Is Hong Kong Over?

Democracy is getting slammed the world over. The impeachment farce and the plutarchy-building Citizens United in the United States. The rise of elected autocrats (“men above the law”) even in Western Europe (e.g., Hungary, Poland, etc… maybe here?), the surge of exclusionary “nationalism” everywhere. Populist wagons circling. Blaming others. The obvious failure of China’s “One Nation, Two Systems” experiment in Hong Kong. All accelerated by global conflict, massive forced migration/exodus from harm, amplified by increasingly intolerable impacts from global warming.  

Narrow-focusing on China, a nation that has so far capitalized on increasing and self-imposed isolation and withdrawal from multinational coordination by the United States, we are witnessing another superpower beginning to face a litany of unexpected negative consequences. To justify and expand its “linkage to China” Belt and Road initiative, China must continue to lead by example. Over the course of about 30 years, through often-brutal autocratic rule, the Peoples’ Republic has lifted about one billion people out of poverty (plenty still to go) and created the second largest economy on earth.

For developing nations looking for political role models, a rapidly unraveling populist American “democracy” is not an attractive solution anymore. China’s centralized government was able to force progress, even allowing for traditional corruption to continue, and generate the largest middle class on earth.  China sold its vision in part by touting its willingness to accept the vestiges of the British rules of governance for Hong Kong, technically required by treaty until 2047, within a greater notion of “one China.” Not what new President Xi Jinping has in mind, however.

Unable to impress either already financially successful Hong Kong and Taiwan that the PRC form of governance was a necessary precursor to prosperity, both these regional bodies looked warily at the iron hand of Beijing, not a possible plus for their futures – they are already rich – but as a huge minus when it comes to individual freedom. And the notion of two systems within one China – just looking at the friction (I’m being polite) between a universally-despised Beijing-friendly Hong Kong administration and especially the younger residents of Hong Kong – clearly was a concept that the PRC simply could not accept. Others were clearly watching.

Recent elections in Taiwan have reinforced a “stay independent from the PRC” movement. Hong Kong’s violence and societal depression reinforced a parallel feeling in that captive island city state. But the latest debacle, clearest evidence of fear of letting the masses know the truth and making loyal cadres tow the party line even as people are dying, has been China’s mishandling of the explosion of the coronavirus epidemic. Born in the produce markets of the large, central Chinese city of Wuhan, coronavirus was minimalized by communist leaders who did not want the world to see the PRC as unable to contain a bucolic virus now spreading to human beings. Disinformation abounded.

That virus spread rapidly. It soon surpassed the 2003 SARS epidemic as travelers from Wuhan carried the disease at first to cities within China – resulting in some of the largest quarantine efforts in history – and then to the region… and then to the rest of the world. For Chinese Asia, especially Hong Kong, the global shunning of regional travel and trade, was a kick to the gut. Writing for the February 1^st Los Angeles Times, David Pierson and Tang Wai Yin explain further:

“Henry Ng is used to hearing the familiar refrain of pro-democracy chants after months of demonstrations in Hong Kong… But when he looked outside his apartment window last week, he saw a protest of a different kind. Hundreds of black-clad demonstrators and local residents were locked in a standoff with riot police over plans to convert an adjacent public housing block into a quarantine site for patients infected with the coronavirus from China .

“The confrontation ended with police repelling the crowds with pepper spray, but not before masked protesters threw petrol bombs inside the lobby of the proposed quarters… ‘I wasn’t brave enough to go downstairs, so I just shouted through my window for the police to leave,’ said Ng, a 20-year-old university student who lives in the border town of Fanling with his mother. ‘We don’t want a quarantine site here. It could harm families.’

“After seven months of unrest, the arrival of the pneumonia-like virus in Hong Kong is landing like a gut punch — adding one more layer of volatility to a city racked by a social and political crisis that won’t go away… Hong Kong’s economy, limping from the protests and U.S.-China trade war, now faces the specter of an even greater decline in tourism and retail sales…

“At a time when millions of Hong Kongers are resisting the mainland, the coronavirus and China’s response to it is providing one more reason to demand greater autonomy from Beijing… ‘The coronavirus epidemic sits in the very center of the vortex of anger at an incompetent Hong Kong government, distrust of Beijing, and anti-mainlander xenophobia — all issues that have driven the past seven months of protests in Hong Kong — and, as such, risks becoming a ‘perfect storm’ of discontent,’ said Antony Dapiran, a Hong Kong-based lawyer and author of ‘City of Protest: A Recent History of Dissent in Hong Kong.’

“Hong Kong has 13 confirmed cases of the virus, which originated from Wuhan, a Chinese city of 11 million in the central province of Hubei, and has spread to 13 countries beyond China… Hong Kong is particularly vulnerable as a major travel hub connected to China through multiple border crossings approachable by air, road, sea and rail. The city’s economy is deeply reliant on those connections — one of the chief reasons Hong Kong’s death toll from the 2003 SARS epidemic was second only to mainland China’s…

“‘The economy is already not good and dying because of the protest movement. The virus is going to make it worse,’ said a 57-year-old catering service worker who provided only her last name, Wong, and has seen business at her company slow to a trickle. ‘I see people wearing masks on the street like when SARS was most severe.’” If the One Nation, Two Systems experiment in Hong Kong spirals to the bottom, if the Hong Kong the world has known for decades is over, exactly what are the ramifications for China?

The lesson for those ready to accept the obvious is clear: any government that can create and sustain fake news as acceptable policy will never serve its people well, no matter any degree of promised prosperity. Where autocrats are above the law, who exactly will protect the people in dire times?

            I’m Peter Dekom, and I fear that too many Americans, averse to recalling history or even watching the lessons in the world around them, are increasingly condemning the United States to repeat those mistakes.