China paints a target on Hong Kong, but abandons one for growth

“The pandemic has weakened China’s economy but not its leaders’ desire to assert power”

Just as the sun rises in the east and people require water to survive, so has  rubber-stamp parliamentof China, the National People’s Congress, arranged its plenary session every March and opened the session with a lengthy—nay, tedious—“work report” from the prime minister. This year is different for two reasons. First is the coronavirus pandemic, which had hindered the NPC itself by nearly three months. The second is that in the last year the Chinese government has tackled complaints on a scale unseen for three decades, in one corner of its domain, Hong Kong.
In his work report, Li Keqian spoke of establishing a “sound” legal system to ensure national security in Hong Kong, which has flourished in part because of its self-governing judiciary and political liberties. Just before the NPC opened, China had signaled how it hopes to attain that “soundness”: by accepting legislation that would entail Hong Kong to prohibit acts of sabotage against the Chinese government.