Alarmed by continuing protests, China has a new strategy for Hong Kong. It’s predictably authoritarian and entirely idiotic.
As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the plan centers on three tenets: more patriotic education, more surveillance of Hongkongers, and more control over the city’s political system. Each of those steps is in overt breach of the Sino-British declaration, and Beijing’s treaty commitment to respect Hong Kong’s political freedom until at least 2047. Beyond that observation, however, this strategy is just absurd.
First off, the strategy fundamentally fails to recognize that the Hong Kong protests are not rooted in the protesters inadequate patriotic knowledge, but their overt rejection of Chinese Communist Party per se. Beijing’s problem is that Hongkongers understand the nature of regime and despise it for that reason. They are not patriotic not because they don’t understand Communist China, but because they understand it all too well. China’s delusional diagnosis of the problem here is matched by its intended solution.
While “patriotic education” might allow China to brainwash citizens in the mainland hinterlands, that’s not going to work in Hong Kong.
After all, Hong Kong is an international city: its financial hub character connects it the rest of the world. That means Hongkongers have access to truth beyond the reach of Communist Party censorship. To educate its citizens towards Mao’s dream, China must thus sacrifice an integral quality of Hong Kong, one that Xi Jinping greatly values: its example to skeptical foreigners that dealing with China need not mean giving up freedom and prosperity. As with so much of its Hong Kong policy, the irony here is that more patriotic education will only fuel more hatred towards Beijing.
Rightly so. China’s reaction to Hong Kong critics, and its effort to dominate international order, are proof of its malevolent agenda. That leads to the next element of the new strategy.
China’s strengthened security footprint might give Beijing more opportunity to crush dissent. Still, it will only further fuel the protesters and their supporters around the world. While China has flooded Hong Kong with officers and agents from its MSS intelligence service, it also absurdly believes that more rules will somehow create more obedience. As the recent mask ban shows, the opposite is true. By further strengthening coercive state instruments in Hong Kong, Beijing will only illuminate the authoritarianism that underpins its nature.
That takes us to the final nail in this strategy’s coffin: new diktats from Beijing on who gets to run for office in Hong Kong. Again, we see here that the thing Beijing values most is control over human lives.
Ultimately, this strategy is doomed to fail. In the end, I believe Xi Jinping will decide that only force can end this insurrection.
