Hong Kong on borrowed time as China pushes for more control

BANGKOK (AP) — Hong Kong has been living on borrowed time ever since the British made it a colony nearly 180 years ago, and all the more so after Beijing took control in 1997 and granted it autonomous status.

China’s passage of a national security law for the city is the latest sign that the 50-year “one country, two systems” arrangement that allowed Hong Kong to keep its own legal, financial and trade regimes is perishable.

China’s communist leaders have been preparing for decades to take full control of the glittering capitalist oasis, while building up their own trade and financial centers to take Hong Kong's place.

For them, national security and patriotism trump the civil liberties that brought millions of Hong Kong residents into the streets last year, hoping to protect their own vision for their future — protests that would not be tolerated across the border.

In the early 1980s, as China's own economy began to open up to trade and investment after decades of Cold War isolation and political upheaval, the contrast between the mainland and Hong Kong was evident on crossing the border into the bucolic rice paddies and fish ponds of Shenzhen.

Several generations later, Shenzhen is a metropolis of skyscrapers, high-tech campuses and huge, modern ports that dwarf Hong Kong's own, at least in trading volume. Railways, roads, bridges and other infrastructure have transformed the Pearl River Delta region that surrounds it into a whole ecosystem of built-up cities that is China’s answer to Silicon Valley and then some. It also is home to increasingly influential tech companies like Huawei Technologies and Tencent.

Railways, roads, bridges and other infrastructure have turned Hong Kong into just one of the big cities of the Pearl River Delta region that...