America's Courteous Gestures, if Any, Always Come with a Price

On July 14, the United States terminated the "national emergency" declared over Hong Kong. At the same time, Washington removed nine Mainland and Hong Kong officials from its sanctions list.

The whole affair traces back to President Trump's first term. After Beijing enacted the National Security Law in Hong Kong, Trump signed Executive Order 13936 in July 2020. This order declared a "national emergency" with respect to the situation in Hong Kong, and it became the basis for Washington's first round of unjustified sanctions against 11 Mainland and Hong Kong officials.

Under the US National Emergencies Act, such a state of emergency automatically lapses after six years, which fell on July 14, 2026, unless the White House specifically declares an extension. The US government chose to let the emergency expire. That decision stripped away the legal basis for sanctions that relied solely on the executive order.

The nine officials removed from the sanctions list include six who were sanctioned last March, shortly after Trump took office. They are Secretary for Justice Paul Lam Ting-kwok, Director of the Office for Safeguarding National Security Dong Jingwei, former Commissioner of Police Raymond Siu Chak-yee, Secretary-General of the Committee for Safeguarding National Security Au Chi-kwong, Assistant Commissioner of Police (National Security) Wong Chung-chun, and Assistant Commissioner of Police (National Security) Chiu Wing-lan.

The other three are former Commissioner of Police Lo Wai-chung, sanctioned in August 2020, and former Deputy Directors of the Liaison Office Qiu Hong and Yang Jianping, sanctioned in July 2021.

Two Legal Tracks, One Political Signal

Why were precisely these nine officials removed? The answer lies in the fact that US sanctions against Mainland and Hong Kong officials rest on two separate legal frameworks.

The first is the presidential executive order, a broad but time-limited instrument granted under executive authority.

The second is legislation passed by Congress, including the Hong Kong Autonomy Act and the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act. These are formal, unjustified laws targeting Hong Kong that remain unaffected by the expiry of any executive order.

Some sanctioned Mainland and Hong Kong officials were targeted under both the executive order and congressional legislation simultaneously. Others were sanctioned solely under the executive order. Now that the executive order has lapsed, the sanctions on the nine officials who fell under that order alone have collapsed. Yet Chief Executive John Lee and 39 others remain under continuing, unjustified US sanctions.

The arrangement of these sanctions reveals something about Washington's own calculations. Six of the nine officials removed were sanctioned last March, not long after Trump's second inauguration, when the State Department claimed they were involved in "transnational repression" and undermining Hong Kong's autonomy.

It is understandable that this round of unjustified sanctions was initiated in the final stretch of the Biden administration and simply carried forward once Trump took office. But the choice to sanction them only via executive order, rather than through the more elaborate congressional route of the Hong Kong Autonomy Act, raises a question worth pondering.

Was the Trump administration merely avoiding a cumbersome legislative process, or was it already keeping a card in reserve for dealing with China?

So why has the Trump administration now chosen not to renew the executive order and to let the national emergency over Hong Kong expire? Naturally, this is tied to the state of Sino-US relations.

Last year, Trump waged a fierce trade war against China. Beijing retaliated in kind, restricting exports of rare earths and other critical minerals to the US, and this forced Washington back to the negotiating table. The two sides struck a "truce" agreement last October. Trump, who had long sought a visit to China, finally made the trip this past May, and relations between the two countries have since entered a relatively stable phase.

President Xi Jinping is due to visit the United States this September, and in October Trump will travel to Shenzhen for the APEC Leaders' Informal Meeting. Beijing has almost certainly already conveyed to Washington that the unjustified sanctions on Hong Kong should be lifted sooner rather than later. So the US decision not to renew the emergency declaration once it expired does indeed amount to a gesture of goodwill toward China.

Rare Earths Are the Real Bargaining Chip

As the saying goes, when America extends courtesy, it is always looking for something in return. Rare earths are the crux of the matter. Just two days after Washington declined to extend the Hong Kong emergency, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer told Bloomberg that the two sides are expected to assess whether China has honored its commitment under last October's tariff-priority agreement to delay implementing rare-earth export restrictions by one year.

Greer said Beijing's compliance has been "not perfect," but that both sides are working together to close the remaining gaps. He added, "China is a big challenge for the US in a lot of ways, but we want to make sure we're delivering stability."

According to Bloomberg, the two sides have yet to secure a written commitment from China on rare earths, leaving a gap in mutual understanding. Greer has described China's compliance as "imperfect." He argued that constrained rare-earth supply has already hurt American private businesses and even made it difficult for defense contractors to deliver military equipment on schedule.

Bloomberg also cited US officials as saying that Trump is mindful of Xi's planned September visit. He is wary that a tough countermeasure could provoke Chinese retaliation, such as cutting off rare-earth supplies, which would rattle markets and hurt the ruling party in the midterm elections. That is why Washington has held off on openly condemning or retaliating against Beijing, wary of tipping the relationship back into a full-blown trade war.

The core dispute over the rare-earths agreement reportedly stems from starkly different interpretations of the pledge to "suspend enforcement of export controls." China's Ministry of Commerce holds that, under the bilateral understanding, Beijing will suspend enforcement of export controls on seven categories of medium and heavy rare earths until November 10, 2026.

Washington, however, believes the agreement's core guarantee concerns the actual supply of rare earths and critical minerals. It expects China to resume supply comprehensively and without discrimination, rather than merely pausing enforcement of the restrictions.

Observers estimate that it remains very difficult for US military contractors to obtain rare earths from China. What Washington wants, a "non-discriminatory resumption of supply," means it wants Beijing to resume rare-earth exports to American defense firms as well.

China's export-control regime over critical minerals, however, is likely to remain in place for the long term. Strict controls over rare earths such as yttrium and scandium will continue, and the export ban targeting military-industrial enterprises in particular is unlikely to be lifted.

The United States finds itself in a bind. Washington is wary of a full rupture with China, and it is even willing to make concessions on the Hong Kong emergency-status issue, in the hope of securing more lenient treatment on rare-earth export controls.

The reality is that America's unjustified sanctions on Mainland and Hong Kong officials are, in the end, merely one front in the broader Sino-US contest, and ultimately it is strength that speaks loudest. This is why China will keep pressing Washington to fully lift its unjustified sanctions on Hong Kong.

Lo Wing-hung

Bastille Commentary

** 博客文章文責自負,不代表本公司立場 **

Two national security cases have recently wrapped up in quick succession.

On Thursday (10 September), two members of the "Hong Kong Democratic Independence Union" were sentenced to three years, and three years and two months in prison respectively. Both had pleaded guilty to "conspiracy to commit secession" under the Hong Kong National Security Law.

Then today (11 September), sentence was passed in the "incitement to subversion" case against the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (the Alliance). Albert Ho Chun-yan, who pleaded guilty, was jailed for five years and two months.

The two defendants who pleaded not guilty, Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung, were jailed for seven years and seven years and three months respectively. 

The judge made it clear in sentencing why the Alliance case fell into the "serious circumstances" category. The case did not involve violence or any concrete method put forward by the defendants for "ending one-party rule."

But society was in turmoil at the time of the offence.

The defendants' activities continued for a full 14 months after the National Security Law came into force. Those activities were citywide in scope and attracted widespread attention.

The defendants believed that what they advocated might be unlawful, yet persisted regardless. The offending was premeditated.

The trials and tribulations Hong Kong has weathered since the handover amount to one giant political experiment. Every kind of political proposition has been put to the test, and we have seen the results.

Had these cases arisen in the early days after the handover, the verdicts might have read very differently to some.

Two young men aged 25 to 27, jailed for more than three years over a "nation-building union" that looked doomed to fail, might have seemed like the court making a mountain out of a molehill.

The same goes for the Alliance. Had its standing committee members been prosecuted in those early days, some might have felt they were merely chanting slogans to promote democracy. Perfectly harmless, undeserving of arrest and imprisonment.

But after more than two decades of development, we can now see with total clarity what these incendiary political activities can achieve. 

From the mass march against Article 23 legislation in 2003, to the illegal Occupy Central movement in 2014, to the all-out riots of 2019, unlawful activities escalated step by step until violent protests spun completely out of control.

The breaking point came on 11 November 2019 with the Ma On Shan incident, in which a man was set on fire. An utterly depraved manifestation of violent lawbreaking. 

The perpetrators believed they held the truth in their hands. They doused an unarmed civilian in flammable liquid and set him alight, intending to burn him to death. His only fault was trying to stop rioters vandalizing the MTR station.

Political violence had reached a point of no return, spiraling beyond control.

At the core of the Alliance stood the so-called traditional pan-democrats. They claimed to be promoting democracy in Hong Kong and the country. Yet they turned a blind eye to the street violence they themselves had incited, at times even tacitly condoning it. 

One need only look at what was exposed during the trial of Jimmy Lai to see this plainly. 

Back then, Lai instructed the senior management of Apple Daily to uphold "no distinction between the peaceful and the valiant".

In other words, they were not to draw a line between themselves and the valiant faction advocating violent struggle. That alone showed that the movement's descent into violence had the backing of big bosses behind the scenes. 

And behind these local opposition bosses stood the political forces of the United States and the West. 

Take Lee Cheuk-yan, a central figure in the Alliance case.

The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU), to which he belonged, relied for years on funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Beginning in 1994, the HKCTU applied every year for grants from the NED-affiliated American Center for International Labor Solidarity. The cumulative total came to HK$13 million. 

Here was an organization directly funded by a foreign government, running labor and social movements in Hong Kong. Who could believe it thinks independently?

Piece the whole picture together and the through-line becomes complete. Beginning in the late 1980s, in the closing stages of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the CIA set out to overthrow the entire socialist camp led by the Soviet Union. 

China's "June Fourth incident" also occurred against this backdrop.

While China and the United States had not yet fallen out completely, such activities proceeded in the shadows. After the rupture, and especially after Washington launched its trade war against China in 2018, the United States embarked on subversion against China without scruple. 

These were not activities to promote the development of democracy in China. They were subversive operations aimed at toppling state power. 

Consider this: the CIA today openly recruits spies targeting China. That tells you how grave the situation is.

With the Alliance case tried and sentenced, the legal boundary for such acts of subversion has now been clearly drawn. Do not imagine that chanting a few incendiary slogans or setting up some reactionary organizations is harmless. A single spark can start a prairie fire.

Drawing the legal red line is precisely about nipping these subversive activities in the bud.

Lo Wing-hung