Opinion | The national security law hasn’t brought back the old Hong Kong. Rather, it has created a new, unfamiliar place

Peace has returned to the city. No more black-clad protesters hurling petrol bombs at tear-gas-firing riot police. Our chief executive, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, gives credit to the Beijing-imposed national security law, claiming it has brought back the Hong Kong we were familiar with.

Wrong. The mass protests are gone but the security law has not restored the old Hong Kong. It has created a new and unfamiliar one. In the Hong Kong that was, people could place flower tributes, like they tried to do on Monday at Prince Edward MTR station, without police intervention.

I don’t believe anyone died when police stormed the station last August 31. But why prevent Hongkongers from placing floral tributes? I believe the tribute would have been peaceful, but police showed up in force, warning that even shouting “five demands, not one less” could violate the security law.

Lam candidly told a Beijing-friendly Hong Kong-based television station that she is an administrator who doesn’t understand politics, and could not have predicted that her now-dead extradition bill would spark an uprising.

Let’s call her the administrator-in-chief then. But even a politically clueless administrator should have foreseen trouble when an estimated one million Hongkongers, then an estimated two million, marched peacefully against the bill, not to mention the reservations voiced by business groups.