China's President Xi Jinping is in Hong Kong for the twenty fifth anniversary of Britain's "handover" of the territory to China.
AP/Selim Chtayti
One thing is worrying Chinese language ruler Xi Jinping. On a two-day go to to Hong Kong, he didn't spend the intervening night time within the territory, part of the Folks’s Republic of China. As a substitute, he slept in Shenzhen, throughout the border in what is known as “mainland China.” He traveled forwards and backwards by particular prepare.
Xi got here to Hong Kong to mark the twenty fifth anniversary of Britain’s “handover” of the territory to China. Within the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, Beijing promised town 50 years of a “excessive diploma of autonomy,” underneath the so-called “one-country, two techniques” formulation.
“Over the previous few years, Hong Kong has skilled nice challenges and gained the battle towards many assessments and obstacles,” Xi declared in a brief speech the primary day of the go to. “Hong Kong has risen from the ashes.”
No, Hong Kong has been subjugated.
The territory noticed large-scale protests and riots in 2019 when the federal government proposed laws that might have allowed Hong Kongers to be extradited to China — and face Communist Get together “justice.” China clamped down exhausting, most notably by imposing in June 2020 a national-security legislation that criminalizes dissent. Since then, Chinese language officers have flooded the territory and run it by dictating to its high political officer, Chief Govt Carrie Lam. They now management her successor, the handpicked John Lee, who begins his five-year time period Friday.
Xi is quick taking management of town. Authorities don't allow protests; they require “patriotic schooling”; they usually have closed down unbiased media. Officers repeatedly harassed and raided the territory’s hottest newspaper, Apple Every day, and jailed proprietor Jimmy Lai together with senior workers. The paper was in the end compelled to shut. A whole bunch of Hong Kongers have been imprisoned, many underneath the national-security legislation, which has been accurately referred to as the top of legislation in Hong Kong.
The federal government has been busy eradicating international judges. The rule of legislation, as soon as town’s nice benefit over rivals Shanghai and Shenzhen, is being shortly eroded. Hong Kong will stay a monetary middle however just for China itself. Beijing, now that it's censoring “political” information, won't be able to withstand the temptation to censor enterprise information as nicely. Internationally targeted companies worry what’s coming and are already leaving, some for Singapore.
Xi Jinping’s long-term objective is to combine Hong Kong into the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Higher Bay Space area. His success on this endeavor will probably be Hong Kong’s downfall as town will lose distinctiveness. As they are saying, Hong Kong is changing into “simply one other Chinese language metropolis.”
And in what's the most dreadful signal of the occasions, the Hong Kong police at the moment are goose-stepping, identical to the Chinese language navy.
So along with his management of Hong Kong, why is Xi Jinping afraid to spend a single night time there?
China is now hated in Hong Kong. There was a burst of pro-China patriotism in 1997, the yr of the handover. Now, nevertheless, folks within the territory more and more self-identify as “Hong Kongers” and never as “Chinese language.” Hong Kong College closed its survey-conducting Public Opinion Program, and plenty of imagine that the transfer was in response to Beijing’s embarrassment.
And persons are voting with their toes. Hundreds are leaving for good, many to the UK, which has provided a British Nationwide Abroad visa that allows Hong Kongers the correct to dwell, work and examine there.
Those that can’t depart Hong Kong resist. Hong Kong folks have repeatedly booed the Chinese language nationwide anthem, the “March of the Volunteers,” at sporting occasions.
“That is an insurgency,” conflict correspondent Michael Yon, who extensively lined the 2019 protests, advised me on the time. As he defined, insurgencies can soften into the background and seem like they've died however typically spring again.
Protest actions in Hong Kong comply with Yon’s sample. With out warning, greater than a half-million folks got here out to show in 2003 over a Hong Kong authorities try to enact national-security laws. The motion nearly fully disappeared till the months-long Umbrella Protests of 2014, sparked by the federal government’s reneging on common suffrage promised by the Fundamental Legislation, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution. Marches, one involving about 2 million folks, came about in 2019 over the extradition proposal.
So why did Xi Jinping not really feel secure sufficient to remain one night time in Hong Kong? I believe he is aware of that regardless of the coercive energy of the world’s largest communist state, Hong Kong stays hostile territory for him, populated by freedom-loving insurgents.
Gordon G. Chang is the writer of “The Coming Collapse of China.”
Twitter: @GordonGChang
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