The People’s Republic of China is having some trouble digesting Hong Kong, which is a good thing for all involved.
It is certainly beneficial to the former British colony, which since 1997 has subsisted nervously under Deng Xiaoping’s old formulation of “one country, two systems.” It’s good for Beijing as well: The Chinese economy has exploded in the past two decades, not by subjugating Hong Kong but by imitating its success. To abrogate the terms of Hong Kong’s reunification with the mainland would not just injure China’s current prosperity but slow down its goal of global competitiveness, if not dominance.
In the long term, however, can there be any doubt what the outcome will be? If Chinese President Xi Jinping were an ordinary politician, he would end Hong Kong’s mass demonstrations and random violence by scuttling the proposed extradition law that has inspired them and sacrifice his unpopular puppet governor, Carrie Lam. Xi, however, is no ordinary politician but China’s newly certified maximum leader. In the world’s only hybrid communist-fascist state, with a history of periodic provincial uprisings, Xi knows that the slightest concessions to Hong Kong would not go unnoticed elsewhere in his kingdom.
President Trump, along with our European allies, has been doing what democratic leaders tend to do in these circumstances: urge both sides to come to some sort of mutual understanding and restore the peaceful, prosperous status quo. Since the United States is in the midst of a trade war with the People’s Republic, however, Trump has been especially careful to tread softly, fearing that a bloodbath or armed intervention in Hong Kong would scuttle any chances for a breakthrough U.S.-China deal.
In that sense, Trump’s dilemma resembles Barack Obama’s predicament when the Iranian leadership stole the presidential election of 2009 and brutally suppressed the mass Green Movement. Obama wanted a rapprochement with the Islamic Republic and so kept quiet; Trump wants advantageous trade relations with China and so counsels restraint.
To be sure, Trump’s domestic political foes are unfettered by such constraints and can safely invoke the modern Western tradition of defending freedom, whenever feasible, and shrink in horror at Trump’s evenhanded approach to an authoritarian state. It is certainly true that Trump could safely offer support for Hong Kong without endangering his relations, such as they are, with Xi. But that is not the way Trump conducts business, especially when he judges that the stakes are especially high. China, moreover, bears little resemblance to, say, the embattled Assad regime in Syria or the Islamic State. Here, there are no decisive military options available to America and its allies, other than symbolic naval demonstrations or pledges of material and diplomatic assistance.
Since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, the United States has twice intervened militarily in Asia: once, on the Korean Peninsula in 1950, where the Chinese People’s Liberation Army ultimately fought the U.S.-led United Nations forces to stalemate and armistice, and over a decade later (1964) on the Indochinese Peninsula, with a less satisfactory outcome. There is no appetite, here or in Europe, for armed confrontation with a nuclear China, nor is there any reasonable guarantee of success. Our options are limited.
To his credit, and especially in comparison with his recent predecessors, Trump has been significantly more helpful to local democracies imperiled by China, such as Japan, Taiwan, and India, but the domestic consensus about China policy remains unsettled. George H.W. Bush was much criticized in 1989 for his relatively low-key reaction to the brutal suppression of the student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. Bush, who had served as the second American “chief liaison officer” in Beijing, was a product of the awkward Cold War détente with China and cherished hopes for a Chinese evolution to democracy.
No one harbors such illusions today. There is no question of China’s economic and strategic ambition, especially in the Pacific. But unlike the U.S.-Soviet confrontation of the postwar era, our relations with China are studiously ambiguous. This is partly an acknowledgment of China’s growing power and influence — and, perhaps, our own relative weakness — and the paradox of China’s broadening prosperity. The Soviet Union, for all its military menace, was never a serious economic competitor to the West. The People’s Republic, by contrast, is rich and growing richer, and the lure of Chinese markets and capital and trade is in conflict with the evidence of strategic aggression.
In that sense, Trump is surely correct to insist that Xi should “quickly and humanely solve the Hong Kong problem,” leading to “a happy and enlightened ending.” This is both an appeal to Chinese sensibilities and a recognition of reality about Hong Kong. Call it realism. Even at the height of American supremacy, in the postwar era, we didn’t always get what we wanted.
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at the Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
