Hong Kong police confirmed, late Tuesday morning, the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to the special administrative region on the historic occasion of the 25e anniversary of the retrocession of the former British colony to China, which took place on the night of June 30 to the 1er July 1997. The Hong Kong authorities have been speculating for months on the likelihood of this visit, all the more symbolic as Hong Kong finds itself halfway through the 2047 deadline which will mark the end of fifty years during which “nothing would change”, according to the promise of the Chinese leader of the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping.
Details of the visit are expected to be announced on Tuesday afternoon, but, according to information from the South China Morning Post, the Chinese president will arrive by fast train from Shenzhen, the major border city, on June 30 to attend a dinner at the government residence. He will leave to spend the night in mainland China and will return at dawn on the 1er July to attend the flag-raising ceremony and the installation of the new local government.
Even before this confirmation, everything and more has been done to guarantee the smooth running of the trip, because, in the spirit of Beijing, this trip conceals a double risk, health and safety. Sanitary, because Hong Kong still registers nearly two thousand cases declared positive per day, compared to around twenty cases for mainland China as a whole and its population two hundred times larger. And safe, because since the major demonstrations and anti-government riots of 2019, maintaining order in Hong Kong has been a priority: hundreds of opponents from the pro-democracy camp are in prison or in exile and, since the adoption of the national security law in June 2020, all forms of dissent have all but disappeared.
Preventive arrests
Thousands of police are already deployed around the new Kowloon station through which the Chinese delegation should arrive. Searches and preventive arrests took place. The police also spotted and installed sniper posts at the top of buildings in the Wan Chai district, the heart of the ceremonies, where huge plastic barricades, two meters high and weighed down by tons of water, form walls opaque, impassable for hypothetical demonstrators. It is therefore unlikely that the president will have any spontaneous contact with the population. The great annual march of the 1er July, a tradition since 2003, has also been banned since 2020.
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