China’s expulsion of four lawmakers from Hong Kong’s nominally autonomous Legislature has stoked bipartisan outrage in Washington, with lawmakers vowing to retaliate.
“There will be consequences for Beijing’s actions,” Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, said in a Wednesday statement.
That bipartisan threat raises the likelihood that the Hong Kong crisis will continue to drive the “systems conflict” between the United States and China, despite expectations that Joe Biden will seek to ease tensions with the rival communist regime. And the timing of the Chinese Communist maneuver suggests that Beijing has little interest in gestures toward American leaders.
“With this decision, China shows that it doesn’t care about the West, about the U.S.,” Hong Kong Baptist University professor Jean-Pierre Cabestan told Bloomberg. “It’s going to be very hard for Biden to relax the U.S. policy on China and Hong Kong. How can you relax the sanctions? It’s a very sad day for Hong Kong.”
Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping paired the expulsion with an international call for resistance against U.S. criticism. He urged Russia and other partners to “firmly oppose interference by external forces in the domestic affairs” in a Tuesday address to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that forecast continuing tensions with the U.S.
“The world is entering a period of turbulence and transformation,” Xi said. “The international community now faces a major test with choices to be made between multilateralism and unilateralism, openness and seclusion, cooperation and confrontation.”
His invocation of multilateralism has become a mainstay of China’s overtures to U.S. allies. Beijing has hoped that European frustration with President Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord would impede the formation of a Western democratic coalition to condemn China’s authoritarian practices.
Yet the Hong Kong crisis, in particular, has galvanized European anger in recent months, and the expulsion of the lawmakers seems likely to fortify the consensus that Beijing is violating the treaty made when the United Kingdom agreed to relinquish sovereignty over the region.
“As of today, ‘one country, two systems’ no longer exists,” defenestrated lawmaker Kwok Ka-ki said.
Fifteen other pro-democracy lawmakers announced their plan to resign as a bloc in solidarity with the expelled quartet. The controversy erupted just two days after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blacklisted “four PRC and Hong Kong officials in connection with implementing” the anti-sedition legislation that spurred Trump to revoke the privileges that the U.S. government has afforded Hong Kong in support of its traditional status as a de facto city-state that enjoyed a high degree of autonomy from the mainland regime.
“These actions underscore U.S. resolve to hold accountable key figures that are actively eviscerating the freedoms of the people of Hong Kong and undermining Hong Kong’s autonomy,” Pompeo said this week.
That sentiment is anchored in both parties, Rubio and Merkley demonstrated.
“Democracy in Hong Kong is gasping for air,” they said. “It is critical that the United States and all allies of freedom come together to recognize and condemn the undeniable and far reaching ramifications of this authoritarian powergrab, which has wiped out what little remained of Hong Kong’s democratic political system and violates China’s treaty obligations.”
