A new national-security bill to intimidate Hong Kong

A SENIOR CHINESE official called it a “birthday gift” for Hong Kong. It was a chilling choice of words for the biggest blow to the territory’s freedoms since Britain handed it back to China in 1997. Close to midnight on June 30th, on the eve of official celebrations of the handover’s anniversary, China imposed a draconian national-security bill on Hong Kong. It gives the government in Beijing sweeping power to crush dissent in the territory using its own secret police and even its own courts.

The new law relates to crimes involving secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces. Hong Kong’s post-handover constitution, the Basic Law, had required the territory to pass its own legislation concerning such offences. But local opposition had stymied the government’s efforts to do so. Unrest during the past year, which Chinese officials call an attempted “colour revolution”, caused the Communist Party to lose patience. In May it announced it would do the job itself.

The law was drafted in secret by legislators in Beijing—not even Hong Kong’s government was shown its contents until it was passed by China’s rubber-stamp parliament. Mercifully, it cannot be used to charge people for things they did before June 30th, or so officials say. But otherwise it is even more intimidating than most people in Hong Kong...