Hong Kong’s US$1 Billion Fund for National Security: How Much Has Been Spent?

Scholar: Nobody knows; NSD is not supervised

Attendees from various forces march next to a banner promoting the new national security law at the end of a flag-raising ceremony to mark the 23rd anniversary of Hong Kong's handover from Britain in Hong Kong on July 1, 2020. Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images

Since the enactment of the Hong Kong National Security Law in 2020, the Hong Kong government’s expenses for “safeguarding national security” are unknown to the public, except that the government allocated HK$8 billion (US$1 billion). Recently, the government submitted “The Report on the Control and Management of the Special Fund to Meet the Expenditure for ‘Safeguarding National Security’ to the Legislative Council (LegCo),” but it contains only three pages without any details on the spending.

Chung Kim-wah, assistant professor in the Department of Applied Social Sciences at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, criticized in an interview with The Epoch Times that all the departments and tasks established in the name of the National Security Law are entirely out of the supervision of the system of Hong Kong.