Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s team is warning China not to tighten control over Hong Kong, despite Beijing’s irritation over comments about the autonomous city.
“The US government remains concerned about the challenges to Hong Kong’s autonomy under the ‘one country, two systems’ framework and it is important to discuss these issues in a transparent manner,” a spokesman for the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong told the South China Morning Post on Saturday.
That statement rebuffed a rebuke delivered Friday by the Chinese government, who accused a top American diplomat of “defamation” for a recent speech about relations between China and Hong Kong.
Communist Party officials want public credit for honoring the “one country, two systems” policy that has authorized the island city to maintain the capitalist freedoms they enjoyed as a colony in the British Empire. But they’ve also taken steps to solidify their sovereignty over the territory, which they officially regained in 1997.
“Last year, 2018, however, was unfortunately not a good year for Hong Kong’s history in terms of the maintaining of its autonomy,” Kurt Tong, the consul general for the State Department in Hong Kong and Macau, said during a Wednesday address on Hong Kong’s place in the region. “[T]he Mainland Central Government’s desire to influence and control political conversations and events in Hong Kong could negatively impact the functioning of the economy, and the international business community’s role here.”
That speech drew an quick retort from China. “The ‘one country, two systems’ has been successfully implemented in Hong Kong and the [city’s] government has taken a series of measures to safeguard the constitutional order,” the Foreign Ministry said, per the Morning Post. “The situation of Hong Kong is steadily heading in the right direction after the past year. There is no room for distortion and defamation.”
Tong’s role as the top diplomat on the ground in Hong Kong and Macau puts him at the center of a fraught relationship between China’s communist rulers and two prosperous former Western colonies. Macau was part of the old Portuguese Empire and remained governed by Lisbon until 1999.
China is very sensitive about how Western governments and companies perceive those prosperous economic centers — in addition to Tibet, which is officially autonomous but subject to repression, and Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a breakaway province governed by separatists. Beijing pressured Western airline companies, for instance, to identify those areas as part of China last year.
China also played a role in the “banning of a political party” in Hong Kong, the disqualification of candidates who wanted to run for office, and the decision to expel an editor at the Financial Times who helped host an event with a group that advocates for full independence from mainland China.
“In all of these cases and trends, the Mainland Central Government appears to have been intimately involved in the Hong Kong Government’s decision-making,” Tong said. “[A] narrowing of Hong Kong’s political and democratic space is likely to adversely impact the city’s marketplace for ideas and innovation.”
