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Presented
by the NYU School of Professional Studies Center for
Global Affairs
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A view of Victoria Harbor and the Hong Kong
skyline at sunset on June 29. (Vincent Yu/AP)
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How does a global city die? The world’s urban centers —
coastal entrepots teeming with merchant ships, oases at the heart of
caravan routes, the fortified capitals of cosmopolitan empires — wax
and wane through history. They can fall in both dramatic and
imperceptible ways, laid low by the invader’s ax and flame, but also
by political upheaval oceans away or the steady toll of drought and climate change.
We may now be watching a famous world city go through such a
demise, a loss of status that feels both sudden and long in the
making.
For decades, Hong Kong styled itself as Asia’s preeminent metropolis, a bustling former
British colony at the center of the continent’s trade and logistics
networks and the main international gateway to the booming Chinese
market. Expats waltzed into Hong Kong as if it was an analogue of London or New York City. Local
Hong Kongers exercised civil liberties unthinkable on the other side
of the border with the mainland.
But those freedoms seemed to come under constant threat since
Britain handed over Hong Kong to China’s authoritarian regime in
1997. Moves, large and small, by local authorities and their masters
in Beijing to curtail Hong Kong’s special liberties sparked repeated
rounds of protests, including the wave of demonstrations that paralyzed the
city last year. And then, in one fell swoop, China dropped the
hammer.
In what the Economist dubbed “one of the biggest assaults
on a liberal society since the Second World War,” China implemented a
sweeping, new national security law for Hong Kong on midnight
Tuesday. “Overnight, Hong Kong’s 7.5 million residents
were put under the same speech restrictions as the mainland, with
possible life imprisonment for
those deemed guilty of subversion — a standard charge used to
jail political dissidents and human rights activists in China,” my colleagues reported.
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To many observers, the law marks the definitive end to an era. It’s
the latest and perhaps most emphatic demonstration of the draconian
grip of Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has shrunk the space for
civil society throughout China, steadily squeezed political dissent
in Hong Kong and erected a dystopia of mass detention camps for persecuted
ethnic minorities in the far-western region of Xinjiang.
“Hong Kong is a great world city, not a remote area like Xinjiang.
But the government of Xi Jinping is now clearly determined to bring
it into line,” wrote
the editorial board of the Financial Times. “The formula of ‘one
country, two systems’ applied to Hong Kong since 1997 and sanctified
in international agreements seems in effect to be over — a point
underlined by the way the national security legislation was written
and imposed from Beijing, without any participation by the Hong Kong
government or legislature.”
Thousands of Hong Kongers still took to the streets in a show of
defiance this week. Hundreds were arrested. The fear is that the
breadth of the new law — which apparently also extends to people
living outside of China’s legal jurisdiction — could break the
popular will to stand against Beijing.
This week’s events can be interpreted as “a bloodless version” of China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Steve
Tsang, a historian of Hong Kong at London’s School of Oriental and
African Studies, told the Atlantic. “People tend to focus on the
killing [at Tiananmen], but the killing was an instrument,” he said.
“The objective was to intimidate and terrify the people so that
people don’t even think about [protesting] again.”
Not long ago, Hong Kong was seen as the city that would prefigure a more liberal, prosperous future
for China. Now, its protesters are the canaries in the coal mine,
left to voice the final cries of a society whose democratic
aspirations are withering on the vine. Rather than seeing a
metropolis of the future, analysts point to Hungary in 1956 or Prague in
1968.
Chinese officials seem unmoved by the torrent of Western criticism
and sanctions coming their way. “The era when the Chinese cared what
others thought and looked up to others is in the past, never to
return,” Zhang Xiaoming, the executive director of China’s Hong Kong
and Macao Affairs Office, told reporters.
Nor do they seem much bothered by the news this week that a host
of foreign governments — including Australia, Taiwan, the United
States and, most importantly, Britain — are considering fast-tracking
permits for potentially millions of Hong Kong refugees seeking to
quit their home city. That exodus may take place alongside a flight
of Western capital and business — especially if the United States
decides to scrap its special trade relationship with the territory,
as President Trump has pledged to do.
Hong Kong’s diminishment may be worth the cost for Beijing, which can
count on global business regardless and attract investors to gleaming
megacities such as Shenzhen and Shanghai. But it may also serve the
interests of the more radical set of Hong Kong’s protesters,
who see the impossible odds of confronting the leviathan in Beijing
yet still want to intensify the showdown. “If we burn, you burn with
us,” a catchphrase from the Hunger Games series, has become a popular refrain.
“The choice is between dying quietly without the world noticing,
or dying with dignity with the world noticing, and at the same time
creating the chance of causing some damage to the people who kill
Hong Kong,” Ho-Fung Hung, a professor of political economy at Johns
Hopkins University, told Quartz.
“Hong Kong’s people have continually shown an ability to defy
impossible odds and create beauty even in the harshest settings,” wrote Jeffrey Wasserstrom, the author of “Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink.” But he laments
the creeping nihilism of the times.
“I am filled with sadness,” he wrote, “and find it hard to see
anything but darkness ahead for the city.” |
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Talking Points
·
Across the globe, the pandemic has tanked
economies.
The world faces its worst collective downturn since the Great
Depression. Russia has been particularly hard hit by the twin blows
of the coronavirus and the collapse in oil prices. It relies on taxes
from the oil and gas sector for 40 percent of its budget. My colleague Robyn Dixon
reports on the many ordinary Russians suffering
as a result.
·
One German sergeant major suspected of far-right
ties
had a cache of weapons in a bunker at his home. Other officers were
reported to have used the Hitler salute, listened to neo-Nazi music
and played a game that involved tossing a pig's head. My colleagues
Loved Morris and Luisa Beck detail why German Defense Minister
Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer this week had to draw a line under the
scandals surrounding the extreme-right ties of the country’s elite
Special Forces Command, known as the KSK, disbanding one of its combat
units and announcing a restructuring.
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Top of The Post
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Viewpoints
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By Richard Fontaine and Ely Ratner | The
Washington Post ● Read more »
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By Tareq Baconi | The New York Review of
Books ● Read more »
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Deaths uncounted.
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Melvin Sanaurio digs a grave at the San Lorenzo
Tezonco Iztapalapa cemetery in Mexico City last month. (Marco
Ugarte/AP)
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MEXICO CITY — The
Mexican capital suffered about three times as many deaths as
it normally would from March through May, according
to the country's coronavirus czar — the clearest sign yet of the
extraordinary toll that the pandemic has taken on the city.
That estimate
comes from the government’s first detailed study on lives claimed by
the virus, an investigation officials say will soon
be made public.
The excess-mortality figure, which includes deaths both directly
and indirectly related to the pandemic, is considered the most
complete indicator of the damage done by the novel coronavirus. The
jump in deaths this spring was similar to surges in urban centers such as London
or New York, experts said.
“Certainly
it’s on a par with what we’ve seen in the most hard-hit areas of the
United States,” said Daniel Weinberger, an
epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health who has
studied excess deaths during the pandemic.
Hugo López-Gatell, the undersecretary of health who is leading
Mexico’s response to the coronavirus, told The Washington Post that
the study uses average deaths from March through May in recent years
as a baseline. “How many people have died now? This statistic, which
we are still refining, is about three times more,” he said. — Mary Beth Sheridan
Read more: Mexico City deaths spiked to
three times normal during covid-19 outbreak, official says |
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1,000 Words
As France emerges from its coronavirus lockdown and life returns
to almost-normal, Marseille considers itself lucky, James McAuley and Emilienne
Malfatto write. The historic port on France's
Mediterranean coast was the site of Western Europe's last outbreak of
the bubonic plague. The disease swept through the city in 1720,
quickly overwhelming hospitals and resulting in mass graves. But the
city and region have so far escaped the worst of the coronavirus
pandemic. (Emilienne Malfatto) |
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Afterword
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"What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what,
at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid." |
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