Hong Kong be damned: Xi senses this is his time
While other world leaders remain COVID-consumed, China’s all-powerful ruler Xi Jinping is not letting a pandemic go to waste.
China’s all-powerful ruler Xi Jinping is not letting a pandemic go to waste.
While other world leaders — especially Donald Trump, who faces an uphill battle for re-election, even if Joe Biden sleepwalks through the campaign — remain COVID-consumed, Xi has moved swiftly to subdue irritating Hong Kong once and for all.
Risks remain before China’s most global, most luminous city is permanently subdued. But Xi has kept rolling the dice as his ambitions have soared and his victories, such as assuming the South China Sea, have multiplied, burnishing his reputation as a leader with luck — and the Mandate of Heaven — on his side. His gains from bringing Hong Kong to heel now will be huge, the great gambler computes.
Xi has already subdued the troubled borderlands of Tibet and Xinjiang, though attracting trenchant criticism for human rights abuses. In response he has weaponised China’s economic heft to convince numerous developing countries, and especially their leaders, that he will smile profitably on them if they back Beijing.
But Hong Kong is a more troubling borderland because of its sophistication, its international reputation and the Chinese ethnicity of its population — inconveniently suggesting that democracy, the rule of law and liberty are not merely “Western” values.
Xi’s window of opportunity to deploy over Hong Kong his familiar strategy of weaponising China’s wealth is narrowing as its economy falters. Thus the urgency to move swiftly now.
The timely distractions include the US election on November 3, the resuming Brexit negotiations within Britain and Europe, and huge continuing COVID concerns globally and within HK itself, the latter limiting the appetite to participate in mass demonstrations.
In September, Hong Kongers will elect a new legislature or LegCo. At last November’s local government elections, an unprecedented 71 per cent of eligible voters — about three million people — returned 388 pro-democracy candidates and 62 pro-Beijingers, the latter losing a disastrous 242 seats from the previous election.
Xi does not want to allow a newly legitimised, likely pro-democrat LegCo anywhere near the new Article 23 laws. Instead they will be passed by the National People’s Congress in Beijing, bedded down by the HK government led by beleaguered chief executive Carrie Lam, and implemented by a new enforcement team in HK to include crack elements of the security forces and secret agencies that have so successfully subdued China’s own population, online and offline.
Then Xi will line up in his sights, sealing his place in the pantheon of the 70-year-old People’s Republic, the “return” — or conquest — of Taiwan. Last year he stressed in a speech that this core Communist Party crusade could no longer “be passed from generation to generation”. He now recognises that the old formulation of “one country, two systems” under which control of HK was resumed by then paramount leader Deng Xiaoping carries no more appeal to Taiwan than it does to himself. He champions “one country, one system” while the Taiwanese remain unattracted by the “one country”.
Taiwan is led by the world’s most effective progressive politician, President Tsai Ing-wen, who has restricted COVID deaths to seven in a country with a population similar in size to that of Australia and without such a lockdown. It cannot now be coaxed into the People’s Republic of China. Taiwan is a crucial tech innovator and producer, and thus an ever more important player for both giants as they decouple.
With this bigger play looming, Xi appears prepared to lose Hong Kong as China’s great commercial entrepot with the world, a key conduit for Chinese companies, both state-owned and private, to international capital markets — chiefly because its common law system is trusted.
Why is Xi risking all this by making clear that Beijing is now Hong Kong’s fundamental lawmaker and the prime actor in its legal system? In part because, unlike Deng, Xi does not hold the business world in general, or tycoons in particular, in high esteem. For him, “North, south, east, west, and the centre, the party leads all.” All within China’s sovereign borders must be made accountable to its leadership. He will readily exchange a more obedient and integrated Hong Kong for a less economically vibrant, or even useful, Hong Kong.
This should not come as a shock. In 2014, China’s State Council issued a white paper — helping trigger student protests — describing judges as “administrators” and PRC patriotism as a “basic political requirement” for their appointment.
Xi made clear his Hong Kong priorities when, visiting for the 20th anniversary of the 1997 handover from British rule, his inspection of the People’s Liberation Army garrison was the major event.
This week, Hong Kong’s own legislature has criminalised “disrespecting” the PRC’s national anthem — written by Tian Han, who died incarcerated during the Cultural Revolution: “With our flesh and blood, let us build a new Great Wall! As China faces its greatest peril … Braving the enemies’ fire! March on!”
Youthful protesters in Hong Kong opposing this law have been tear-gassed by police, whose high reputation for fairness has been hugely eroded during the past year of incessant demonstrations.
But legislating and implementing Article 23 is now the central issue. The Communist Party, with 91 million members, has long held that the broad population is capable of feelings — as in the formulation “you have hurt the feelings of the Chinese people” — but not of independent thought, so they cannot reliably choose or hold to account their leaders.
Nefarious anti-China foreigners are presumed to lurk behind critical views. Thus the claims that Hong Kongers are naturally loyal to the PRC but are being duped into demonstrating by foreign agents — usually conceived as American. Vice-Premier Han Zheng talked last Sunday of the new law being required to target such “dark forces”.
Because Beijing has remained responsible for Hong Kong’s foreign and defence relations, this assumed alien intervention requires redress by the PRC, whose parliament is now legislating Article 23 accordingly. Wang Chen, the legislator guiding this process, declared that without it Hong Kong was “defenceless”.
Xi is chairman of the Central Military Commission. Both his deputies, the most powerful People’s Liberation Army commanders, agreed on Tuesday there was a “great urgency” to pass this legislation, to “contain any attempts by external forces in engaging any separatism, subversion and infiltration activities”.
The new law allows “relevant national security organs to set up agencies” in Hong Kong “to fulfil relevant duties”. This means China’s full secret police apparatus will be free to operate there as it does in the mainland, complete with “enforcement mechanisms”.
The results are expected to include more widespread arrests and disqualification from candidacy of pro-democracy figures to ensure the September LegCo elections do not replicate last year’s local council voting.
Another outcome is for “national awareness and patriotism” to become central features of Hong Kong’s education system, complete with “Chinese history and Chinese culture” — as construed by the party-state. A Xinhua commentary says Hong Kong schools are becoming “lawless” and their students “poisoned”.
Foreigners living in and travelling to Hong Kong may face new constraints, with the prospect of the present visa-free access being curtailed as border controls are tightened. Foreign media will no longer find Hong Kong an open base to report on China. Journalists recently expelled from Beijing, including Australians Phil Wen of The Wall Street Journal and Chris Buckley of The New York Times, appear unlikely to be permitted to relocate to Hong Kong. And Hong Kong’s media will come under new constraints. Access to the global internet — one striking contrast between Hong Kong and the mainland — also may become mediated over time by Chinese service providers, which must act as censors.
Many Hong Kongers, some of whom left before 1997 only to return once “one country, two systems” appeared to operate acceptably, will now leave for good. About 100,000 there are Australian citizens.
But none of this will concern Xi, who senses opportunity and will keep rolling those dice.
Elizabeth Economy, author of The Third Revolution: Xi Jinping and the New Chinese State, asks how today’s China, “an illiberal state seeking leadership in a liberal world order”, can become such a leader while “closing its borders to ideas, capital and influences from the outside world”.
The last British governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten — still a popular figure there — says once the Ministry of State Security acquires the right to operate in Hong Kong, “with its well-earned reputation for coercion and torture, it will not be there to sell dim sum”. He describes “China’s assault on HK’s freedom and its outrageous breach of its treaty obligations to this great city” as “matters of global concern”.
Rowan Callick, twice a China correspondent for The Australian, is an industry fellow with Griffith University’s Asia Institute.
–
Beijing takes Basic Law in hand
Hong Kong was ruled by Britain from 1841. The lease from Beijing of its New Territories was due to expire in 1997. So in the early 1980s China’s top leader at the time, Deng Xiaoping, opened negotiations with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher for Hong Kong’s return.
They agreed in a 1984 joint declaration that Hong Kong would be “vested with executive, legislative and independent judicial power, including that of final adjudication”, when it became a special administrative region of China in 1997.
The declaration said: “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.”
China agreed this under the principle devised by Deng of “one country, two systems” that it pledged to maintain for 50 years, which also has been held out for Taiwan.
The National People’s Congress, China’s parliament, then approved in 1990 the Basic Law or constitution for Hong Kong. This included in Article 23 that the region would “enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against (the Beijing government), or theft of state secrets, to prohibit foreign political bodies from conducting political activities in the region” and to prohibit HK bodies from establishing ties with foreign political bodies.
When the HK government sought to enact such laws in 2003, a half-million people — one in 12 of the adult population — protested and the legislation was withdrawn.
But Beijing continued to press for them, with the backing of its supporters — including some big business figures — in Hong Kong. The protests that started in 2014, resumed last year and that have persisted have hardened Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping’s determination to bring HK firmly into line.
Thus the NPC has introduced in its current annual fortnightly session legislation of its own to outlaw those delinquent acts outlined in Article 23. In doing so itself rather than allowing HK to legislate, it leans on Article 18, which gives it powers strictly “relating to defence and foreign affairs”. Beijing insists Hong Kong’s protests are foreign-instigated.
Hong Kong, with 7.5 million people, is the 10th biggest market for Australian goods, the seventh biggest for services, and has invested 1.86 times as much in Australia as China has.
Rowan Callick
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout