China’s brutal assault on rights

The Orwellian culling of “pro-democracy” books from Hong Kong’s libraries and stores leaves no doubt about the extent of the repression that Beijing is imposing on the territory. Together with a simultaneous order that all schoolchildren, including even those in nursery schools and special institutions, be educated in, and instructed to obey faithfully, China’s draconian new security law, it is a grim reminder of the true nature of President Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party dictatorship and what it intends for Hong Kong. Not that Beijing’s assault on its cherished freedoms and rights tells us anything we didn’t know about the regime: tragically, the precedents are there in plain sight in its ruthless suppression of Tibet, its constantly bullying approach towards neighbours, and the mass imprisonment and forced sterilisation of the minority Uighurs.

Even so, it is hard to believe high-achieving Hongkongers who, as Rowan Callick wrote on Monday, “created the world’s most beautiful and vivacious modern city” and are widely regarded as among the most talented and innovative people, are now being targeted with similar senseless forms of oppression. Young pro-democracy leader Joshua Wong, whose books are among those of several authors removed from the shelves, has compared the Chinese crackdown to the ruthless “White Terror” used against political dissidents in 1920s mainland China during the rise of the Communist Party. Certainly the speed with which Beijing has moved against the books of those it regards as dangerous dissidents underlines the surly anger it has long harboured about the robust protections of free speech Hong Kong has enjoyed since the 1997 handover by Britain. The 2016 “disappearance” of booksellers who sold titles in Hong Kong critical of China’s leaders, and their unsurprising reappearance in Beijing, was a clear pointer to its intention to impose tough social controls on the city.

It is wasting no time in doing so. As Callick pointed out, so determined is Beijing to impose all 66 articles of its new security law that “not a word of it can be touched in Hong Kong itself … it can only be ‘interpreted’ by the Beijing-based National People’s Congress, which through the 71 years of the PRC has done almost invariably what the party’s general secretary tells it to do”. That is Mr Xi who, Callick wrote, in his zeal for China’s “rejuvenation” was offended that such a “privileged” corner of his empire, Hong Kong, should harbour such disloyalty. “This emperor will now never be far away,” Callick added. “He will be in the face of everyone in Hong Kong, he will be in every smartphone, he will be hovering beside every dai pai dong food stall — and his agents will be ubiquitous on and offline.”

The ominous Big Brother culling of books and the order to instruct school students to obey the new security law make it clear the solemn pledge Beijing made in 1997 to respect Hong Kong’s traditions of freedom of speech and the rule of law is now well and truly over. For Western democracies and, indeed, most countries, whether or not they are shackled supplicants of Beijing’s corrupting Belt and Road Initiative, what is being done to Hong Kong should provide a reality check for their relationship with China. There is much at stake in how the world stands up to Beijing’s latest assault on democracy and its bullying attempts to emasculate the people of one of the world’s most vibrant cities.