Earlier this month, Ip Kwok-him, a top adviser to Hong Kong\u2019s embattled Chief Executive Carrie Lam,\u00a0mused\u00a0about measures that, a few short months ago, would have been unthinkable. \u201cThe government,\u201d he said, \u201cwill consider all legal means\u201d of curtailing the monthslong protest movement. \u201cWe would not rule out restricting the internet.\u201d On the world stage, Beijing has defended its domestic internet controls as critical to \u201cstability maintenance\u201d and demanded that other nations respect China\u2019s \u201cinternet sovereignty\u201d\u2014a euphemism for the web of surveillance, censorship, and Chinese Communist Party policing of local tech firms. But Hong Kong\u2014where Beijing officially has political sovereignty, but does not directly control the internet\u2014is testing the World Wide Web\u2019s original promise of cyberspace without borders.<\/p>\n
Adv<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n In 1997, when the British colony of Hong Kong was handed back to Chinese sovereignty, the internet was in its infancy. Under the \u201cOne Country, Two Systems\u201d agreement brokered between Beijing and London, Hong Kong preserved many of its institutions as a special administrative region: customs and immigration checkpoints on the old colonial border, independent courts, a separate system of currency, and civil liberties. Beijing pledged that Hong Kong\u2019s freedoms would remain unchanged for 50 years and promised a pathway to elected democratic representation to match the city\u2019s freedoms of speech and assembly.<\/p>\n In the years since, Hong Kong\u2019s cyberspace, outside Beijing\u2019s \u201cGreat Firewall\u201d of censorship and surveillance, has grown in line with those freedoms. It\u2019s dominated by services that are blocked in mainland China: Facebook, Google, YouTube, WhatsApp, and others. Inside China, foreign competitors were squeezed out, and a suite of surveilled and censored homegrown tech firms and apps grew to dominate digital life; the Communist Party hopes that dazzling advances in consumer tech will guide China to greater prosperity while consolidating the government\u2019s control. But, as China\u2019s economy boomed through the 2000s, business ties drew Hong Kong closer to Beijing\u2019s state-supervised system of \u201cmarket socialism with Chinese characteristics\u201d\u2014capitalism kept on a leash by the Communist Party.<\/p>\n With Hong Kong\u2019s once boisterous print and broadcast media falling increasingly under the ownership of firms with mainland business interests, traditional news outlets have softened their skeptical coverage of China. So when simmering discontent over fading promises of democracy\u00a0bubbled over in 2014, the internet offered an unfettered platform for dissent. The result was a citizens\u2019 \u201cOccupy\u201d movement with tent villages in Hong Kong thoroughfares, organized largely over Facebook and WhatsApp, symbolized by a Yellow Umbrella motif. \u201cOccupy\u201d fizzled a few months later in late 2014, its goals for political reform unmet.<\/p>\n \n As it turned out, Hong Kong\u2014and China\u2014had seen nothing yet. In the spring, Hong Kong\u2019s unelected chief executive proposed a\u00a0controversial extradition law\u00a0that risked sending Hong Kongers over the border to China\u2019s murky and merciless legal system. The law looked likely to pass through Hong Kong\u2019s local legislature, which is stacked with unelected loyalists sympathetic to Beijing. An explosion of citizen protest brought a harsher-than-expected police crackdown. In the ensuing cycle of escalations, millions of protesters returned to the streets, continuing their demonstrations and escalating their demands even after the extradition law was withdrawn. Clashes between police, protesters, and pro-Beijing crowds (including mobs believed to have\u00a0links to organized crime) have spiraled into the worst civil unrest any part of China has witnessed since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing.<\/p>\n While the Beijing protests are remembered for the brutality with which they were suppressed, Hong Kong\u2019s separate status limits the authoritarian toolbox that China can deploy to contain the unrest. (Another\u00a0recent protest, in the mainland city of Wuhan, was swiftly extinguished thanks to the security services\u2019 thorough penetration of the local internet and unfettered police powers.) In Hong Kong, where Beijing\u2019s political sovereignty does not come with direct control over the internet or local police, Beijing is reluctant to active the most draconian option: deployment of the People\u2019s Liberation Army to keep order in Hong Kong\u2019s streets. While this could be done lawfully, it would be catastrophic\u2014for global investor confidence, the regime\u2019s credibility, and the assets of party elites and state-backed firms that rely on Hong Kong\u2019s financial institutions.<\/p>\n Instead, Beijing is exploring other options. As protests continued to flare over the summer, various arms of China\u2019s security and propaganda apparatus reached over the digital divide running along the former colonial border. Hong Kong has become a laboratory for China\u2019s efforts to shape cyberspace beyond the Great Firewall. Within weeks of the movement\u2019s resurgence, protesters had switched their main organizing from WhatsApp and Facebook to Telegram using a series of decentralized groups to direct demonstrations according to geographic location, profession, and other affiliations. China responded with a distributed denial of service attack on Telegram: a blunt-instrument method of overwhelming the app\u2019s servers with bogus requests. (Telegram has suffered such disruptions before; this time, for the first time ever, the firm\u2019s CEO\u00a0Pavel Durov\u00a0fingered China as the culprit.)<\/p>\n\r\n \t