The link below will take you to an excellent review of the activities of China’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) in Hong Kong. It is the UFWD that orchestrated the political, administrative and civil society takeover of Hong Kong in the past 23 years, contrary to China’s ‘binding’ legal agreement with Britain that the place would run itself (with a few understandable exceptions) for at least 50 years. The author is the former New York Times correspondent and long-time China watcher Didi Kirsten Tatlow.
The piece explains the role of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), which does a great job of co-opting persons who are (usually) not Communist Party members and getting them to act as Communist Party running dogs. Among highlighted Hong Kong CPPCC stars are late tycoons Henry Fok and Tung Chee-hwa, who readers of my 2007 Asian Godfathers will be familiar with.
There is also a nice presentation of evidence about how China has infiltrated and increasingly directed the Hong Kong police force and made use of local triads as ‘patriotic’ allies in its war against ‘Western’ influence and all things liberal. In the interests of historical fairness, it should be noted that the British also made use of patriotic triads when re-taking control of Hong Kong from the Japanese at the end of the Second World War, as beautifully related in Philip Snow’s The Fall of Hong Kong. The mafia in Hong Kong has batted for both sides, although it probably enjoys batting people over the head for Beijing more.
The document is here.