A legislative official in Hong Kong was given a platform at the New York Times to express her view on recent Chinese intervention in the city’s affairs, saying that intervention was the right move.
“Like it or not, Hong Kong is part of China,” wrote Regina Ip, a member of Hong Kong’s legislative and executive councils.
The politician has previously expressed her support for China’s national security law for the city, which criminalizes acts of secession, subversion, collusion with foreign forces, and terrorism and allows such crimes to be punishable by up to life in a Chinese prison. Because of the vagueness of the law, the government has been given ample ability to crack down on dissidents.
Ip, however, dismissed such criticisms.
“To some, the new national security law is especially chilling because it seems simultaneously vague and very severe,” she wrote. “But many laws are vague, constructively so. And this one only seems severe precisely because it fills longstanding loopholes — about subversion, secession, local terrorism, collusion with external forces. One person’s ‘severe’ is someone else’s intended effect.”
Ip said that the idea that Hong Kong’s freedoms are being eroded is simply a myth.
“No amount of outcry, condemnation or sanctions over the Chinese government’s purported encroachment in Hong Kong’s affairs will alter the fact that Hong Kong is part of China and that its destiny is intertwined with the mainland’s,” she wrote.
“What’s more, Beijing isn’t actually encroaching on Hong Kong’s semi-autonomy by taking measures to proscribe subversive activities in the city,” she added. “Bear in mind that back in the late 1970s, China’s leader, Deng Xiaoping, put forward the ‘one country, two systems’ formula with a view to bringing Hong Kong, Macau and eventually Taiwan back into the fold. National unity has always been the ultimate objective.”
When Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, it was under the pretext that the city’s “high degree of autonomy” from China would remain unchanged for 50 years, Ip said.
Most of those arrested under the law so far appear to have been arrested for doing something other nations might consider within the realm of free speech. But Ip said it’s not appropriate to apply a Western lens to this issue.
“Foreign governments should not benchmark what happens in Hong Kong against standards that prevail in Western countries,” she said.
The New York Times’s opinion section came under fire after it apologized in June for publishing an op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton wherein he expressed his desire for the military to be sent in to respond to riots happening in America’s cities.
While the publication did not remove the article from its website, it did add a lengthy editor’s note to the top of the article, saying the “tone of the essay” was “needlessly harsh” and that it fell short “of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate.”
No such editor’s note is present before Ip’s op-ed.
