Sitting out not an option as perfect storm looms
United States President Donald Trump trade-sanctioned China; Hong Kong citizens, including its government, in general take a detached attitude. As a separate tariff territory from the Chinese mainland and without electronic manufacturing activities, we act as if we were a bystander.
This is the wrong stand because Hong Kong is, along with the mainland, on the sanctioned list although we are not hurt much. As a separate tariff territory Hong Kong has to defend its rights under World Trade Organization agreements irrespective of any actual harm. In fact because we are totally unrelated to the current trade dispute the US has with the mainland we should be left out of the sanction.
It is a matter of principle because we will never know how far this crazy trade war initiated unilaterally by Trump will go. Should we connive at this unlawful transgression, we will be innocently dragged deeper and deeper into this nonsense. So what is the status of a separate tariff territory after all, and what is the point of being a special administrative region within China?
If we treasure “one country, two systems” as we all claim we do, we should take the issue to the WTO and fight. This is not pleading as some pundit would jeer at because it is a legitimate fight.
It seems that our decision-makers are not aware that an epic economic war has erupted under an even bigger new Cold War. Two giants, China and the US, are now locking horns. Some call this the Thucydides’ Trap — some US scholars claim war is inevitable when a rising power challenges the existing one.
While the mainland has no intension whatsoever to challenge the ongoing Pax Americana, the US has already fixated on China as its No 1 competitor and a “revisionist” to the current international order, and is bent on crushing it. Hong Kong as China’s cosmopolitan city under “one country, two systems” is caught right in the middle of it.
Psychologically our decision-makers are not prepared for this colossal confrontation and up till now they don’t seem to realize a perfect storm is gathering. As China’s international financial center, Hong Kong is especially vulnerable. Many of us have perhaps forgotten the pain of the Asian Financial Crisis some 20 years ago. With the help of the central government and a lot of luck we managed to fend off the attack but subsequently the city was plunged into 60