There was no need to send in the People’s Liberation Army after all. Hong Kong’s freedoms were snuffed out with a pen stroke.
China did not consult Hong Kong’s officials about its new national security law. The legislation had been drafted, as became painfully clear, without the involvement even of Carrie Lam, the territory’s pro-Beijing chief executive. Within hours of its promulgation, pro-democracy activists were being taken into custody. Nine people, including a teenaged girl, were arrested on the first morning, most of them for carrying colonial-era flags or placards that backed self-rule. Human rights campaigners announced their withdrawal from public life. Hundreds of dissident social media accounts quietly closed down.
Hong Kongers understand that they will now be treated like Uighurs or Tibetans. Critics of the system will be crushed underfoot. In a striking disregard for national sovereignty and territorial jurisdiction, China is claiming the right to prosecute people overseas: “This Law shall apply to offences committed from outside the region by a person who is not a permanent resident of the Region.”
To see how outrageous Beijing’s behavior is, we need to recall Hong Kong’s recent history. It is often said that the United Kingdom’s 99-year lease on the territory expired in 1997, but this is not quite true. Hong Kong island, plus a strip of the adjacent peninsula, had been ceded to Britain in perpetuity. The 99-year lease applied to a wider hinterland called the New Territories.
China wanted all the lands back, including those to which it had no legal claim. Britain, for its part, was mainly interested in preserving the freedoms of the people who lived there. Eventually, a compromise was reached: China would assume notional suzerainty over the entire territory provided that, in exchange, it promised to leave it self-governing for a further 50 years. That accord, reached in 1984 between Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping, was registered as an international treaty, and, until last week, China respected the letter, if not always the spirit, of its terms.
Why has China picked this moment to violate the agreement? For the same reason that it is saber-rattling in the South China Sea, the same reason it has stepped up its operations against dissidents in Xinjiang, the same reason it has intensified its border dispute with India, provoking military fatalities for the first time in decades. China’s communist leaders see a world distracted and impoverished by the COVID crisis, which has, paradoxically, caused far more damage in the West than in China itself. As Mao once put it, “Everything under the sky is in chaos, and the situation is excellent.”
Under Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, as China was becoming more integrated into the global economic system, observers used to talk about its patient and nonconfrontational rise. Not any more. Xi Jinping’s China is more assertive, more hurried, more revanchist. Chinese intellectuals often discuss what the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison famously defined as the Thucydides Trap: “The past 500 years have seen 16 cases in which a rising power threatened to displace a ruling one. Twelve of these ended in war.”
China’s communists, like all autocrats, understand that overseas quarrels tend to shore up support for the regime. They feel that their star is in the ascendant. International institutions, from the Davos schmoozefest to the World Health Organization, bend to their will. Several Western universities have become their clients. They have moved against Hong Kong, in short, because they believe the West won’t do anything about it.
Are they right? Plainly no one is going to start a nuclear war. But it does not follow that we can do nothing. Western countries could respond locally and proportionately to Chinese bellicosity, by giving more active support to its neighbors — notably India. They could also respond in kind to China’s online propaganda efforts — by, for example, making better known the wealth held overseas by some of the regime’s cronies.
In this case, the most important thing is to stand by the people of Hong Kong. I am delighted that Britain has promised the right to settle, with an assumed path to citizenship, to 3 million people there, and I hope other democracies will follow suit. Indeed, I’d like to go further. Why not recreate Hong Kong in the West?
Why not, in other words, find some suitable land and give it to Hong Kongers as a charter city? Let them bring their enterprise and global business networks. Let them set their own regulations and taxes. And let the wealth that used to spill into neighboring China instead flow into the new host country? That, ultimately, is what will do for China’s ambitions.
