In Hong Kong, a proxy battle over internet freedom begins

As Hong Kong grapples with a draconian new security law, the tiny territory is emerging as the front line in a global fight between the United States and China over censorship, surveillance and the future of the internet.

Long a bastion of online freedom on the digital border of China’s tightly managed internet, Hong Kong’s uneasy status changed radically in just a week. The new law mandates police censorship and covert digital surveillance, rules that can be applied to online speech across the world.

Now, the Hong Kong government is crafting web controls to appease the most prolific censor on the planet, the Chinese Communist Party. And the changes threaten to further inflame tensions between China and the United States, in which technology itself has become a means by which the two economic superpowers seek to spread influence and undercut each other.

Caught in the middle are the city’s 7 million residents, online records of rollicking political debate — some of which may now be illegal — and the world’s largest internet companies, which host, and by extension guard, that data.

A standoff is already brewing. Many Big Tech companies, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, Zoom and LinkedIn, have said in the past two days that they would temporarily stop complying with requests for user data from Hong Kong authorities. The Hong Kong government, in turn, has made it clear that the penalty for non-compliance with the law could include jail time for company employees.

TikTok, which despite being owned by the Chinese internet giant ByteDance has its eye on the U.S. market, went even further than its American rivals. The video app said late Monday it would withdraw from stores in Hong Kong and make it inoperable to users there within a few days. The company has said that managers outside China call the shots on key aspects of its business, including rules about data.

Based on the law, Hong Kong authorities can dictate the way people around the world talk about the city’s contested politics. A Facebook employee could potentially be arrested in Hong Kong if the company failed to hand over user data on someone based in the United States who Chinese authorities deemed a threat to national security.

While it is not clear how widely Hong Kong’s government will enforce the law, the looming legal fights could determine whether the city falls behind China’s digital Iron Curtain or becomes a hybrid where online speech and communications are selectively policed.

The technological Cold War between China and the United States is playing out on various fronts around the world. The trade war has ensnared Chinese tech giants like Huawei and ZTE, while American companies complain of industrial policies that favor Chinese businesses at home and subsidize them abroad. Beijing’s severe digital controls have kept companies like Google and Facebook from operating their services in mainland China.

Though U.S. internet companies still earn billions of dollars in Chinese ad revenue, a decision to go along with the Hong Kong rules would risk the ire of Washington, where there has been bipartisan condemnation of the security law. New restrictions on American businesses could also trigger retaliation.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday that the Trump administration was considering blocking some Chinese apps, which he has called a threat to national security.

“I don’t want to get out in front of the president, but it’s something we are looking at,” he said in an interview on Fox News.

A Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, Zhao Lijian, defended the law at a news conference Tuesday, saying that it would make a more “stable and harmonious” Hong Kong.

“The horses will run faster, the horses will run happier, the stocks will sizzle hotter, and the dancers will dance better. We have full confidence in Hong Kong,” he said, alluding to a quote from the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping about the city.

Google’s experience over the past year shows the fraught position of the largest U.S. internet companies. As Hong Kong police struggled to contain protests across the city in 2019, they turned to internet companies for help. Overall data requests and orders from police to remove content more than doubled in the second half of 2019 from the first half to over 7,000 requests, according to a pro-democracy lawmaker, Charles Mok.

Police asked Google to take down a number of posts, including a confidential police manual that had leaked online, a YouTube video from the hacking group Anonymous supporting the protests, and links to a website that let the public look up personal details about police officers, according to a company report.

In each case, Google said no.

The new law could punish the company with fines, equipment seizures and arrests if it again declines such requests. It also would allow police to potentially seize equipment from companies that host such content.

“We see the trend. It’s not just that they’re making more requests, it’s the growing power in the hands of the authorities to do this arbitrarily,” Mok said, adding that “some of the local smaller platforms will be worried about the legal consequences and they may comply” with government requests.

Several small local apps associated with the protest movement have already shut down. Eat With You, which labeled restaurants based on their political affiliation, stopped operating the day after the security law was enacted last week. On Sunday, another service that mapped pro-protester and pro-police businesses on Google Maps suspended its services, citing “changing social circumstances.”

Individuals, as well, have taken to self-censorship. Many have taken down posts, removed “likes” for some pro-democracy pages and even deleted accounts on platforms like Twitter, according to activists. Fears that WhatsApp would hand over data also drove people to switch to downloading a rival encrypted chat app, Signal. WhatsApp, though, had no recent data requests from Hong Kong police, according to a person familiar with the matter.