Some Hong Kong celebrities like the kung fu film star Jackie Chan have abruptly become patriotic. That has earned him good press in China and opened up access to its vast, lucrative entertainment markets. On the other hand, artists who express pro-democracy sentiments, like the singer Denise Ho, have been publicly vilified and prevented from performing. Some of them have been rehabilitated, but only after making public mea culpa, broadcast countrywide.

The Chinese Communist Party, in its almost 100 years of existence, has perfected a highly sophisticated system of punishments and rewards, and it extends well beyond the mainland. Known as the United Front, this patronage network operates informally, but deliberately, in Chinese communities throughout the world, handing out various benefits to people willing to perform services for party and country.

In Hong Kong, the United Front is being deployed, often in the name of patriotism, to dismantle the best vestiges of British colonial administration — the rule of law, a professional and apolitical civil service and police force, a free press and now, free speech.

The publications Ming Pao and the Hong Kong Economic Journal, once bulwarks of independent journalism, have adopted a much more pro-China stance in recent years, dismissing journalists and editors who sounded critical views. (I was among them.) The remaining pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily, is having to sell its weekly sister magazine, which used to be a major source of profit but has become insolvent as major companies in Hong Kong stopped placing ads in it at the behest of Beijing.

The rule of law in Hong Kong has been under siege at least since 2008, when Xi Jinping, then a state vice president of China, reportedly told Hong Kong leaders during a visit to the city that the judiciary, the legislature and the executive branch should cooperate.

The civil service, at least at the top levels, has been thoroughly politicized. It was the Hong Kong justice secretary, for example, who asked for a new trial for three leaders of the 2014 pro-democracy Umbrella Movement, which led to much heavier jail terms than those they had received earlier.