‘Saddest day’ in Hong Kong’s history

While the world stands by and watches as the free and open city of Hong Kong finally falls and closes within Xi Jinping’s clenched fist, at least the kids haven’t given up. If the cause is lost, at least they intend to go down fighting.

As for the rest of us, the seven-point annexation manifesto finally presented on Friday at the third session of the 13th National People’s Congress in Beijing leaves no “let’s wait and see” pretext available, and Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister François-Philippe Champagne’s predictably robotic and empty utterances about “dialogue” count for nothing. It’s done.

Xi Jinping is setting out to devour Hong Kong as surely and as confidently as Vladimir Putin devoured Crimea six years ago. And so, for the millions of brave Hongkongers who have been choking in thick clouds of tear gas and tending their wounds from volley after volley of rubber bullets ever since last June, fleeing down alleys from the baton charges of Hong Kong’s brutal and corrupt police force, it’s back into the breach.

They say that history is written by the victors, but it’s not true. History is written by people who can write, and by people who can sing, and the stirring protest anthem of Hong Kong’s gallant legions of ordinary people, Glory to Hong Kong, will echo from the city’s gleaming towers in the coming days. And the people will march in the streets again, while they can.

Saturday and Sunday, between 2 and 6 p.m., the people’s anthem will be sung anywhere protesters manage to gather without being chased off by the police, and the song will be heard all day this weekend in the “Yellow Shops,” the businesses run by the merchants who have stood by the street protesters ever since Hong Kong’s largely non-violent democratic uprising began last June.

To thoroughly subdue a free people it is necessary to not only keep them from singing, but to force them to sing only the right songs, and to do so properly. And so, also on Sunday, marches will proceed from two assembly points, the Southorn Playground sports complex and the SOGO department store on Hong Kong Island, to protest Xi Jinping’s National Anthem law.

Carrie Lam, Xi’s puppet and chief executive of Hong Kong’s officially gerrymandered legislature, has pledged to make promulgation of the law, gazetted in Hong Kong last year, a priority in the coming weeks. Anyone who mocks or makes pantomime of the People’s Republic’s anthem, March of the Volunteers, and anyone who refuses to stand straight or sit up straight while the tune is being played will face a punishment of $9,000 in fines and up to three years in prison.

This coming Wednesday, there will be a protest against the anthem law, to “besiege” the Legislative Council, where pro-democracy lawmakers have been dragged out and locked up in a series of strongarm manoeuvres Beijing’s proxies have employed to wrest control of key committees over the past three weeks.

On June 7 in Kowloon, a “March of Reignition” will seek to revive the prorogued demonstrations that mostly went into hiatus after the coronavirus pandemic spread to Hong Kong from Wuhan earlier this year. (Hongkongers have been spared the COVID-19 agonies endured by countries like Canada, thanks mainly to medical workers who went on strike in February to force a shutdown of all but three of the 14 border crossings with the Chinese mainland and to enforce mandatory 14-day quarantines on all travellers.)

There’s a “May Freedom Reignite” Rally on the evening of June 12 in Tamar Park; a June 16 march to mark the one-year anniversary of the pro-democracy uprising, starting at Victoria Park; a June 28 Mourning of Love gathering at Heritage Place, and on it goes, into July. But by then, there is no telling what will have become of Hong Kong.

The demonstrations that began last June were sparked by an extradition law, which Hongkongers interpreted — correctly, judging by the evidence of Friday’s proceedings in Beijing — as an initiative which, by stealth, Beijing intended to scrap the city-state’s constitutional hanging-by-a-thread autonomy.

The new law is a replication of an attempt the Communist Party made in 2003 to impose a “national security” law on Hong Kong that had to be withdrawn after half a million people poured into the streets in a surprise revolt against it. The law that ranking Chinese Communist Party politburo officer Wang Chen put before delegates to the rubberstamp National People’s Congress in Beijing on Friday is a wholly Beijing-formulated law that will be forced on Hong Kong, requiring only the Legislative Council’s promulgation, which Lam has now promised to provide.

Beijing will determine the meaning of the terms treason, secession, sedition and subversion, and transgressors will be prosecuted as Beijing sees fit. The law will cover “theft of state secrets,” which already means in the rest of China whatever the secret police say it means. “Foreign political organizations” will be banned, and Hong Kong activists will be banned from “establishing ties with foreign political organizations or bodies.”

And that’s just the core of it. The longtime Hong Kong human rights activist Patrick Poon says it’s “the most alarming development I have seen in the past 20 years.” Hong Kong Civic Party lawmaker Tanya Chen called Friday “the saddest day in Hong Kong history.” Her colleague, the legislator Dennis Kwok, calls the national-security law “the end of Hong Kong,” the most devastating thing to happen to Hong Kong since the United Kingdom handed over the city to Beijing in 1997, in exchange for Beijing’s serially-broken promise of democracy and internal autonomy.

The question is whether the world’s democracies will stand for it. The Americans, because of bipartisan support in Congress for a hard defence line for Hong Kong, might fight back. Australia might stand up. But going by what we’ve heard out of Ottawa, London and Brussels, it doesn’t look promising.