Hong Kong is a ‘hair’s breadth from destruction’

HONG KONG — Margaret Ng — lawyer, writer and former legislator — is, at 71, a member of the generation for which this city’s youthful protesters have scant patience. But, says Ng dryly, the youths frequently welcome assistance from the older generation’s lawyers.

Ng, who plainly states facts as she sees them through her round spectacles, resembles an owl with an attitude. She says Hong Kong’s situation is “desperate”: “Under the veneer of a free city, we are under Beijing’s control.” Today the city is a “hair’s breadth from destruction.” She is particularly distressed by police violence, which is a departure from the professional policing bequeathed to this city from its last three decades of colonial rule. Recently the police have prevented, sometimes for hours, first-aid providers from attending to those the police have injured.

Beijing’s puppet, Carrie Lam, and her masters are learning what Gen. Douglas MacArthur said of military disasters — that all are explained, in one way or another, by two words: “too late” — is also often true in politics. In April, Lam ignited a long hot summer by refusing to amend an extradition bill that would have facilitated Beijing’s penchant for kidnapping into its Kafkaesque criminal justice system inconvenient Hong Kong booksellers and other affronts to totalitarianism. If Lam had promptly done what she has done five months too late — withdrawn the bill — the protests might have dissipated. Instead, they have metastasized, as has the protesters’ agenda, which now includes more meaningful suffrage — ending Beijing’s role in approving candidates — and an independent review of police behavior.

At a recent lunch at the Hong Kong Club, there were three generations of democracy advocates around a table seating eight. The lunchtime gathering stressed that the agenda does not include independence for a sovereign Hong Kong. Lam and Beijing should, however, remember that events can generate their own logic: In the early 1770s, restive American colonists, chafing under annoyances imposed by London, insisted they sought only restoration of the status quo — enjoyment of traditional British rights. But spilled blood — on Lexington green, at Concord Bridge, and elsewhere — quickly led to July 4, 1776.

“Do you remember the Cheshire Cat?” Ng asks, invoking the creature in “Alice in Wonderland” that in one scene slowly disappears, leaving nothing but its grin. Hong Kong could slowly disappear except for its veneer. Or quickly. “Is [Beijing] prepared to kill Hong Kong?” Ng asks. Young people here, “who have nowhere else to go,” increasingly think they have nothing to lose. Some of them “carry their last wills in their pockets.”

They know they are dealing, ultimately, with a regime that has swept at least a million Uighur Muslims into prisons and “reeducation” concentration camps. China’s national anthem celebrates “millions of hearts with one mind.” Hong Kong’s protesters are defending a society comfortable with many different minds. Now, however, thanks to the ongoing drama in Hong Kong’s streets, it is possible to hope that the West has passed “peak China” — the apogee of blinkered admiration for a nation in which approximately 19% of the human race is saddled with one of the world’s most sinister regimes.