The Hong Kong Protests

The Hong Kong Protests

Hong Kong is a jewel in modern Asia. It has the most skyscrapers of any city in the world (355, to NYC’s 282), and is one of the busiest ports in the world.

I first visited Hong Kong in 1981 and could not fail to be impressed, even then, how modern and tech-savvy the city was. Of course Hong Kong was then under British rule, with the union jack flying over it all.

I was equally impressed in 2015, on a tour of China and Hong Kong. The fact that Hong Kong had some degree of western autonomy, even if it was now a part of China and under that red flag, was illustrated by the fact that I used Hong Kong’s VPN servers to elude China’s “Golden Wall”, and was able to successfully use Google and western social media on the mainland. (Along with several million or so other western users).

The current massive protests and civil unrest in Hong Kong started as opposition to a proposed extradition bill related originally to a murder in Taiwan, but with wider applicability to future extradition of Hong Kong citizens to the inimical, brutal judicial system of communist mainland China. The extradition bill was eventually removed by Carrie Lam and the Hong Kong government, but the protests have continued. Although they were originally aimed at maintaining democratic principles in Hong Kong under the “One Country, Two Systems” agreement hammered out by the British with Deng Xiaoping in the 1980's, they now are more separatist in nature, and seek independence from Communist China. A plethora of American flags accompany the protests, along with slogans like “Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death”. The analogy to our American independence is unmistakable. There are few, or no union jacks flying over these protesters.

Freedom loving people cannot fail to sympathize with the Hong Kong protesters who are resisting being ultimately absorbed into monolithic Communist China. Our congress, and President Trump, passed a bill backing the Hong Kong protesters, even in face of the very economically important trade negotiations with the mainland communist Chinese.

But in the cold clear light of day one cannot escape reality. After being leased from the Chinese by the British for 150 years, Hong Kong, since 1997, has been part of China. It is a special, negotiated autonomous region of China, but it is part of China.

The Hong Kong protests have “poked the bear”, in the form of China’s supreme leader, Xi Jinping, who is not a wild-eyed radical, but who cannot fail to respond. Hopefully this response will be diplomatic, granting some concessions that will satisfy the Hong Kong protesters. But it will not be separation and independence, no matter how vociferous the protesters are, nor how much external sympathy they elicit. Hong Kong is too valuable to the PRC.  And Xi Jinping's response may very well be a crackdown, to which the Beijing government are no strangers, either historically, or currently, as with the Uyghurs in Western China.

This article paints a realistic, but somewhat pessimistic picture of what Hong Kong might expect.

https://humanevents.com/2019/08/31/xi-jinping-will-have-his-way-with-hong-kong/



Ray Gruszecki,

November 29, 2019