Stephen Roach is a well-known American economist who once lived in Hong Kong. As a former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, his views sometimes attract attention. For reasons best known to him, he has recently taken to smearing the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

In 2024, Roach told the Financial Times that “Hong Kong is over”. This delighted not only the HKSAR’s rivals but also China’s antagonists. It was, however, manifestly incorrect, and in 2025 he backtracked, acknowledging it was premature to write Hong Kong off entirely.

However, last month Roach resumed his mischief-making. In a syndicated article, he claimed that “the Hong Kong of old is over”; that it has lost its distinctive identity, becoming “just another big Chinese city”. Only somebody wholly ignorant of the HKSAR’s unique status as China’s only common law jurisdiction (and its gateway to the broader world) could have advanced such an absurd proposition.

Indeed, the acting financial secretary, Michael Wong Wai-Lun, in a reference to Roach, said such criticisms are rooted in anti-Beijing bias rather than objective analysis. They amount to attempts to “talk down Hong Kong’s prospects”, and ignore its “extraordinary resilience”.

Roach’s bias is perhaps most vividly demonstrated by his depiction of what he called Beijing’s “hostile takeover” after the turmoil of 2019-20. This was a reference to the enactment of the Hong Kong SAR National Security Law (NSL) of 2020, which restored normality after months of insurrectionist violence. Far from being “hostile”, the NSL ensured the survival of the “one country, two systems” policy, and proved to be Hong Kong’s salvation.

As somebody who has previously claimed to “love Hong Kong”, it might have been expected that Roach, like the business world of which he was once part, would have welcomed the end of the insurrection and the city’s resurgence, but not a bit of it.

It might also have been thought that Roach, as an American, would be delighted by the recent positive reporting on Hong Kong’s future by the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong. Yet he disregarded it, and it is not hard to see why.

Roach would have his readers believe that the rule of law in Hong Kong has been “severely compromised”, a crude attempt to undermine business confidence in the city.

If Roach wants to malign Hong Kong, the least he can do is undertake some elementary fact-checking first. His latest remarks show he is a brazen publicity seeker who can no longer be taken seriously. If he wants to be known as just another anti-China hack, so be it, but he is best ignored by everybody who values honest commentary

He claimed that the combined effect of the NSL and the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance (SNSO 2024) had been to integrate “China’s national security framework into the city’s legal system”, which could not be further from the truth. The national security laws in the two places differ markedly, as Roach would have known if, instead of dishing the dirt, he had taken the time to compare them.

For example, under the HKSAR’s distinctive arrangements, both the NSL and the SNSO require that the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights be observed in their application, while the SNSO is largely modeled on the United Kingdom’s National Security Act (2023).

Far from being “severely compromised”, the rule of law in Hong Kong is as vibrant as ever. In making his case, Roach, not surprisingly, ignored the findings of the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index 2025, issued in October. It ranked the HKSAR as 24th out of the 143 jurisdictions surveyed for their rule-of-law credentials, ahead of the United States at 27th. As the index is the world’s leading source of original, independent rule of law data, Roach’s disregard of its conclusions was little short of criminal.

Roach was also on very weak ground when he sought to buttress his claims by pointing to the resignation of six foreign nonpermanent judges from the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal (CFA). He argued that those resignations called “the independence of the city’s highest judicial authority into question”, but they did no such thing.

When, for example, Lord (Lawrence) Collins resigned from the CFA in 2024, he gave the lie to Roach’s claim. He stressed, “I continue to have the fullest confidence in the court and the total independence of its members.”

Indeed, had he researched the position before holding forth, Roach would have known that the UK government exerted huge (and inexcusable) pressure on the British judges to resign from the CFA, which placed the resignations in context. In 2022, for example, the then-foreign secretary, Liz Truss, declared, “It is no longer tenable for British judges to sit on Hong Kong’s leading court.” She added that if they did not quit, they would “risk legitimizing oppression”. Although this was despicable (and was even condemned by Hong Kong’s former governor, Chris Patten), it helps to explain why a handful of faint hearts succumbed to governmental pressures and resigned from the CFA.

However, the real story does not concern the judges who buckled to Truss’ pressure. It is, firstly, about the jurists who refused to be intimidated, and, secondly, about the judges who have subsequently joined the CFA despite the pressures to boycott it.

Thus, Lords (David) Neuberger and (Leonard) Hoffmann, both long-standing members, bravely resisted the pressures, remained true to their oaths of office, and continue to this day to serve with distinction on the CFA.

Moreover, in 2023 and 2024, two eminent Australian jurists, Patrick Keane and James Allsop, joined the CFA, followed in 2025 by New Zealand’s Sir William Young (a former president of that country’s Court of Appeal). None of them would have joined if there was even a scintilla of truth to Roach’s slurs. Needless to say, Roach completely ignored their appointments, and it is not hard to see why — they confounded his China-hostile messaging.

If Roach wants to malign Hong Kong, the least he can do is undertake some elementary fact-checking first. His latest remarks show he is a brazen publicity seeker who can no longer be taken seriously. If he wants to be known as just another anti-China hack, so be it, but he is best ignored by everybody who values honest commentary.

The author is a senior counsel and law professor, and was previously the director of public prosecutions of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.