Hong Kong's New Secret Police "Hotline"

By Jerome A. Cohen

This article helps put flesh on the bare bones of the initial announcement of the unprecedented secret, anonymous HK “hotline” for reporting suspected NSL violations to Hong Kong’s new secret police. For the first week of implementation, harvesting an average of 1,400 pieces of information per day seems to be a promising start for the Mainland-dominated national security unit.

There is evident Hong Kong Government interest in seeing whether this local equivalent of the former East German “Stasi” secret police “hotline” might soon equal or surpass the “hotline” HK police established last year for tips concerning alleged acts of violence, which is now up to 3,000 tips per day!

Yet this HK secret police innovation need not look to the practice of the discredited and overthrown East German regime. As the report points out, the PRC’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), which controls the new HK unit, has been successfully running a similar operation throughout the Mainland since 2017. However, that institution has apparently been so troubled by the receipt of many “malicious reports” that it issued a warning in April that such anonymous accusations could result in “legal consequences”. Nevertheless, the MSS does not want to discourage would-be tipsters and has begun to pay cash rewards to reliable informers. It would be good to know the criteria for compensating informers.

I wonder how long it will be before the HK counterpart offers similar cash rewards and follows another MSS precedent by establishing “a reporting platform” like the one the MSS established in the Mainland soon after it began operating the national “hotline”.

China’s Ministry of Public Security to “fully direct and support Hong Kong police”

By Jerome A. Cohen

Here’s a statement on May 29 by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) vowing to “fully direct and support Hong Kong police” to stop violence and chaos. The timing is fascinating. At a time when some pro-Beijing elite in Hong Kong are seeking to assure the public that the establishment of national security organs in Hong Kong has minimal significance and that their offices there will only play a modest, quiet role similar to that of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs office, why does the MPS make a statement that, at least in the minds of millions, will maximize anxiety about the forthcoming national security legislation by the National People’s Congress Standing Committee?

To be sure, other millions in Hong Kong may feel greater comfort at the prospect of the notoriously efficient MPS directing the Hong Kong police and thereby enhancing prospects for suppressing violence, vandalism and even peaceful mass protests, but they are not the ones raising international alarms in opposition to the forthcoming legislation.

At a time when the forthcoming legislation is being finalized, is this a move by the MPS to assert its preeminent role in controlling Hong Kong’s security, upstaging the Ministry of State Security (MSS) that the non-Mainland media often assumes will play a dominant role? The two major PRC secret police institutions often have had difficulties sorting out their respective responsibilities on the Mainland where foreign and HK elements are involved. Although generally receiving less media attention, the “guobao”, national security division, of the MPS has seemed ever present in restricting and punishing the human rights activists and lawyers I have been involved with over the years, not the MSS. But perhaps that is because the MSS usually operates more unobtrusively.

Can the people of Hong Kong gain comfort from this MPS announcement?

Invisible punishment of countless people in China

By Jerome A. Cohen

Human Rights Watch’s Sophie Richardson just wrote an article, Chinese Authorities Torment Activist’s Dying Mother. It’s a representative example of the kinds of informal but harsh punishments to which countless people are invisibly subjected in China, without a shred of legal pretense. One can only speculate about the numbers of victims of this lawlessness, usually inflicted by the secret police or their thugs.

When the PRC National People’s Congress meets in a few weeks, in their annual reports the President of the Supreme People’s Court and the Procurator General will each rattle off endless statistics about the millions of cases their respective institutions have formally processed. Yet no one will report on the millions of people who suffer daily humiliating, unregulated restrictions on their personal freedoms. The Ministry of Public Security should certainly report on this important aspect of its massive activity, but it also does nor report on its monitoring and inhibition of even the Party elite, not to mention ordinary citizens. At least this massive task provides jobs for many university graduates who might otherwise face employment problems!

Coronavirus and Chinese Governance: You Bet the Police are Dangerous!!

By Jerome A. Cohen

Here is Charles Parton’s article in yesterday’s Financial Times on “What the coronavirus crisis tells us about Chinese governance,” in which he lists the dangers that have been revealed by China’s treatment of the crisis (spoil alert: “The police are dangerous,” among others).

We did not, of course, need the virus to tell us the PRC police are dangerous, but it has certainly provided yet another occasion for vividly demonstrating that proposition. The whistleblowers, the late Dr. Li Wenliang and his colleagues, got off easy. They could have been “disappeared” indefinitely like the missing independent journalists covering the crisis. They could have been sentenced to four years in prison like legal scholar/activist Xu Zhiyong, who has just been recaptured after criticizing Xi Jinping’s handling of the crisis and now faces a much stiffer punishment. They could have been spirited away for six months of incommunicado detention by the local “supervisory commission” before even being handed over to the formal criminal process (note that a more senior National Supervisory Commission posse was subsequently sent down to Wuhan to dole out harsh sanctions as needed, with no participation of prosecutors, defense lawyers or judges required). Or Dr. Li and his colleagues could have been “released” by the police but neutered at home under severe restrictions and stigma that would have assured their permanent de facto “non-release” (but that would, ironically, have saved his life). 

This lawlessness is not new. Many of us can recite examples over the decades. I remember years ago the explanation given me by the Shanghai police when, in the courtyard of his apartment building, I asked what authority they had for preventing me from visiting the apartment of disbarred lawyer Zheng Enchong, who had recently been “released” from prison after a three-year term for sending a message to a foreign human rights organization. The several public security officers simply kept repeating “we are police” (women shi jingcha), plainly implying that this was all the authority needed to justify their interference with legitimate human contact!  

Eliminating arbitrary detention in China: a Whac-A-Mole game

By Jerome A. Cohen

China has reportedly eliminated the formal administrative detention system for sex workers (see BBC report), which was never successful in “reforming” the offenders. This is, of course, good news for other reasons as well. This sanction was sometimes used for political purposes to ensnare the alleged customers of sex workers, men who allegedly patronized prostitutes but whose real offense was conduct disliked by the regime. As the report indicates, prostitutes are still subject to up to 15 days of detention in a Public Security Bureau detention cell for violation of the Security Administration Punishment  Law, which is also administered by the police. This constitutes a minor offense that in China is technically not a “crime”. Yet detention cell conditions are often extremely unpleasant in comparison with prison conditions for those who are formally convicted of “crimes”.

I wonder whether there is any support for formally eliminating long-term administrative custody for drug offenders, who used to constitute the majority of persons detained under “reeducation through labor.”  To be sure, as Xinjiang’s massive administrative detentions demonstrate, trying to eliminate arbitrary police detention in China is a Whac-A-Mole game—just as you think a form of detention is gone, others keep popping up again under slightly revised names.