Carrie Lam, the city’s chief executive, said the law would ensure “Hong Kong’s long-term prosperity and stability.”

States and separatists

Anti-separatism is the norm throughout the world, no matter the desire of many people around the world for their own country, or which is often stated as the importance of “self-determination” as a principle of international law.

“Since the end of the Cold War, global norms have prevailed upholding cartographic stasis, freezing on the map as it existed at the end of the 20th century,” Keating said. “This norm applies even when ethnic and religious conflicts rage in countries on the map.”

Adjacent China

It is possible that this norm is stronger, or stronger recognized, than in China.

The same applies to other parts of China which are often called inseparable by the government, including Tibet and Xinjiang. While these territories were also often under Chinese control or influence, they were part of a broader imperial system completely removed from modern conceptions of nationhood.

“The borders of modern China do not fit into the historical boundaries of culture with ethnic Chinese (or Han) people, or with the borders of premodern Chinese states,” Esherick wrote in “How the Qing became China.”

“Fully half of China’s territory today was obtained by conquest during the Qing dynasty, a dynasty in which the ruling house was not Han China but Manchu intruders from outside the Great Wall. Most of this expansion occurred only in the 18th century.”

Sam Crane, head of Asian studies at Williams College, said many states and territories that paid homage to the Qing Empire and were under its influence would not be considered part of China or Chinese civilization by Beijing.

“The imperial political control does not consider a single, general, modern national identity,” he said. “As soon as we arrived in 1949 the statement that the Tibetans and Uyghurs were part of the ‘Chinese people’ was established at a much greater level than under the Qing, and the political stakes that accompanied it demanded greater autonomy, thus, far higher . ”

Anti-separatism

Modern ideas about nation states – about nations united by the same culture, language or ethnicity – were traditionally embedded in a series of treaties in the mid-17th century, when the Holy Roman Empire recognized the independence of two non-monarchic states. states, Switzerland and the Netherlands

That signifies, according to Keating, the point at which the state is becoming increasingly “the most significant unit in international politics,” becoming more important than the rulers or empires in the midst of increasing nationalism across continents.

This did not happen immediately and the breakup of the great European empires would not fully occur until the 20th century. In Asia, too, it was not until the Qing was challenged by decisive new nation-states, especially Britain, France, and Japan, the conception of the empire began to shift in the same direction.

Apart from the adoption of imperial borders, since the fall of Qing, China has reinvented itself completely as a modern nation state, advancing the idea of ​​covering Chineseness – a system of language and education that encourages all within its borders to identify with being part of China.

The concept of a nation state has also been expanded backwards from time to time, so that former imperial territories such as Tibet and Xinjiang, whose traditional societies have little ethnic, linguistic or cultural relations with those in eastern China, have become “part of the country since ancient times,” as Liu and other Chinese officials said.

Writing about global norms that support the status quo, Keating said, “the assumption is that if the secessionist movement is allowed to succeed, it will open up a dangerous Pandora separatism box.”

This may be especially true in China, where a single pro-independence domino can trigger territorial riots.

Beijing has dealt with the desire for independence in Xinjiang and Tibet, in part, by encouraging the mass migration of Han Chinese to both regions, and advancing a policy of synification in education, language and religion. Changes in ethnic composition in the two regions make it more difficult to debate self-determination based on the idea of ​​racial or cultural differences with China, with millions of Han Chinese living in both regions.

Hong Kong and Taiwan threaten the status quo in different ways. Both are predominantly Han Chinese, and antipathy towards Beijing in these areas is not based on nationalism but as a rejection of the mainland political system. If one region becomes fully independent, this can damage the claims of the legitimacy of the PRC, based on the idea that historical China has always existed and always has to be.

Challenging this controversial idea everywhere – as much as in China as in Britain over Scotland, Spain over Catalonia, or Russia and Ukraine over Crimea. But as Keating wrote: “Countries in the world are not good in and of themselves; they are useful as long as they help provide public security and welfare for the people who live in them and for the world as a whole.

“When they fail to do so, our first impulse should be to ask how they can be improved, not just to state that they must be preserved.”