The last time I was in Hong Kong, I stood high on a hill above the vertical city looking down from the German ambassador’s residence.

The democracy protests were at their height in those weeks near the end of 2019. Posters calling for the liberation of Hong Kong from Chinese rule, and for the victory of democracy over totalitarianism, were plastered on the walls.

Perhaps I should’ve understood more clearly what lay ahead when I heard Hu XiJin, a Chinese journalist from a state-run newspaper, speak at the conference I was attending. He angrily defended the mainland’s heavy-handed policies and aggressively cautioned the United States not to tell China what to do. “We’re not interfering with your country; why should you interfere with us?” he said. “Why should we obey your orders?”

And they haven’t. Instead, exactly a year ago this week, on June 30, 2020, China imposed a draconian National Security Law on the city. Since then, independent newspapers have been closed down, protests quashed and more than 10,000 people arrested for crimes such as “uttering seditious words.”

As Human Rights Watch noted in a report issued last week, the Chinese government is pressing residents to pledge public loyalty to the regime in Beijing. It is turning the police and courts into “tools of Chinese state control rather than independent and impartial enforcers of the rule of law.” Candidates considered insufficiently loyal to China have been barred from running for Hong Kong’s electoral council. Academic freedom is under attack. Websites have been blocked, museums harassed, films canceled, political slogans banned and school curriculums rewritten. Books have been removed from libraries.

Watching a country move from freedom to subjugation is heartbreaking. And perhaps the most frustrating part is that the United States and the international community seem unlikely to do much about it.

American policymakers, who don’t see Hong Kong as a fundamental or core national interest, will only go so far. The U.S. can express its grave concerns and its dismay.

But in the end, few people believe the U.S. will go to the mat for the people of Hong Kong. And given China’s record of imposing control in places such as Tibet and Muslim-areas of China, things could get a lot rockier.

Nicholas Goldberg is an associate editor and Op-Ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times.