“We must save Hong Kong, the present Hong Kong and the future Hong Kong,” declared the city’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, in a Friday announcement of a ban on wearing masks in public. Enacted under a colonial-era emergency powers ordinance, the mask ban takes effect Saturday and is ostensibly a “deterrent to radical behavior,” a way to tamp down the rising violence from a minority segment of the anti-government protesters who have flooded the city’s streets for weeks. Yet, as demonstrators have been quick to note, punishing the use of face coverings with jail time will do far more than make the violent few easier to apprehend. It will also expose thousands to tear gas employed by increasingly brutal police, and it bares protesters’ identities to China’s panopticon surveillance state. Hong Kong is right to bristle at this ban — and we in the United States would do well to take it as a warning. The civil liberties violations now underway in China can happen here, and they almost certainly will if we do not proactively reject them. In some arenas, the march of technological development does not substantively change the questions policymakers must address. Civil liberties are different. A… Read full this story
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