A tale of two presidents
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, calling him “Psycho Joe” and her “low I.Q. Crazy Mika.” And, please hold this in your mind for just a moment: The tweet referred back to last New Year’s Eve.
Back in Hong Kong, it was the 20th anniversary of the July 1, 1997, handover of the British colony to Communist China.
In a July column that year, I wrote: “So the primary outstanding question is this: Can Hong Kong’s unique economic power, backed by the free market principles behind it, influence China, or will the corruption of Beijing inevitably overwhelm Hong Kong?”
I remember that many Hong Kong residents, who had enjoyed a unique loyalty to their special city/state/colony (and semi-autonomous zone within China), were hopeful, even ebullient. They believed the mainland Chinese did mean it when they hammered out reformer Deng Xiaoping’s “One Country, Two Systems” idea that would make it possible for them to live together under different rules.
One man who did not believe it was Martin Lee, the respected Hong Kong democrat. The original policy, he outlined for me, was supposed to be one of Beijing being “hands off.” But even then, it had already changed to a political “hands on.”
“China’s policy on Hong Kong can now be expressed in one word: control,” he told me.
But back in Washington this week, few were thinking of the fact that President Trump had himself, if sometimes indirectly, referred to the danger of Chinese perfidy, whether with Hong Kong or with American companies.
No, everyone’s thoughts were on poor Joe and Mika. Even when Trump is right on an issue, so many are appalled by his most recent vulgarity -by the president of the United States! -- that any credit due him is simply lost.
I first went to China in 1983, during the period just before the end of the drear, cruel, unjust communist era. By the next year when I returned, things were