rethink the dangers of operating in Hong Kong.“[Beijing] chose the guy who could crush people and use the judicial system for national security purposes. “Beijing basically made a calculation that if they do this to Hong Kong, the international community and the U.S. government will condemn them, but essentially will roll over which is what they’re doing,” said Dennis Kwok, former Civic Party member of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council and senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.The ordeal of former Hong Kong-based American lawyer Samuel Bickett illustrates that foreign expatriates working in the city’s financial sector aren’t immune to the Lee-supervised roll back of rule of law.Bickett, who was a financial compliance director at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, intervened to stop a vicious assault by a baton wielding assailant on a teenager in December 2019. “My case was one of the early ones where you saw this dive into the abyss by the judiciary from a legal [integrity] standpoint.”Observers see Bickett’s case as a sinister bellwether for the foreign business community’s vulnerability to unlawful attack from Hong Kong’s security forces and judiciary.“[Bicketts case] shows that Hong Kong has changed immeasurably and there’s a lot of uncertainties that did not used to exist — nobody knows what the rules are anymore,” said Tara Joseph, who stepped down as president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong in November.One metric of the growing insecurity felt by foreign citizens in Hong Kong who long took the city’s freedoms and rule of law for granted was the decision last month by Hong Kong’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club to suspend its annual Human Rights Press Awards.