Death of Hong Kong
Hong Kong is dead. It’s time to ask the right questions.
It’s been six months since the Chinese government imposed its draconian security law in Hong Kong. To a greater or lesser extent, the legislation has achieved its desired effect: coupled with the impact of Covid, mass-protests at the scale of 2019 are now nowhere to be seen; prominent resistance figures, such as Agnes Chow, Joshua Wong, and Nathan Law are either in prison or in exile; Opposition MPs resigned en masse after the government’s purging of four ‘unpatriotic’ lawmakers, with Beijing reportedly planning to extend this crackdown to the District Councils after the pro-democracy landslide of 2019; and over 50 activists, politicians, scholars, and even a pollster arrested yesterday, accused to plotting to ‘overthrow’ the government by attempting to win the postponed-2020 elections by organising an unofficial primary vote for pro-democracy candidates.
But as much as we ought to be enraged by this tyranny imposed upon us, none of this should come as a surprise. We knew this was coming: it was only a matter of time. We knew, in 2014, that Beijing would tighten its control over the region, arguing for a ‘comprehensive jurisdiction’ akin to the British Declaratory Act against the American Colonies in 1766. We knew, in 2017, that Beijing had no intention to abide by the Sino-British Joint Declaration, the 1984 treaty that stipulated the conditions for the handover of Hong Kong, which they renounced as a mere ‘historic document’ with ‘no practical significance’. We knew in May, that the National Security Law will spell the ‘the end of Hong Kong’, argued Dennis Kwok, one of the four moderate MPs who have since been forcefully ousted from the local legislature. We, in Britain and the West, knew, and yet we did nothing, apart from ‘strongly worded’ condemnations which, I’m sure really ‘hurt the feelings of the Chinese people’. Is it really any surprise, then, that China went ahead with its crackdown on political dissent?
Hong Kong as we know it, is dead. It was a death caused by Beijing’s complete reversal on its promises made in the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration. A death caused by its vehement attacks on the independent judiciary, the free press, the academia, and our democratic institutions. But above all, it was a death caused by decades of Western inaction and appeasement, because apparently, a piece of the Chinese market is more valuable than the rights and liberties of those in Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang. The EU, for all its talk about its commitment to human rights and democracy, had concluded a fresh trade deal with China, just one day before authorities jailed pro-democracy media tycoon, Jimmy Lai, after he was denied bail on national security charges.
And yet, the Hong Kong ‘we know’ has never been anything more than a mercantilist colony. From British rule to Chinese rule, Hong Kong has always operated for the benefit for its foreign masters first, and its people second. Consequently, it is a city without a character, without a soul. Neither, do the myths we used to tell ourselves apply in the current political climate any longer. The so-called ‘Lion Rock Spirit’ of the 1970s (perseverance and solidarity — an Asian ‘American Dream’, if you will) collapsed as social mobility withered and the wealth gap widened to an all-time high (also like the ‘American Dream’); and the ‘core values of Hong Kong’ — freedom, human rights, democracy, the rule of law, and clean governance — seems comical amidst the fresh political purges of 2021. The security law was the final nail on the coffin: by killing off any liberal remnants of British Hong Kong, Beijing hopes to integrate the rebellious city into its authoritarian grip. Still, by the same token, it is equally possible that a new national consciousness — a national consciousness unique to Hong Kong — may rise from the ashes of its two-century long colonial history under Britain and China.
Yesterday’s crackdown was a wake-up call to the world. Now is the time to stop living in denial and recognise, once and for all, that Hong Kong is dead. To quote Thomas Paine, the English-American revolutionary, ‘to speak of friendship with whom our reason forbids us to have faith in […] is madness and folly.’ We need to wake up to the fact that authoritarian China stands direct at odds with everything we embody as Hongkongers, and will consequently never respect our way of life, let alone grant us democracy. And in the West, we need to relinquish the ‘illusion’ that ‘at the end of the all the kowtowing there’s this great pot of gold waiting for us’, said Lord Patten, the last Governor of British Hong Kong.
The question, therefore, isn't how we can resuscitate the old Hong Kong by restoring the post-handover status quo, as Western governments repeatedly urged Beijing to do so, but rather what kind of Hong Kong do we want to see in the future. Whether it becomes just another soulless second-tier Chinese city, or whether it becomes an independent city-state and a beacon of democracy in East Asia — along with Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, acting as a counterbalance to authoritarian China — is down to the willpower of Hongkongers and Western governments. To quote Churchill, this is ‘the end of the beginning’: Hong Kong is just getting started.
