National Post (National Edition)
City-state a victim of statutory terrorism
To fully appreciate the historic significance of the tragedy that befell Hong Kong this week, it’s not enough to notice that Chinese Supreme Leader Xi Jinping has finally shredded the city-state’s foundational autonomy by abrogating the “one country, two systems” terms of Britain’s surrender of its former colony to the People’s Republic of China in 1997.
The draconian “national security” law imposed on Hong Kong by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in Beijing will embed China’s secret police in Hong Kong and enable Beijing’s officials to prosecute dissident Hongkongers on charges of treason, subversion, terrorism, separatism and collusion with foreign forces. It’s statutory terrorism, pure and simple. Xi is now openly repudiating the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, a solemn treaty registered with the United Nations that was supposed to guarantee Hong Kong’s post-1997 autonomy for at least another 50 years. But these facts alone do not come close to accounting for the enormity of what has happened.
To find an instructive parallel to the tragedy unfolding in Hong Kong at the moment you’d have to reach back as far as Aug. 21, 1968, when the Soviet Union dispatched columns of tanks and more than half a million heavily-armed Russian and Warsaw Pact soldiers to crush a nonviolent uprising in Czechoslovakia, forcing a brutal and vicious end to the youthful, democratic Prague Spring.
Another parallel that’s worth citing is Moscow’s smashing of the Hungarian Revolution on Nov. 10, 1956. A pro-democracy student protest had spread from Budapest and quickly blossomed into a countrywide open revolt. Workers’ councils organized themselves into militias and waged guerrilla warfare against invading Soviet troops, but they were outgunned and overpowered. More than 2,500 Hungarians were killed, at least 200,000 people fled the country, and it was all over in a matter of weeks.
It has been more than a year since Hongkongers first poured into the streets, initially to protest an extradition law Beijing’s proxies in Hong Kong had attempted to force through the citystate’s officially gerrymandered legislative council. The non-violent protests were met with brutal police violence, and quickly evolved into a mass revival of Hong Kong’s democracy movement, which had waxed and waned ever since 1997. Since last June, nearly 11,000 Hongkongers have been arrested, including 1,707 children.
But unlike Prague and Budapest, Hong Kong is not being subdued militarily. It is not just that Beijing already more or less occupies Hong Kong.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union collapsed in a swamp of economic stagnation and democratic upheaval in the late 1980s, while the Chinese Communist Party crushed China’s democracy movement in the bloody climax of the Tiananmen Square massacres of 1989. More importantly, the People’s Republic of China retained its Leninist organizational norms but ditched communism in favour of a sclerotic and grossly stratified form of state capitalism.
Two years ago, the Shanghai-based research project, the Hurun Report, estimated the net personal wealth of the ruling People’s Congress at $650 billion. With 1.4 billion people, China is the world’s most populous country, and even though per-capita income is only about a quarter of that of most developed countries, China’s economy is the world’s second largest, and Beijing has invested vast resources in “elite capture,” strategic investment, influence-peddling networks and divide-and-rule operations throughout the liberal democracies.
And that’s how Beijing gets away with the most brazen transgressions of international law and basic decency. It’s how Beijing gets away with hostage diplomacy, as in the case of the Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who were kidnapped 568 days ago in retaliation for Canada’s detention of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou on a U.S. extradition warrant related to bank fraud and sanctions-evasion charges she and Huawei are facing in New York.
It’s why some of the bestknown names in Canada’s political establishment, just last week, could get away with endorsing Beijing’s demands, and be treated by no small cohort of Canada’s national news media as though they were merely public-spirited citizens offering their guidance and counsel, in an act of goodwill, so as to get Prime Minister Justin Trudeau out of a jam.
It’s how Beijing gets away with genocide. Just this week, an exhaustively researched Associated Press report documented a system of forced birth control that China’s national security apparatus is imposing on China’s Muslim minorities, notably the Uyghur people of Xinjiang, at least a million of whom have already been rounded up and corralled in concentration camps.
The women are required to submit to sterilization, forced abortions and the implanting of intrauterine devices, in order to keep the Muslim population down. “It’s genocide, full stop,” Joanne Smith Finley of Newcastle University in Britain told the AP. “These are direct means of genetically reducing the Uyghur population.”
And it’s how Beijing is getting away with crushing the Hongkongers’ freedom struggle as surely as the Soviets crushed the uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
There is an encouraging effort that several Canadian senators and MPs have joined, along with 19 Canadian civil society organizations and several parliamentarians around the world, led by several dozen Hong Kong local district councillors and human rights activists.
The initiative calls for countries like Canada to co-ordinate a joint strategy of Magnitsky-type sanctions aimed at officials who are directly complicit in human rights abuses in China and Hong Kong that would freeze their assets and subject them to persona-nongrata status. The effort also proposes filing cases against China before the International Court of Justice, and urges democracies to develop “lifeboat” schemes to offer Hong Kong democrats a route to refuge.
These measures amount to just the bare minimum course that any self-respecting liberal democracy should be expected to adopt in the face of such barbarism. Still, there is money and power involved, and access to China’s lucrative domestic markets that Canada’s corporate class is always salivating about, so even though the great and beloved free city of Hong Kong is now almost fully eclipsed by Beijing’s dark shadow, and from across the Pacific Ocean you can almost hear the hearts of Hong Kong’s young democrats breaking, it may be a stretch to expect much will come of it.