Democracies cannot appease tyranny

The crushing of Hong Kong’s democracy is an abhorrent act by a brutal dictatorship

ong Kong is dead,” Jimmy Lai, a prodemocracy activist and founder of the Apple Daily newspaper, told the Associated Press. “It’s worse than the worst scenario imagined. Hong Kong is totally subdued, totally under control.”

Within hours of the new security law coming into force, hundreds of people in Hong Kong were being arrested by police for “crimes” such as waving another country’s flag.

Suddenly, the one part of China where democracy was permitted under the “one country, two systems” approach, used since the UK returned the territory, was placed under the same kind totalitarian regime as the mainland. Expressing an opinion can now lead to life imprisonment. Amnesty International reported security agencies from the mainland, where the rule of law does not hold, were now operating freely in the city and warned that secret trials with handpicked judges could now be held.

So the UK government’s decision to allow up to three million Hong Kong residents to move to Britain for five years, with the prospect of full citizenship, was, without question, the right thing to do. But given its population is nearly 7.5 million, are their others to whom we could offer asylum from tyranny? Tyranny is a strong word, but how else to describe a country where about a million Muslim Uighurs and other ethnic groups are held in vast camps for political indoctrination?

While the US has criticised China over Hong Kong, according to John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, the US president told China’s Xi Jinping the camps were “exactly the right thing to do”. According to Trump himself, he did not impose sanctions over the detention camps because he was in the “middle of a trade deal” with China. What’s the unjust detention of vast numbers of people when there’s money to be made?

However, in the UK, former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith said Britain should now reconsider its trade links with China, adding: “We learnt a lesson 80 years ago about appeasement of dictators.”

Vladimir Putin has destroyed Russian democracy, now Xi has ended Hong Kong’s. A great divide is forming all over the world, a virtual Iron Curtain, between tyrannies and liberal democracies. At the moment, the latter are in retreat.

We should weep for Hong Kong, then set about treating this growing threat with the seriousness it deserves.