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Anti-government demonstrators scuffle with riot police
during a protest in Hong Kong on May 27. (Tyrone Siu/Reuters)
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Before the coronavirus pandemic shut down international travel,
Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam embarked on a charm offensive at a
gathering of global elites. Her January mission to the World Economic Forum at the head of a
major Hong Kong trade delegation was an attempt to show investors and
corporate executives that the Chinese special administrative region was
back on its feet after months of heated, disruptive protests. “Hong Kong
is open for business,” declared one of Lam’s colleagues at a soiree of
cocktails, dim sum and gold-wrapped chocolate coins in Davos,
Switzerland.
Less than six months later, though, there’s little Lam can do to dress
up the crisis unraveling her city. On Thursday, China’s National People’s
Congress approved a plan to move forward with a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong that
many fear will squelch the former British colony’s already waning
autonomy. Though the legislation has yet to be formalized, it is expected to drastically curtail Hong Kong’s political
freedoms, including measures that could criminalize protest and
criticism of Beijing.
Lam and her pro-Beijing allies in Hong Kong argue that the move is
necessary to preserve law and order in the wake of a year of tensions and
clashes between pro-democracy protesters and the city’s local authorities.
Critics contend that it’s just the latest, if most dramatic, example of
China disregarding Hong Kong’s freedoms and weakening the “one country,
two systems” political model that followed the British handover in 1997.
“Much of the present uproar over Beijing’s latest move is not just
about the ‘what’ but the ‘how,’ ” wrote Hong Kong-based journalist Holmes Chan.
“Indeed, Hong Kong’s own constitutional text has always contained an
article about national security, but it clearly states that the city
should ‘enact laws on its own’. But overnight, Hong Kong’s
legislature was cast aside, with Beijing opting for a backdoor option …
that lets it unilaterally apply certain national laws to the city.”
The rest of the world is paying attention. The governments of
the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia jointly condemned the
decision to impose the law, which they warned in a statement endangered the system that made
Hong Kong “so prosperous.”
“If China destroys the rule of law in Hong Kong it will ruin the
city’s chances of continuing to be a great international financial hub
that mediates about two-thirds of the direct investment in and out of
China,” wrote Chris Patten, the city’s last British governor.
He urged Britain and its partners in the Group of Seven nations, which
will convene virtually next month, to take a stand against a Chinese
regime “that is an enemy of open societies everywhere.”
As questions mount over the city’s political and economic future,
British officials are being pressed to extend visa rights to hundreds of thousands of Hong
Kongers born in the colonial era. Officials in Taiwan, where sympathy
for Hong Kong’s plight featured in the recent presidential
election, are also finalizing details on a plan to provide asylum and
other assistance to Hong Kong activists.
Hong Kong’s identity as one of the world’s preeminent entrepôts is not
just endangered by Beijing’s overreach. On Wednesday, the Trump
administration through Secretary of State Mike Pompeo notified Congress
that Hong Kong may no longer merit favorable treatment from the
United States compared with mainland China, a long-standing status quo
that, among other things, has shielded Hong Kong entities from the Trump
administration’s punitive trade war.
“That would allow the U.S. government to impose the same tariffs on
goods from Hong Kong that Trump imposed on Chinese products, a move that
could imperil his already embattled trade deal with China,” wrote my colleague David J. Lynch. “The White House
has not said whether it will take this step, but Trump has signaled anger
with Chinese leaders over the initial coronavirus outbreak and a desire
to retaliate.”
Trump is slated to speak on China at a news conference on Friday. The administration’s
tough line has a degree of bipartisan support, with Washington lawmakers
from both parties issuing statements this week condemning China. On
Wednesday, the House passed legislation authorizing sanctions against Chinese officials
involved in the mass incarceration program of more than 1 million people
from Turkic Muslim minority groups in China’s far-western region of
Xinjiang. Congress is also moving legislation that could force Chinese firms to delist from the New York Stock
Exchange and the Nasdaq.
There’s no indication that Beijing is cowed by the backlash. At
a time when the pandemic has significantly affected the country’s
economy, China’s leadership probably sees a hard-line approach to Hong
Kong as a maneuver that plays to nationalist sentiment at home. It’s also
in keeping with the more broadly aggressive posture taken under
Chinese President Xi Jinping, from the new social media spats triggered by his diplomats to
the Chinese military’s provocative movements along the disputed Himalayan
border with India.
“China now appears to have given up hope of having stable ties with
the U.S. under the Trump administration,” Bonnie Glaser of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies told
my colleagues. “China’s behavior against Hong Kong, pressure on
Taiwan and its global disinformation campaign all suggest that Beijing
could care less about U.S. reactions to its decisions.”
It’s a predicament that somewhat mirrors the White House’s sweeping
anti-Chinese position in the depths of a public health crisis it, too,
has failed to adequately manage. “This is another case in which we see a
certain kind of strange parallelism between the two ‘make my country
great again’ leaders, even though they present themselves as opposites,”
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a China scholar and author of “Vigil:
Hong Kong on the Brink,” told Today’s WorldView.
Meanwhile, despite the threat of new crackdowns, Hong Kong’s
protesters aren’t giving up. “Forfeiting Hong Kong is not an option as
this is the place we call home: there is no future for us if our home is
compromised,” wrote
pro-democracy activists Joshua Wong and Glacier Kwong. “The fight for
democracy and human rights is one both Hong Kong-ers and the world have
to win.”
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Talking Points
• My colleague
Gerry Shih detailed the range of U.S. steps being
contemplated to further raise the stakes for China. As he notes, it’s
starting to cause a degree of alarm among some
experts in Beijing: “After squeezing the flow of
trade, technology and visas, U.S. moves to choke off capital could
present the biggest challenge of all for a Chinese economy that, despite
its size, remains highly dependent on an international financial system
dominated by the United States. And in China, an increasingly urgent
debate is unfolding about whether — and how — the country could weather
that pressure.”
• It is one of the
many mysteries of the pandemic: Why has the death toll
from covid-19 apparently been lower in Asia than in Western Europe and
North America? My colleagues explore.
• In another noteworthy
punitive move, the U.S. government has charged 28 North
Korean and five Chinese individuals with facilitating more than $2.5
billion in illegal payments for Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and missile
program in what court papers describe as a
clandestine global network operating from countries
including China, Russia, Libya and Thailand.
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Top of The Post
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Viewpoints
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A fragile peace
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South Sudan National Police Service officers ride a
pickup truck while patrolling the streets of Juba, South Sudan, in
April. (Alex McBride/AFP/Getty Images)
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In mid-May, attackers with machine guns stormed a remote cluster of
villages in South Sudan, killing hundreds, according to
aid agencies working in the area. In February and March, the same side
that suffered so many deaths had been the perpetrator, and so the most recent bloodshed seemed
like yet another massacre in a cycle of retribution between two competing
cattle-herding communities that has claimed thousands of
lives in South Sudan’s Jonglei region over the past decade.
The violence, however, comes on the heels of the formation
of a new government in South Sudan, one intended to bring an end
to a civil war that began in 2013 and has cost more than 400,000
lives. The two main belligerents, President Salva Kiir and his former
deputy Riek Machar, declared
“a new dawn” and that “peace has come to stay,” but many other militant
leaders who were jockeying for power were left out of the deal,
which was signed in late February.
As part of the peace
deal, Machar’s rebel army, made up mostly of the Nuer ethnic group,
is being integrated into the national army, mostly made up of Dinkas. But
militias tied to smaller groups such as the Murle have been excluded from
national power long before the peace deal. The Murle and a sub-tribe of the
Nuer have fought over disputed land in Jonglei for decades, each
accusing the other of cattle raiding, mass abductions of women and
children, and attempts at ethnic cleansing. — Max
Bearak
Read on: Hundreds killed, villages destroyed
in massacres undermining South Sudan’s peace deal
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1,000 Words
Condemnation rained down Thursday on the four Minneapolis police
officers involved in the death of George Floyd this week, as local
officials, police organizations and President Trump denounced the
incident as a tragic and unacceptable case of police brutality. Trump
vowed a federal investigation of the incident, which rose to national
attention after a bystander’s video showing
then-officer Derek Chauvin holding Floyd in a prolonged and illegal hold,
his knee on the black man’s neck, as a crowd of onlookers begs for
Floyd’s life and he gasps: “I can’t breathe.” (Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty
Images)
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Afterword
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