OPINION:
Hong Kong is the pebble in China’s shoe. The Beijing government didn’t try to swallow Hong Kong whole when the British gave up the ghost, and the colony, in 1997. The Beijing government, which seems to have a low opinion of its constituents, promotes the line that Chinese people are incapable of democratic government and they are not capable of the rule of law and consequently are not due the liberties and freedoms common in the West.
Chastened by civil strife, poverty, and marinated over the centuries in Confucianism, the Chinese people gravitate toward autocracy, the communist line goes. Chi Wang, the president of the U.S.-China Policy Foundation, described this earlier this year in an op-ed in the South China Morning Post as the idea that “it doesn’t seem that the nation could support a democracy. China lacks the ideological framework under which democracy could spontaneously develop or be fostered. Confucianism is inherently undemocratic; it encourages obedience, not freedom or personal liberty.”
There’s a hole in this argument, created by Taiwan and Hong Kong. Those feisty enclaves of Chinese democracy give the lie to the self-serving notion that China will always be undemocratic. Taiwan and Hong Kong are living rebukes to Chinese president Xi Jinping’s vision of a forever oppressive Chinese state. Mr. Xi has makes no secret of his scheme to ultimately stamp out the embers of freedom in those enclaves.
In recent days densely populated and prosperous Hong Kong and its 7 million residents, now technically part of the People’s Republic of China after the handover from the British in 1997, still maintain a semblance of an independent economic and political system. “One country, two systems” is the slogan, though it’s come under increasing strain over the past decade. Democracy in Hong Kong may be withering away as Beijing tightens its grip, but it’s not dead yet.
June 4, 2019, the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre passed quietly in the People’s Republic. Not only are memories of the massacre suppressed, but public protests are banned, and can be punished harshly. Internet censors ensure that no references to the atrocity survive.
Hong Kong, the pebble in the shoe, is different. Not only was the anniversary marked, as it is every year, with a candlelight vigil, this week the streets have been thronged with protest of a proposed law that would enable Beijing to extradite criminal suspects from Hong Kong to be tried in mainland China, where the courts seem to be administered by kangaroos.
Hong Kong saw the largest protest of China’s authority since Britain ceded control in 1997. Organizers estimated more than a million people demanded that Beijing shelve the law. Hong Kong’s streets were choked with demonstrators. “A snaking crowd that included young families, students, professionals and the elderly streamed through the city, reflecting unprecedented and widespread opposition to the latest move by Beijing to bring the former colony to heel,” The Wall Street Journal observed. “Critics say the proposed law could be abused to target political dissidents and would expose citizens to the mainland’s more opaque legal system, where detainees could be unfairly jailed and abused.”
The proposed law would be, as many in Hong Kong argue, the final blow to “one country, two systems,” and begin in earnest the merging of Hong Kong’s free, open, accountable, and democratic system with Beijing’s Communist, corrupt, closed, and opaque dictatorship. Luckily, and contra the notion that the Chinese people are not up to the task, the city is full of hearty Chinese resisters who, in the words of Emma Lazarus inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, are “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
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