Top U.S. officials and bipartisan lawmakers are backing the protesters gathering in massive numbers in Hong Kong to stop legislation to allow extraditions to mainland China, warning that the tradition of human rights in the city is at stake.
“People are protesting because they don’t want to be subjugated to the Chinese as it relates to some of their fundamental rights,” State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said Wednesday.
Ortagus defended the protesters in the midst of a political crisis that erupted this week, as the legislature proceeded with a plan that would require Hong Kong’s judiciary to send fugitives to China, Macau, and Taiwan based on nothing more than an affidavit that they committed a crime. Domestic and international critics regard it as a fig leaf for “legalized kidnapping” backed by mainland authorities.
“The extradition law proposed by Beijing loyalists in Hong Kong would allow political dissidents, minorities, and foreign travelers in Hong Kong to be spirited away to China’s secret police on the mainland,” a bipartisan group of 12 senators, led by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said in a Wednesday evening statement.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and other lawmakers have also warned that the passage of the bill would prompt a review of the 1992 federal law by which the United States treats Hong Kong as separate from China. That policy is contingent on Beijing honoring the city’s autonomy under the “one country, two systems” agreement that allows the former British colony to retain its Western-style economy.
Such warnings have drawn rebukes from Beijing. “No other country, organization, or individual has the right to interfere,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said earlier Wednesday. “China deplores and firmly opposes the irresponsible and erroneous comments on the amendment and other Hong Kong affairs made by the U.S. side.”
Local activists organized a historic demonstration on Sunday, as hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong residents turned out to rally against the legislation. The size of the protest was a subject of dispute, as event organizers said that more than 1 million people turned out for the event, while local police put the crowd size at 240,000. Hong Kong officials attributed the concern to miscommunication and predicted that locals would like the policy once they saw it in action.
“In the final analysis, the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” Matthew Cheung Kin-chung, Hong Kong’s second-ranked official, told the South China Morning Post on Monday. “After this huge demonstration and this saga in Hong Kong, I am quite sure that any jurisdiction, not least the mainland authorities, will be doubly prudent and careful in putting [extradition] requests to Hong Kong.”
That sunny prediction failed to relieve tensions. The demonstrations continued, culminating in violent clashes that left dozens of protesters injured as riot police used tear gas and rubber bullets to prevent them from storming the legislature. Lawmakers delayed a debate on the bill, but Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam denounced the protests
“Clearly, this was no longer a peaceful assembly, but a blatantly organized instigation of a riot,” Lam said in a video released by the government.
Lam, who maintains that the bill must be passed quickly in order to bring charges against a Hong Kong resident credibly accused of committing a murder in Taiwan, justified defying the protesters by likening the controversy to parenthood.
“I’m a mother too, I have two sons,” she said, per a South China Morning Post translation. “If I let him have his way every time my son acted like that, such as when he didn’t want to study, things might be OK between us in the short term. But if I indulge his wayward behavior, he might regret it when he grows up.”
Cotton suggested a different analogy, recalling the Chinese crackdown on pro-democracy students in Tiananmen Square that took place 30 years ago last week.
“Hong Kong demonstrators know what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989, unlike so many Chinese on the mainland,” the senators said, referring to Beijing’s efforts to censor accounts of the protests. “They know the risk they run by defying the Chinese Communist Party. The demonstrators’ courage in the face of threats, police batons, and tear gas is an example for the world to follow. We support these demonstrators as they fight for freedom and call on Hong Kong and Chinese authorities to respect their right to peacefully protest.”
