When Beijing imposed its National Security Law on Hong Kong in June 2020, it presented the measure as a targeted response to the protests of the preceding year. Six years on, the picture looks rather different. The law has become not an exceptional instrument but a standing principle of governance, reshaping the city’s institutions, personnel and public life in ways that have left little of the old autonomy intact.

Human Rights Watch, in a report published on the sixth anniversary of the law’s imposition, documents the extent of that transformation. The Chinese Communist Party has restructured Hong Kong’s governance to answer to Party leadership rather than to Hong Kong’s people. The relevant chain of command runs from Xi Jinping’s Central Leading Group on Hong Kong and Macau Affairs down through the Hong Kong and Macao Work Office, headed by Xia Baolong, to the China Liaison Office, led by Zhou Ji, who also serves as an adviser to the Hong Kong National Security Committee. The city’s chief executive, John Lee, remains nominally in place, but real authority lies elsewhere.

The legislature offers a telling illustration. A record 27 of its 90 members now hold seats in either the National People’s Congress or the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. At least 45 hold positions or directorships in Chinese state-owned enterprises, an increase of roughly 60 percent on the previous term. Government departments are increasingly staffed by former police officers. Two figures prominent in the crackdown on the 2019 protests were appointed in May and June to head the government communications and public hygiene departments, bypassing the professional civil servants normally assigned to such roles.

The law’s reach into daily life is extensive. Sedition charges have been used against people for peaceful online comments, for selling books about opposition figures and for speaking out after the deadly Tai Po housing complex fire in November 2025. A student and a YouTuber were arrested after criticising the official response to that disaster; journalists were barred from accompanying survivors back to their apartments. No official has apologised or indicated any acceptance of responsibility. The government also spent HK$18 billion (US$2.3 billion) on the national security budget since the law’s imposition, with no public accounting of how the funds are used.

Education has not been spared. Schools routinely take pupils to a national security exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum of History that casts the 2019 protests in an unfavourable light. The “Hong Kong Story” exhibition, which reopened in April after six years of renovation, has been substantially revised, adopting mainland Chinese official language to describe the colonial period and removing references to China’s 1989 democracy movement.

Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, argued that the national security regime had moved well beyond its stated targets. “In reality it has turned the city into a security fortress, leaving people powerless,” she said. Foreign governments, her organisation urged, should continue to raise their voices on Hong Kong’s behalf. For ordinary Hongkongers who once campaigned for universal suffrage and basic rights, the cost of silence would fall hardest of all.

Sources: Human Rights Watch report published 28 June 2026; Hong Kong government budget documents; Legislative Council composition records.