The US, which is forever intervening in other sovereign countries, from outright invasion and occupation, to staging coups d’etat and imposing severe economic sanctions, not to mention the occasional assassinations, kidnappings and torture, complains Beijing is interfering too much in Hong Kong, a Chinese city no less
Departing United States Consul General Hanscom Smith said Beijing should let “Hong Kong be Hong Kong”. The US Congressional-Executive Commission on China wants to sanction mid-level local officials, the new justice secretary and prosecutors for, well, whatever. Yes, they are talking about Hong Kong, a Chinese city. US officials’ incessant finger-pointing at the city and Beijing is becoming a sick joke.
Admittedly, parent China and child Hong Kong have hit a rough patch lately. And yes, it’s always the parent’s fault. But then, a violent serial child abuser comes along and picks on the Chinese family in the name of child protection. This is just too rich!
The US is a country that has been forever intervening in other sovereign states, from outright invasion and occupation, to staging coups d’etat, carrying out assassinations, kidnappings and torture, and severe economic sanctions that have killed hundreds of thousands of children, for example, in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, not to say malnourished many more, and to destroying whole economies, from Afghanistan to Venezuela.
John Bolton, the former national security adviser under Donald Trump, admitted this week during a CNN appearance to planning coups d’etat against foreign governments.
When the network host said, “One doesn’t have to be brilliant to attempt a coup,” Bolton disagreed. “As somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat ― not here but, you know, other places ― it takes a lot of work,” Bolton said.
People well-versed in US history and politics know the country’s foreign policy is all about interfering with other countries left, right and centre, from outright organised violence to more diplomatic means. It’s almost always claimed to be done in the interests of the local population but inevitably ended in their detriment, if not physical destruction.
Still, it’s nice to have someone like Bolton to admit it on national US media.
Is the US really concerned about Hong Kong and its freedom and well-being? It is, of course, another typical case of interfering in another society by exploiting its social instabilities and domestic problems, and then using human rights and freedom as a kill-all weapon to gain leverage over that country. It’s standard operating procedure for the US foreign policy establishment, whether it’s of the left or right, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative.
And of course, Washington can always find some useful local idiots to complain about their own society and offer excuses or even invitations for the US to intervene.
The latest includes several who testified this week before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which has become the official propaganda organ of the US Congress against China: Patrick Poon of the Institute of Comparative Law at Meiji University; Fermi Wong, founder and former executive director of the NGO Unison in Hong Kong; Ching Cheong, veteran dissident journalist; and Samuel Bickett, a fellow at Georgetown Centre for Asian Law. Bickett has resurfaced to become a “human rights lawyer”. He used to work for a big bank in Hong Kong but was jailed briefly for assaulting a police officer during the civil unrest of 2019. In the US, he would have been shot by the cop. But somehow he thinks Hong Kong police are worse.
Personally, if I were one of those people, I might run to a more neutral family service to complain about parent and child China and Hong Kong, say, at the United Nations. But, unless you have an axe to grind, running to a violent serial child abuser with sinister designs on the family is hardly advisable.
In a new book, The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, Canadian author Stephen Marche warned the collapse of the American democratic experiment would be bad for freedom everywhere. I find his claim bizarre.
“It would be a lie, an evil lie, to say that the American experiment did not give the world a glorious and transcendent vision of human beings: worth affirming in their differences, vital in their contradiction,” Marche wrote. “That is still a vision of human existence worth fighting for.”
There are plenty of successful democracies around the world, none of which is constantly looking for monsters abroad to slay, and in doing so, becomes a monster itself.
And, radicals of the 19th century and Marxist revolutionaries in the 20th gave the world “a glorious and transcendent vision of human beings”, too: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Leon Trotsky once wrote that people of the socialist future would be physically taller and stronger, and more intelligent from universal education. He was no doubt thinking about those long passages in volume one of Karl Marx’s Capital about stunted and malnourished young children being worked to death in 19th century British industrial factories.
We are all happy to see Soviet totalitarianism being consigned to the dustbin of history. But there is no denying that without those radicals and Marxists of the past two centuries, there would have been no social democracy and the welfare state after the second world war.
Thomas Jefferson wrote those inspired words of the Declaration of Independence; he also owned hundreds of black slaves. Obviously, the concepts of liberty and happiness did not apply to slaves who were not fully human.
The Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights will long remain the ideal expressions of freedom and democracy. Too bad their progenies are now tearing apart the republic they have inherited and are exporting militarism and hegemonic destruction around the world in the very name of liberty. I was going to write that it’s just Orwellian, but it’s actually deeper. It’s more akin to what Hegel calls the cunning of history or reason, when every idea or ideal, carried to extreme, becomes its very opposite.
Now, in the US, the chickens are coming home to roost. Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential election and remain in power, leading to the January 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol, is a clear warning of worse to come. In a functioning democracy, he would be in jail. In the US, he is more than likely to be the Republican candidate for president again. Go figure.
US politicians should tend to their own backyard. It’s in enough trouble as it is.
The effort to counter China’s ‘malign influence’ would fund negative coverage of China’s Belt and Road Initiative—while also beefing up the U.S.’s international lending.
When you try to back up your false assumptions, you look like a fool.
If the person you claim to be concerned with repeatedly said she is fine — under duress, or not — what can you do ? As per Peng Shuai’s latest interview with L’equipe, she insisted she is fine and there was no sexual assault.
This is a moment for WTA, Martina Navratilova and all those #whereispengshuai minions to take a step back and re-examine the premise for this fiasco.
WTA withdrawing from China wasn’t a big loss at all for WTA — Steve Simon and WTA accountants have made the calculated risks, and there is, no risk.
Sure, the profits won’t be huge, but WTA is not in the red.
In fact, the women’s tennis tour ran well in 2020 and 2021, without a single WTA events in China, due to China’s Covid restrictions. It was a test run for the women’s tour. They can survived and still ran a reasonably good tour without China’s deep pocket.
So all the talk about morality and ethics over profits isn’t the whole story.
But it is a set-back for the many aspiring young girls trying to follow Li Na’s footsteps.
And what did Peng really write? People should know how to read Chinese , the nuances and the motivation, before they jump to conclusion. And boy, did they judged, so harshly and they jumped at the chance to beat their chest with self-righteous indignity , because it vilifies China and confirms their biases.
The language and word choice, and cultural aspects have to be taken into account in Peng’s post. This is a woman having an affair with a married man. Her post is not something you can just directly translate into English to have the full sense of the content.
There will be no end to this saga, but I hope people can see what sort of tight leash the Anglo-Saxon world and their lap dogs pull on China. The premise is China has sinned. Where is the ‘ beyond the benefit of doubt’ mantra so often used in criminal and civil justice lawsuits in the West?
Those #whereispengshuai minions, journalists and Martina Navratilova could use their time in more constructive ways, for example – show their concern and outrage about the thousands of missing women in the United States, especially women of colour ( see this, this and this), in their own backyard. Why pull your hair over a multi-millionaire Chinese tennis player who is apparently fine, insisted she is fine from her own words, and not missing?
picture from: Voices for Those Who Have Been Silenced: Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women -Examining the issue of missing American Indian women throughout the United States (link)
picture from :There Are 64,000 Missing Black Women and Girls in the United States and No One Seems to Care (link)
Comments : We need to see through this kind of a fetish for a backward, 3rd-world living from a white, British woman, lamenting the loss of a polluting, time-consuming, and no doubt, uncomfortable rail travel for the locals who need to make this arduous journey – they are not sight-seeing like you – but are going from Point A to B — just more imperialist gushing and bullshit. Too bad Ms Davis can’t enjoy the scenic long , slow, ride anymore. BUT DON’T WORRY Ms Davis — LOADS of these trains in the USA. You are welcome. Wonder why FT publishes nice high school essays..
The time-honoured ritual of a long, slow, train journey home for Chinese New Year is under threat — both from Covid restrictions and the rapid expansion of high-speed rail
Camilla Bell-Davies
JANUARY 29 2022 2
The largest human migration in the world used to take place in the days leading up to Chinese New Year — which this year falls on February 1. Millions crossed vast distances to reunite with their families, many travelling on long-haul trains, sometimes for days. The last New Year of this kind was February 2019, when I joined a packed train heading from frozen Beijing to China’s warm southern province, Yunnan. It was a journey of 35 hours.
Perhaps it was only on these train trips that all the languages and diversity of China from north to south were drawn together so intimately. This seems unthinkable today, with Covid restrictions meaning many Chinese are unable to travel home for a third year in a row. Back then though, passengers were crammed in among piles of presents and luggage, sipping flasks of tea and Tsingtao beer, all buzzing for the holiday. In my compartment, a group of workers from Hunan province played Go noisily while passing round bags of melon seeds. These have a subtle roasted flavour and the chewing promotes reflection — perfect for the long hours on the train.
Progress was slow because we were aboard a lupiche, one of the “green skin trains” built in the 1950s under Mao. Characterised by heavy ironwork, clanking doors and faded yellow interiors, these old trains have lumbered across the vast country innumerable times — a slice of China perpetually in motion. Inside, they smell of metal, oil, and cigarettes from the smokers who lurk between carriages.
But lupiche are fast disappearing in favour of high-speed trains. In the past five years, about 20,000km of new high-speed track has been laid; earlier this month the China State Railway Group announced the total had now reached more than 40,000km, enough to stretch around the equator. Meanwhile, China recently debuted a Maglev bullet train capable of reaching a speed of 600km per hour. Tickets are much pricier; the Beijing to Kunming high-speed train can cost double my Y600 (£70) slow-sleeper ticket. Like many on the lupiche, I was travelling deeper into the countryside than the high-speed lines reach, to stay with a friend’s family for Chinese New Year.
“These old trains have lumbered across the vast country innumerable times — a slice of China perpetually in motion”
When I did, the view was initially disappointing. The landscapes of Hebei province were flat and drab, smoke poured from factory chimneys. But by late afternoon we passed through the cliffs of Xingtai and into Henan province, where mountains began to loom, promising beautiful views that we would miss during the night. Pots of noodles were passed around as dusk fell, filling the train with umami fragrance. At last, the sun touched down over the lakes of Xinyang, and the train became quiet.
A strict ritual occurred at bedtime. Everyone wedged themselves into one of three tiers of bunks, feet dangling into the open corridor. A guard passed through to check tickets, followed by a man with a mop. Lights went out down the train, a few last cigarettes flared in the gaps between carriages. I was soon rocked to sleep by the motion of the lupiche lumbering on through the dark.
We awoke to a different world, somewhere close to Huaihua in Hunan province. Everything was strange and new: the green earth dissolving into mist, haybales piled up like stupas, fishermen hauling nets in gleaming rivers. By midday, we were crawling through Guizhou, a province famous for its spectacular limestone orogeny. All around us, white peaks rose up like giant stalagmites. The region is also a centre of rice cultivation and its hills shone iridescent, tiled in hundreds of water paddies, farmers treading lightly along their seams.
Faces on the train changed as the language softened to southern dialect. Many people were wearing the intricately embroidered clothes of the ethnic minorities in the Guizhou and Yunnan region. Their distinctive dress has been captured by the photographer Qian Haifeng who travelled 150,000 kilometers across China on the slow trains, documenting his subjects with a rare intimacy — the kind encouraged by these long journeys. Indeed, Qian rarely ever points the camera out of the window.
Meanwhile I had become a windowseat-hogger, gazing out at the landscapes with the greed of an enchanted child. At midnight we finally arrived in Kunming, where the air felt warm and clean. 38 hours ago I’d been skating on a frozen lake in Beijing, now the tropical forests of Vietnam were close.
I spent the two-week holiday with a friend’s family among Yunnan’s mountainous rice terraces, consuming sublime amounts of home-brewed baijiu and festive foods. On New Year’s Eve, we watched the fireworks blazing above a mist-filled valley. There had been views I’d missed on the night train passage — Wuchang, Yueyang, Changsha — beautiful places to which I wished to return. Perhaps the line will still be open next time I go.
The widely reported narrative that Beijing tried to impose a law to snatch dissidents from Hong Kong in 2019 was never true
Peaceful demonstrators quickly fled the protests as they realized something dark, violent, and well-organized lay just below the surface
The media simply relayed stories and numbers they were given by one side, failing to do their jobs to investigate and report
The allegation that “police brutality” was the issue was simply false: Hong Kong is a low-crime city with good relations between citizens and law enforcement
THERE ARE TWO STORIES about what happened in Hong Kong in 2019.
One, portrayed in Western media, says Beijing broke its “one country, two systems” promise and encroached on the freedoms of Hongkongers, who bravely responded with massive pro-democracy protests that were met with police brutality.
The other says that organizers of violent riots were funded by the U.S. to pay rioters and special consultants who taught them how to make the compliant Western press write that they were pro-democracy protesters fighting against repression and police brutality.
Guess which one is true.
EYEWITNESS EVIDENCE
Unlike the multitude of offshore armchair commentators expressing their views on the violent social upheaval that began in June 2019, I lived in Hong Kong through that period, as did Nury Vittachi, whose eyewitness investigative journalism I will discuss.
We each saw, directly, what was happening.
NEW YORK TIMES FEATURE
On October 14, 2014, an op-ed was published in The New York Times titled, “Hong Kong’s Pop Culture of Protest,” by Vittachi, a Sri Lanka-born journalist living and writing in Hong Kong since 1987.
The op-ed celebrated the protest known as the “Umbrella Movement” that was under way in Hong Kong at the time. Vittachi explained that the protest was about “rejecting the influence of Beijing over Hong Kong’s next election.”
I visited the central site of that protest at that time, and I, too, felt the celebratory atmosphere. Protests in two of the busiest areas of Hong Kong, the business district known as Central, and Nathan Road, the main thoroughfare in the Mongkok district, had filled the streets and brought traffic to a standstill. The double-decker buses that traverse Nathan Road, near where I lived – as many as hundreds per hour – had found ways around the blockages and were otherwise carrying on as usual, as if they were genially accommodating the protests.
The 2014 protest was well-organized and well-led, with large numbers of expensive tents. Image by Underbar DK/ Wikimedia Commons
When I visited the protest site in Central, I marvelled at its vast expanse of colourful upscale tents, of the type you find at Patagonia. They were shelters for the huge number of protesters camped out there.
My first thought was, “When this is over, perhaps the city planners will realize what a boon to the city it would be to turn this downtown area into a pedestrian mall.”
I also thought for a brief moment, “I wonder how they pay for all these tents? They aren’t cheap.” Hong Kong is a rich city, though most of its residents aren’t.
CONFUSED MESSAGE
Another thought that occurred to me was that if someone didn’t know who the leader of this movement was, they would think it was John Lennon, because his picture was everywhere and his song, “Imagine,” filled the air.
This was curious because the protests were presumably anti-Communist, but Lennon himself described the song as “virtually the Communist Manifesto,” with its dreams of ending private property and religion.
THEBACKGROUND
In 1842, Hong Kong island was seized by force during the Opium War from China by Britain. Additional territory was added to the city later, with the largest part area-wise, the New Territories, being annexed in 1898 by a 99-year gunboat-lease agreement with China. Therefore, it seemed appropriate to China to request the entire city back at the end of that lease in 1997.
A waxwork reconstruction of the 1984 meeting between Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher at a Shenzhen visitor attraction. Picture by Brücke-Osteuropa/ Wikimedia Commons
An agreement was struck in the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984 for the territory to be handed back to China in 1997. That event was subsequently called “the handover.”
In the joint declaration, China agreed that Hong Kong would be governed by a doctrine of “one country, two systems,” in which it would keep its form of government, legal systems and policies including its free speech and press traditions for at least 50 years following the handover.
This agreement was to be elaborated in a Hong Kong mini-constitution known as the Basic Law, negotiated by a committee of Hong Kong and mainland China officials.
UNDEMOCRATIC PAST
One provision of the Basic Law was that Hong Kong’s chief executive – its top official – would be elected by universal suffrage, something that had never happened when the British were in charge. Although 92% of Hong Kong’s population are Chinese, the chief executive under the British was an unelected British official appointed by the Queen.
The actual wording of the provision is as follows:
“The method for selecting the Chief Executive shall be specified in the light of the actual situation in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and in accordance with the principle of gradual and orderly progress. The ultimate aim is the selection of the Chief Executive by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures.”
Hongkongers had agitated after the handover for realization of that provision. In August 2014 Hong Kong’s civil service finally promulgated a process by which the chief executive would be elected. The election would be by universal suffrage, but the nominees would be screened and vetted by a 1,200-strong committee of Hongkongers, much the same committee that had been electing the chief executive since the handover. The majority of that committee were representatives of Hong Kong business communities. Since they did a lot of business with the mainland, it was believed – generally correctly – that they tended to have mainland sympathies, or to be “pro-Beijing.”
UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE REJECTED
Many Hongkongers who had been participating in peaceful pro-democracy protests over the years – including Vittachi – interpreted this as a failure to adhere to the promise of free elections, though it was definitely not in violation of the Basic Law’s actual wording. Vittachi, a widely-read journalist in Hong Kong, gave rise to a viral meme by saying that the proposal to vet the nominees amounted to a “choose your own puppet” election.
The pan-democrats – the pro-democracy faction – rejected the offer.
The unfortunate result, from Hong Kong’s perspective – and from everybody else’s, it turns out – was that the chief executive continued to be elected by that 1,200-strong committee, not by universal suffrage.
NEEDFOR EXTRADITION LAW
Hong Kong was behind other jurisdictions in the passing of an extradition law recommended by the United Nations Model Treaty on Extradition, which “urges all States to strengthen further international co-operation in criminal justice” and “urges Member States to inform the Secretary-General periodically of efforts undertaken to establish extradition arrangements.”
Most jurisdictions worldwide had extradition treaties with most other jurisdictions worldwide, but Hong Kong had few.
As Vittachi noted, “Britain had signed extradition treaties with numerous countries with utterly abysmal human rights records, such as Iraq and Zimbabwe. America had signed deals with the Congo, Myanmar and El Salvador, among others.”
MURDER MOST FOUL
When a Hong Kong man murdered his pregnant girlfriend during a joint holiday in Taiwan, and then escaped back to Hong Kong, he could not be tried for murder as Hong Kong criminal law does not apply in Taiwan.
A gruesome murder in Taiwan — Chan Tong-kai did not deny that he had killed Poon Hiu-wing (left); Police pictures
Neither could he be extradited due to that lack of a legal framework. This prompted Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam to take care of unfinished business by proposing an extradition law for Hong Kong in February 2019.
But the Hong Kong protestor inclination was to view this as a way for Beijing to snatch political protestors and try them in the mainland. (This inclination was fuelled by the fact that there had been incidents of Hong Kong booksellers who sold books critical of high-level mainland political figures being snatched, though it was not known how this happened or who did it.)
The proposed law would allow nothing of the sort, but it was seen nonetheless as another threat to the one country, two systems model.
SCARE STORIES
As a result, after scare stories about the proposed law had circulated widely, a massive peaceful protest took place on June 9. The protest leaders told the international media that a million people had participated in the march, and the international (i.e., Western) media dutifully printed that without checking. But any systematic count would have revealed that the number of marchers was far less.
It was, nevertheless, a massive turnout. Chief Executive Carrie Lam responded by welcoming the peaceful protest. But after more such protests, she responded to popular sentiment and withdrew the bill.
UTTER CHAOS
In spite of the withdrawal of the bill – to cover the next six months very, very briefly – the protests continued, then descended into utter chaos.
A violent faction became prevalent, commandeering the streets, invading, trashing and desecrating Hong Kong’s legislature (called Legco), hurling petrol bombs and bricks pried loose from Hong Kong’s streets at police and eventually shooting arrows, some flaming, and launching the bricks and bombs using catapults.
Shockingly violent incidents began on June 9, 2019 and continued for months, with almost all of Hong Kong’s MTR stations damaged, and huge amounts of damage to people and property. Image by Studio Incendio/ Unsplash
The protestors swarmed into Hong Kong’s metro stations and broke everything they could. They demolished Hong Kong’s world-class malls and stores and businesses that had any perceived relationships to mainland people or even to Mandarin speakers (Hong Kong’s spoken language is Cantonese while Mandarin is spoken on the mainland).
They killed one innocent bystander, set another on fire and beat up many who disagreed with them. They wounded many police officers, some severely.
In the end, they took over two university campuses, where they occupied bridges over heavily trafficked highways and threw large objects down on the traffic, set up weapons manufacturing stations, and battled police.
POLICE BLAMED
The rioters blamed the police, claiming “police brutality.” They spread rumors that police had killed a number of protestors, perhaps thousands.
Through all this, the Western press continued to call the riots “pro-democracy protests,” and the cause of those protests suppression by Beijing.
The much larger group of peaceful protesters drifted away from the demonstrations and no longer participated. Most of the erstwhile leaders of that group, called the pan-dems or pan-democrats, did not roundly condemn the rioters, not even when they presented their absurd “five demands, not one less!” which included the non-negotiable demands that they all be granted amnesty and that their protests not be called riots.
One of Vittachi’s readers made the Dave Barry-like comment: “They are literally rioting to protest against being defined as rioters,” he said, amazed. “You can’t make this stuff up.”
Anyone with an interest in what has been happening in Hong Kong should read it, whether they have the least predisposition to agree with it or not.
Although nearly everybody in the United States will vehemently deny this, and say that it is propaganda from Beijing, it is obvious that it has much more than a grain of truth in it.
It is the truth.
PETROL BOMB TRAINING
Vittachi, in his role as a peripatetic journalist in Hong Kong for over 30 years, has cultivated a large number of followers and contacts, many of whom send him emails and messages and serve as his extended eyes and ears.
These people include financial executives as well as ordinary Hong Kong wives and mothers, students, and other contacts. Vittachi maintains “offices” at various coffee shops around the city where he meets with people to chat and get local opinions and observations.
He teaches courses at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the largest university in the city and was able to visit it during the last and final and most intense battle in November 2019, when the rioters occupied the campus and were surrounded by police.
The view from inside the burned-out Polytechnic University shows seven black-clad men guarding the entrance bridge. The world was told that the students were occupying the university, but out of about 1,600-occupiers, only 46 had any connection with the university. Picture by Nury Vittachi
There, he says, “I watched men train younger people how to do a long run-up and then release their missiles at ‘about 42 degrees’ so that they flew in a graceful curving arc, smashing into a pillar in the distance. In another area, masked archers were practicing the use of high-technology bow and arrow sets. Over in the swimming pool area, men were experimenting with different substances for Molotov cocktails to see which spread the furthest and burned for the longest period.”
THE REAL STORY
His network of ordinary Hongkongers and informers at high levels brought him the real story. The protestors were neither students nor at the universities but hired rioters.
When the occupiers of Hong Kong Polytechnic University finally gave up and filed out and surrendered to the police, it was found that of about 1,600 occupiers, only 46 had any relation to the university.
CASH WAS FLOWING
“Adults, youths, school children, and even domestic helpers have told me that they have been offered cash in significant amounts – sometimes thousands of Hong Kong dollars – to join the protests. Teachers tell me children from their schools, kids who were clearly under 18, were offered HK$300 each (that’s about US$40) to bulk up the numbers at protests. They just needed to turn up in black and do some shouting, throw a few bricks and that sort of thing.”
Who was paying them? “This year alone,” says Vittachi, “the U.S. has budgeted $643,000 (HK$5 million) for pro-U.S. anti-China activists in Hong Kong through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the CIA’s regime-change arm – but other large sums are being sent through other groups. These include the Open Technology Fund, which presents itself on its website as a non-profit independent organization but is a U.S. government-led operation to boost protester organizations’ communications capabilities.”
REVOLUTION CONSULTANTS
You don’t believe this? But it should be obvious. The United States has been funding government destabilization efforts in many countries for 70 years – and worse. Why should it be different now?
Part of the money was used to pay professional protest consultants, some of them from Serbia who were experienced from their anti-Milosevitch work, to teach protesters how to stage their activities so that journalists and photographers are led to photograph lone protesters being wrestled to the ground by police, feeding allegations of “police brutality.”
THEAFTERMATH
The stories the protesters told the Western media were almost all lies, but the Western media sopped them up.
Police brutality was not the cause of the riots. Police killed no one and harmed very few, considering the level of violence of the rioters. Vittachi noted that “The most recent Police Service Satisfaction Survey at the time was the one taken just last year, in 2018, in which 84% of respondents were either ‘quite satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ with the overall service performance of the police. Furthermore, 79% of respondents were either ‘quite confident’ or ‘very confident’ in the police.”
In any other city around the world, the military would have been called out to deal with that level of violence: but Hong Kong’s circumstances meant that the job was left to the local police. Image by Oscar Chan/Pexels
The United States should have such a police force. Referring to the way the story was reported by the Western media, Vittachi says: “Hong Kong police had instantly and miraculously been transformed overnight from one of the best-loved police forces in the world to the most brutal police force in the world.”
RIOTERS HOPED FOR BEIJING TANKS
The Hong Kong police, overwhelmed by the rioters, mostly stood back and let things happen, to preserve order as best they could in a very crowded city with substantial fire hazard from the Molotov cocktails that the rioters were throwing – even in underground MTR stations – and to avoid causing any deaths or serious injuries. Remembering Beijing’s brutal crackdown on protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989 – an event that was annually commemorated by Hong Kong’s protest movement – there was a fear that Beijing would have to step in to quell the riots, and such a crackdown would occur again.
In fact, that was probably what the rioters – and their U.S.-based handlers – hoped for.
BEIJING’S SURPRISING PATIENCE
But instead, Beijing took a velvet-glove approach. The Hong Kong Basic Law had specified that:
“The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People’s Government, or theft of state secrets, to prohibit foreign political organizations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organizations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organizations or bodies.”
This would not be much different from security laws in many other countries, including the US, Australia, and numerous others.
But the Hong Kong government had not been able to enact such a law when it tried in 2003 due to the protest movement and suspicion of Beijing. Now, Beijing simply imposed such a law, and the Hong Kong government has been enforcing it strictly, applying it to those persons in Hong Kong who provided encouragement, aid and support to the violent riots and coordinated with foreign powers, most specifically the US.
This may not have been the endgame that anybody wanted, but at least Beijing didn’t crack down violently.
REPORTER’S REGRET
Vittachi now regrets that he didn’t support accepting Beijing’s half-a-loaf offer of democratic election of Hong Kong’s chief executive in 2014. I had written in 2016 that Hong Kong’s democracy seekers needed to go slow, but the recommendation was not taken.
“That was the key moment,” Vittachi says, “when Hong Kong could have moved towards being a Western-style democracy. But we missed it.”
And this is true. With the aid of the United States, Hong Kong was shifted from the path of greater – if not perfect – democracy to the path, at least for the time being, of less democracy.
Thanks a lot for the help.
Vittachi says of his long history of marching for Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” ideal, “We were marching not against China, but in favor of China being its best self.”
Michael Edesess is an economist and mathematician. An adjunct associate professor and visiting faculty member at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, he is also managing partner and special advisor at M1K LLC, and a research associate of the Edhec-Risk Institute.
‘ The prior claim was genocide, but without a shred of evidence, they ( US) are forced to downscale to claims of “cultural genocide”. Instead of providing evidence, which they, of course, cannot, the US is demanding that companies operating in Xinjiang do what should never be expected under the rule of law : to prove they are innocent. Of course since it’s hard to prove the negative, the US hopes to grab Xinjiang industry in a stranglehold, sucking hard earned gains and prosperity from the Uyghur people, in the hope that it will lead back to unrest, violence and terrorism.’
tell it like it is 