Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was right to declare Wednesday that Hong Kong can no longer be regarded as autonomous from China.
The United States must lead the world in rejecting what China is doing to this former British colony.
What is happening in Hong Kong is a legal, political, and moral disgrace. With its move to impose a new national security law upon the city, Beijing is asserting decisive and unilateral authority over Hong Kong in violation of its international commitments. Xi Jinping is abandoning the 1984 Sino-British Joint declaration by which China vowed to respect Hong Kong’s political rights and legal independence until 2047.
Under that treaty, China accepted that Hong Kong is “vested with executive, legislative and independent judicial power, including that of final adjudication. The laws currently in force in Hong Kong will remain basically unchanged … Rights and freedoms, including those of the person, of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of travel, of movement, of correspondence, of strike, of choice of occupation, of academic research and of religious belief will be ensured by law.”
Prior to Xi, China had viewed the treaty as acceptable. It gave China a global center of commerce and international connectedness in return for Chinese sovereignty over it. That sent a powerful message to the world that China was open for business. But now that Xi is in power, he has decided that Hong Kong’s autonomy and its citizens’ self-governance is intolerable.
China maintains, laughably, that it remains in compliance with the treaty and is only moving to ensure that another treaty obligation, Hong Kong’s introduction of a national security law, is upheld. This excuse is absurd. Hong Kong’s government, elected a few months ago in a show of overwhelming opposition to parties supportive of Beijing, is solely responsible for introducing such a law.
The U.S., Hong Kong, and other free, democratic nations view national security as the state obligation to protect the people’s rights, institutions, and safety. But China sees national security as the maintenance of state control even at the expense of those goods. In China, national security means throwing millions of innocent Muslims into reeducation gulags. It involves “disappearing” citizens who make jokes about their leader online.
Hong Kong’s growing disenchantment with the idea of subjugation to Beijing poses a mortal threat to Xi. To allow Hong Kong to remain free is to prove that those who are given a choice between freedom and his tyranny find it hardly a choice at all.
What Xi is now doing to Hong Kong, in strangling its citizens’ aspirations, he hopes to do the rest of the world as well. He has been trying to buy friends with hundreds of billions in annual investment via China’s Belt and Road economic strategy. His false promises come with a hefty price tag, including the forced transfer of intellectual property and a requirement that new “friends” turn a political blind eye to China’s foreign policy.
The U.S. is right to protest what is happening in Hong Kong. It is a foretaste of the poison with which Xi wants to force-feed the world.
