China claims its Hong Kong national security law is designed only for counterterrorism, foreign espionage, and treason.
The Chinese Communist Party hammered the final nail into that claim’s credibility coffin on Wednesday. It did so by arbitrarily expelling four elected pro-democracy Hong Kong city legislators. The expulsion then provoked the mass resignation of the remaining 15 pro-democracy legislators and a formalization of the inevitable truth. The truth is, as one resigned official told the media, that Hong Kong “can no longer tell the world that we still have ‘one country, two systems,’ this declares its official death.”
Whatever Xi Jinping’s regime and its Hong Kong puppets claim, that statement is now an undeniable truth. China says that Hong Kong remains a place in which foreign visitors can enjoy the same freedoms of home and confidently invest and do business. To be sure, some, such as Tony Blair, Timothy Geithner, and Ray Dalio, buy (quite literally) into this lie. Some Western banks, such as HSBC, also put greed before basic decency.
But the ultimate truth is that Hong Kong is now just a slightly nicer Chinese city gulag.
It is a place where freedom exists only as far as it is used to pay homage to Xi. It is a city where the democratic rights owed to Hong Kongers, by China’s treaty commitment under the 1985 Sino-British joint declaration, aren’t just ignored but wantonly shredded. Still, beyond the misery of Hong Kong’s courageous citizens, many of whom have been willing to brave an increasingly brutal communist crackdown, there’s a lesson for the world in this former British colony.
Namely, the lesson that Xi is about as good for humanity as oceanic whitetip sharks are for shipwrecked sailors. Metaphors aside, the lesson of Hong Kong is a special one. After all, a centerpiece of Xi’s diplomatic strategy is the making of false promises designed to extract real concessions. Xi’s pledges to reduce China’s carbon emissions and to pursue mutually beneficial trade offer standout examples, here. But what Xi is doing in Hong Kong is an overt and undeniable proof of his utter unreliability. The Sino-British declaration commits China to upholding Hong Kong’s democratic rights until at least 2047. That’s 27 years from now. What we’re seeing now is thus crystallized proof of just how capricious the Chinese Communist Party is when it comes to upholding its word.
This raises a critical follow-up question to every world leader, Joe Biden, in particular: How on Earth can you trust Xi? This is a leader who offers only the most rosy of “we’re all in this together” messages. But the truth of Xi’s regime is unmistakable. It is the truth of a regime that throws millions of innocent people into concentration camps, disappears writers for making clown jokes, and treats its neighbors as de facto waste dumps and feudal imperial subjects.
Those who deal optimistically with Xi do so not simply at their own peril but at the precipice of delusion.
