Keep The Bauhinia Flying
Stories of Changing Fortunes in Hong Kong
“…The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world…if a leader says that two and two makes five, then two and two makes five. This is a prospect that frightens me much more than bombs.”
— George Orwell, ‘Visions of a Totalitarian Future’ (1942)
Hong Kong has always maintained an intense relationship with change. It has long been a refuge for opinions that were unable to be voiced by its neighbors, and a haven for people looking to start new lives or escape the consequences of old ones. The island’s coasts and mountains — once upon a time not much more than a broken collection of jagged rocks snapped off of China proper, unburdened by high finance or a taste for glamour — took on a new kind of human-driven beauty in a few short generations. Hong Kong was energized by a crowd of newcomers and all of their worldly desires. Lately, though, many of the positive side effects of change and reinvention have passed on, and a state of disappearance has taken their place. Old ways of living, political values, language, and the ability to have certain opinions — plus revered local tangibles like hawker stalls, dishes, landmarks, and entire neighborhoods — are all wilting in some way or another; they exist only in the memories of those who had a bond with the old Hong Kong. Soon enough, many of these rare and lovely things may vanish completely.
This is a place that always has, for the whole of its modern existence, lived under the threatening cloud of an expiration date. Stuck between two empires — Britain and China — with fundamentally different views about the world, it has passed between their hands multiple times now, often with very little input in the decisions being made about its own destiny. The people of Hong Kong — peaceful farmers and fisherman of the early days, migrant workers who fueled its rise on the world stage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or the brave young idealists of this millennium — have never really had much of a voice in matters concerning the governance of their own society. Locals have mostly been told to keep it down and accept their fate, while the adults in the room decide it for them.
In order to better understand the position of Hong Kong today, it’s necessary to become a bit more familiar with its recent past, as the origins of this territory’s discontents were set in motion centuries ago. By considering its historical reality as the stronghold square on a chessboard being jostled for by two geopolitical grandmasters, and the significance of what might happen now that China is in firm control of that battle, we can start to grasp why the current conflicts in Hong Kong should — no matter which direction their ultimate outcome falls — make waves far beyond the shores of the Pearl River Delta.
I. Farewell the Trumpets
A Brief History of Rule in Hong Kong
“Up goes the mist, taller and taller those buildings turn out to be, each higher than the one before — pressing upon one another, looking over each others’ shoulders, immense clean buildings of white, or silver, or even gold, with masses of port-holed windows, or great cross-girders, with jagged rooflines and spiky towers — up the city heights until the green mountainsides appear behind, and there are white villas everywhere, and snaking roads, and white domes alone on summits, and the rising sun, shining clean through the windows of an apartment block on a high ridge, suddenly seems to set the whole structure afire, blazing all white and red above the sea.”
— Jan Morris, ‘Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire’ (1997)
The geographic jewel of Hong Kong has always been its deep and accommodating harbour, so the territory at-large was by no means deserted when it became more familiar to the outside world. This cluster of rocky islands and its sister shorelines on China’s southeastern coast enjoyed a consistent bit of ocean traffic as time rolled along. Most of the land on Hong Kong Island is far too mountainous to be farmed, despite the best efforts of its tropical climate. This differs, though, from the more fertile stretches of Kowloon Peninsula across the water, where throughout most of history, scattershot communities of farmers, fisherman, and foragers of various sorts could be found sowing rice and trading local goods. Bands of pirates haunted convenient hideaways amongst the outer islands, away from view, and preyed upon the seafaring commerce floating towards Pearl River’s estuaries and the deeper realms of China.
The story of Hong Kong’s modern history begins in the vicinity of the early nineteenth century. At this point in time, its mother-country of China was profoundly contemptuous of foreign relations and intervention in her homeland by distant powers — these feelings were especially strong amongst the dynastic elites who lived in Northern cities. The Celestial Empire in Beijing officially classified all foreigners as “Outer Barbarians” and had virtually zero diplomatic contact with other states; their xenophobia was left to flourish within the bounds of a walled-off kingdom. But attitudes in the South were slightly less inclined towards isolation. Guangzhou was the country’s southern port city — it sprawled across the inner-most shores of Pearl River, less than 100 miles away from the desolate and far less important Hong Kong. Crucially, it was the only city in China where foreigners were able to live, and it had valuable commercial connections with the Arab world, the Indian subcontinent, and — by way of the Portuguese colony at Macau, just down the road — Europe. Textiles, porcelain, spices, art, narcotics, and gargantuan quantities of tea traded hands here.
The British quickly became the most distinguishable of the Western presences in Guangzhou, which they lended the name Canton (in a very on-brand linguistic maneuver). The Brits in town were increasingly numerous, aggressively outspoken, and relentlessly ambitious. This was the nineteenth century, after all, and Her Majesty’s Government was busy at work molding the entire world in her image. Britons at home and abroad were high on the intoxications of empire, and they were on a recent winning streak in South and East Asia — their operations in India were a foundation of enormous profit, and the establishment of Singapore as an outpost of the British East India company promised the opening of more overseas markets and opportunities for Anglo influence. Recent victories in the Napoleonic Wars back home gave them important economic and diplomatic advantages over their maritime arch-rivals: the French, Dutch, and Portuguese.
What would this Western imperium choose to do in a position of such power in a region far from home, distanced from London gossip and consequence? The answer, for the sake of understanding a little bit more about Hong Kong, relies heavily on opium — or “foreign mud,” as the Chinese called it. The drug was strictly illegal but in overwhelming demand within the gates of China, and British traders were happy to supply boatloads of the stuff for the masses to light inside their pipes, earning huge amounts of silver by doing so. But while Britain was illicitly supporting China’s addiction to opium, in return, China was feeding Britain’s gluttonous dependence on tea. In reality, an important reason for their incessant hawking of the narcotic was to earn back silver bullion that was originally used to purchase tea — in order to purchase more tea. And so these two antagonizing empires with fundamentally different attitudes about the world, one forcefully expansive and the other rigidly conservative, each alien to the other, and both hooked on drugs of some sort, became locked in a Faustian bargain. China eventually decided to clamp down on their opium problem, tempers reached a point of no peaceful return, and a war was fought.
British possession of the islands of Hong Kong was hatched from this war, which was entirely one-sided: gunboats under command of the British Navy — by far the most powerful on Earth — roared down the river and took everything in sight. Afterwords, ministers in London were seeking to carve out a piece of China for themselves in permanence, and following a declaration of cession in the Treaty of Nanking, the Union Jack was raised over the newly-named Victoria Harbour in 1842. Kowloon Peninsula was ceded twenty years later, enlarging Britain’s property and giving them control of both sides of the water. The UK had so much power in the negotiations around these treaties that China would eventually not recognize them at all, referring to them as “void due to their one-sidedness,” arguments which would re-emerge 150 years later as a basis for the handover.
But the curious realities of Hong Kong’s administrative situation weren’t truly set in motion for another half-century. In 1898, the Qing Dynasty in China ceded the New Territories — a tract of rural land between Kowloon Peninsula and the mainland region of Shenzhen — to the British, giving them a slightly larger buffer between the affairs of the islands and China’s interior grasp. However, these properties weren’t handed over permanently, they were instead signed across to Her Majesty on a 99-year lease. Because of this fateful diplomatic detail, Hong Kong now officially had an expiration date. 1997 was then a long way off, but already cemented as a potential inflection point for the futures and fortunes of all those who called this place home. Beijing had just become London’s landlord in the South China Sea.
In the meantime, Hong Kong began to blossom, like the Bauhinia flowers in its gardens. Because of its natural beauty, “exotic” location on Western radars, and colonial umbrella shading influences of both Orient and Occident, the islands attracted unique international attention. For Britain, it was an “emporium of commerce” and free port on the Eastern edge of their world. For other itinerants and bon vivants, it was a sunny playground with loose rules and global company. It had a long leash from Parliamentary decision makers in London — as messages at this time took entire months to travel back and forth overland — so the island basically governed itself. It situated itself in the United Kingdom’s colonial Asian portfolio next to Bombay and Singapore, each a twisted sub-tropical cocktail of London and their own local cultures. And it occasionally popped up in literary creations: the traveler Phileas Fogg remarks on his trip Around the World in Eighty Days that the territory reminds him of “a pleasant town in Kent or Surrey, transported by some strange magic to the antipodes.”
But progress wasn’t exactly a straight line. For much of the early twentieth century, Hong Kong held onto its reputation as a drab and washed-out sea haven lined with opium dens, port brothels, and gambling houses, frequented by varying shades of nefarious characters. It was a city keen on vice. It was dirty — markets were colorful and filled with diverse goods but covered with a heavy patina of squalor. The hot, damp climate and transient inhabitants created a breeding ground for disease. Queen Victoria was originally amused by the acquisition, and didn’t think it would be of much general use to the Crown. One British Garrison stationed in the area went so far as to call it “a fairly horrid place — inferior to Sierra Leone for the fact of its being less healthy, less amusing, and less near England.” In World War II, the conditions imposed by Imperial Japanese throughout their occupation were hellish for all involved.
After the war, though, the place grew into its own as a hub of commerce and culture that was not quite like anywhere else. Whereas Shanghai — China’s other commercial hub at the time — became increasingly tied to the Soviet bloc, Hong Kong drifted away from the mainland to be fueled by the decadence and glitter of international capitalism. It was energized by investment from rich Chinese tycoons, who were at once building and filling luxe new housing developments upwards along the peaks. Banks and new businesses enjoyed hands-off regulations and low tax rates. Networks of art and culture were created by a new rush of interesting people who were looking for refuge from the post-war Communist regime. While Shanghai was shedding its old cosmopolitan skin — which was bruised a bit by desires to be a truly international place — under the eye of a new government, many of the city’s fashion designers, filmmakers, models, and merchants were pouring into Hong Kong to build a new and more free life.
But eventually the British music would stop playing, and the royal trumpets would bid farewell, as the year 1997 was now looming closer. The adults in the room, led by Deng Xiaoping of China and Margaret Thatcher of the UK, agreed on a post-handover structure called “One Country, Two Systems” — in which Hong Kong would legally and immediately be a part of China, but allowed to maintain a collection of its previously-enjoyed freedoms and societal customs throughout a 50-year transitional period, until 2047. The territory would exist as a semi-autonomous “Special Administrative Region” within view of the panoptic eyes of the People’s Republic in Beijing. This was an international affair of strange circumstances: one of our most aggressively pro-business societies was about to be legally handed over, by our most historic and grandiose of world powers, to our largest official Communist regime, with an effective expiration date on its way of life. From the outside looking in, safe from the anxieties of the unknown being felt by those living it at the time, the transaction raises a question: was this a case of newfound freedoms being given to a place by its old imperial rulers? Or was it betrayal on behalf of Britain, the abandonment of a child now within the grip of a new guardian that is far more terrifying? Should the climactic denouement of British Hong Kong have been celebrated or feared?
II. The Art of Disappearance
Two Decades in Post-Handover Hong Kong
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”
— Martin Niemöller, Dachau (1946)
“First they came for the activists, and I did not speak out — because I was not an activist. Then they came for the journalists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a journalist. Then they came for the booksellers, and I did not speak out — because I was not a bookseller. Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”
— Agnes Chow, Hong Kong (2016)
In those first few years of new ownership, China let the dust settle. The Western leaders had vacated their government desks in Central Hong Kong and the eyes of the world turned their gaze elsewhere. The year 2047 seemed distant — just as 1997 had, at one point in time — and supporters on both sides of fundamental political divisions prepared to shape the new Hong Kong to their liking. Everything still seemed possible for the territory at this point — its worst nightmare or its happiest utopian ending.
Back in the late-1980s, just a few years after the details of the handover agreement between China and Britain had been hammered out behind closed doors, Margaret Thatcher was asked for her predictions on the future of the deal during a BBC World News program. “China will honor the commitments she has made with us about the future of Hong Kong, because I think she’ll wish to be seen to honor them in the forum of the world,” she said in her characteristically straightforward and well-spoken manner, as if daring the listener to try and disagree. The Iron Lady believed that China’s strong economic development would pave the way for democratic reforms to follow close behind, integrating the country with other nations in the West and providing a political security blanket for Hong Kong — which would have a head start — in the meantime. China’s leaders had given the international community some catnip; Deng Xiaoping spoke more than once of the “reform and opening” to come in the future. But these hopes of liberalization were largely extinguished during the Tiananmen Square massacres of 1989, when China’s army used deadly force to crush a student protest demanding more freedoms and less corruption in a city park in Beijing. It didn’t take much to connect the dots: these were to be the same troops about to have jurisdiction in Hong Kong in less than a decade’s time. The idea of converging with a military titan that had just slaughtered its own people in city streets for speaking their minds was not an enticing prospect to a place that had fancied itself a champion of free speech.
The People’s Republic of China would soon prove Mrs Thatcher incorrect; the heads of their government didn’t actually care about occupying an honorable position in the “forum of the world.” The opinions of foreign leaders and pundits, in the end, just wasn’t the country’s top priority—it was reluctant to wait fifty years to bring Hong Kong under its complete control. The whole situation was basically an experiment without precedent and its results were now beginning to reveal themselves. It would have been naive to pretend that any concessions made by the Chinese in the original discussions had been given due to generosity or respect; they were and are still shrewd operators. On this point, there’s a strong common thread that continues to be sewn through the decisions and public appearance of China today.
One of the first true moments of concern came along in early 2003, when a security bill was introduced that included wording to prohibit acts of “treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People’s Government…and prohibit foreign political organizations from conducting affairs in the Region.” It was labeled as Article 23, and it was worrisome to locals for a few reasons, one being that Beijing could use the legislation to legally step on any attempts to speak out against its government on the mainland. If the bill was pushed through, it could plant seeds of concerning precedents in the official law books of the territory, seeds that might grow into something far more dangerous in the future. But the citizens of Hong Kong were paying attention, and a groundswell of objection to the bill grew, and on the sixth anniversary of the handover, more than 500,000 people gathered in Victoria Park to protest. The government eventually let this version of the bill die. It ended up being an amazing promise of the potential power of an organized group of people fighting for something they care about, but also a temperature-check on what actions might be considered by China in the future.
That temperature has risen feverishly in this past decade. In 2014, against a backdrop of continuing failed attempts by Hong Kong progressives to increase accountability and suffrage, protesters organized massive rallies (originally labeled the “Occupy” movements and now known as the “Umbrella” movements) to call for real democracy. Beijing had proposed a framework allowing more people to vote for the city’s leader, but only from a pre-approved shortlist of candidates. Named for the instrument used to repel the pepper spray and flashbang grenades being dispersed by police, the Umbrella Movements were to be the first in a series of distinct but related confrontations in the story of the fight for democratic values in Hong Kong.
In early 2015, a local activist named Joshua Wong, who was growing in popularity on the basis of well-spoken warnings against shifting towards the political realities of mainland China, had his passport blocked from entering a list of other countries in East Asia. The Chinese government accused him of having ties to America’s CIA, and restricted his movement based on worries that he might spread his message to other impressionable nations, such as Thailand, Laos, and Malaysia — nations that China is pulling more closely into its orbit. Wong was also harassed that year in Taipei’s airport by local “businessmen” with ties to Beijing — they told him that he had no right to be in Taiwan and urged his party to turn around.
Later that year, five staff members of Causeway Bay Books — a book store in Central Hong Kong that offered titles banned by Beijing as part of its collection — disappeared. The booksellers surfaced in mainland China a few months later, detained on the grounds of petty offenses that were largely considered to be either completely fabricated or exaggerated in the extreme (one was an old traffic violation). A pair of them, Lee Bo and Gui Minhai, made virtual reappearances on Chinese news broadcasts apologizing for their “crimes” and attempting to re-assure the international community that this obvious charade was actually a legitimate example of judicial process. Later, once back in Hong Kong, a press conference uncovered the detentions as unlawful and the apologies as scripted.
In February of 2016, in events that came to be known as the “Fishball Riots,” a group of activists who had assumed leadership roles in local pro-democracy movements were arrested. In this case, they were attempting to preserve a collection of local landmarks and traditions — one being the continued existence of street food hawkers, who commonly sold a regional snack, fishballs — and for their efforts were apprehended en masse. A group of supporters, activists, and journalists met police in protest, which eventually erupted into violence.
The following year, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping made a speech in Hong Kong to commemorate the handover’s twenty year anniversary. In a broadcast that was streamed near and far — within Hong Kong but also to the corners of the Chinese sphere of influence — he stressed the “One Country” half of the “One Country, Two Systems” agreement. It was now clear that the “Two Systems” piece was likely to not be mentioned at all — it was fading from view. A new and stronger China had emerged, and Hong Kong was a small part of it. As if to eliminate any possible opposition to that point, he brought along the largest exhibit of troops and military hardware ever put on display within the territory.
In 2018, a new passenger train station of the Express Rail Link network opened in West Kowloon — an area that is very much in the interior of downtown Hong Kong affairs — staffed by mainland employees. The sparkling piece of modern infrastructure cost more than ten billion U.S. dollars and can connect downtown Hong Kong to Guangzhou via high-speed rail in 45 minutes, less than half of the time it previously took. But the bright and alluring facade hides a much darker reality: that travelers disembarking here, in the heart of Hong Kong, will meet Chinese immigration officers and be technically subject to the legal jurisdiction of Beijing. It was the first occurrence of mainland law being enacted in practice on Hong Kong soil.
A few months later, the Financial Times journalist Victor Mallet moderated a discussion at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club in Central with the leader of the Hong Kong National Party, which had just been officially outlawed. Leaders in Beijing tried to cancel the talk preemptively, but the show went on. After its completion, Mallet took a brief trip to Thailand, and his visa was blocked on his way back into Hong Kong. The move was clearly retribution for holding the event, which represented free speech, open journalism, and defiance of a Chinese position. Democracy does dim in darkness — and when journalists are prohibited from entering a country on grounds of doing their job, there seem to be ill-lit times ahead. The Hong Kong Journalists Association, an organization that is used to confronting the extinguishing powers of the government across the water, reminded locals that they were hearing “the death knells of freedom of speech.”
In the summer of 2019, the voices of Hong Kongers would rise to their loudest level yet heard by ears around the world, not only in the circles of those who follow international affairs but also of everyday people in faraway countries. Their rage was directed at the introduction of an extradition bill in parliament, which would allow those accused of crimes in Hong Kong to be sent to mainland China for trial. This opening of judicial channels between Hong Kong and China, combined with the already-converging legal systems of the two places and a highly controversial national security bill that would be introduced in the next year (which allowed for Chinese security forces to operate in Hong Kong, and gives them an extreme amount of slack in their interpretations of crime), would amount to a near-complete deletion of any political and legal autonomy that remained in the territory. If you could now be easily arrested on grounds of the security bill, and then easily moved to china on grounds of the extradition bill, were these really two distinct places?
What all of this amounts to is a continuing state of disappearance in the territory. The collective memory of an open Hong Kong is fading, as college-aged students today were born after the British handover. The allure for international travelers is waning, as worries of offending the wrong person and ending up in a mainland jail have become crystallized as an actual possibility. And even the geographic independence of the islands — a buffer born of the natural, rather than political, order of things — is gone, as the completion of the world’s longest sea bridge has now tethered Hong Kong to mainland China permanently, and the newest train stations in town represent the red flag of the People’s Republic. Lord Chris Patten, the final Governor of British Hong Kong who made an earnest and admirable effort to solidify a few democratic norms that he hoped would outlast his tenure, summarized his opinions on contemporary Hong Kong affairs in a single thought: “when the snow starts melting, it melts quickly.”
III. A Revolution is Not a Dinner Party
On Democratic Decay and Political Language
“A revolution is not a dinner party…or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained, and magnanimous…”
— Mao Tse-tung, ‘Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan’ (1927)
“I dream of a language whose words, like fists, would fracture jaws.”
— Emil Cioran, ‘The New Gods’ (1969)
Understanding the reasons for Hong Kong’s sometimes confusing existence in a state of political limbo — a certain degree of liberty without democracy — requires a brief safari into the administrative undergrowth of the islands. The constitutional document here comes in the form of its “Basic Law,” which was enshrined during negotiations before the handover, and intended to give Hong Kong some fundamental legal muscle in its coming relationship with China (advanced in no small part by the honourable Lord Patten mentioned above). The Basic Law declares the region’s “capitalist system and way of life” and its “high degree of autonomy,” including executive, legislative, and independent judicial powers — for fifty years. These were fundamental human freedoms, Prime Minister Thatcher said, and they must be preserved. They were — on paper.
But increasingly, as we’ve now explored a bit, the government officials in Beijing are exercising an authority to interpret this document. And similarly to the judicial and democratic acrobatics that have been going on in the highest courts in the U.S., the crucial matter at hand is who gets to interpret the laws of the land. Changes to political processes have to be approved by the Hong Kong government and China’s top legislative body. And while Hong Kong is mostly allowed to forge external relations in certain areas — like tourism — Beijing maintains control regarding any affairs regarding diplomacy and defense (particularly important things in the case of tiny island protectorates). Under the Basic Law, Hong Kongers are guaranteed de jure freedoms of press, expression, assembly, and religion, as well as protections under the normal standards of international law. Of course, things are playing out much differently in practice. As if to display the Chinese hand to the crowd of this globally-observed poker game, part of the document now includes the language that any interpretations may be “specified in the light of the actual situation” — a red flag raised high enough that not only lawyers can see the potential problems in its wording.
Since the handover, there has been no free voting process to elect the “Chief Executive,” which is the title for the head of state in Hong Kong (and gives the added first impression that the capitalists are still in charge). Instead, an election committee composed of representatives from the region’s commercial and business elite has selected the position. During the most recent election, in 2017, only candidates vetted by a nominating committee chosen by Beijing were allowed to run. Carrie Lam, viewed as a mainland-favored establishment candidate, won the contest and became Hong Kong’s first female to take the position.
In some version of the world that we have now moved far beyond, it would seem that Beijing’s most ideal scenario would have been to retain Hong Kong’s status as an open and accessible market, especially with regard to international finance, amongst the theatre of global affairs. But things are different now. Hong Kong’s status no longer means what it once did to leaders up North. The sobering economic reality is that in 1993, Hong Kong was responsible for more than 25% of China’s entire GDP, but by 2019 that figure had sunk to less than 3%, and it continues to descend. The territory’s leverage has evaporated; the mainland no longer has an incentive to protect it as a safe haven for lax financial rules. Britain’s main argument in the original negotiations — that everyone involved would be best served by just letting things go on as they had been — was now crumbling. China has found a new winning formula, mainly turning rural swamplands into ultra-productive megacities with special economic benefits and filling them with hardworking people (see Shenzen, Chengdu, Xiongan). In my own experience working for an American bank in Asia, I can back up that Hong Kong is still a relevant place for international firms to operate in the Pacific Rim and to get some type of foothold into the notoriously difficult and localized Chinese financial markets. Things usually don’t change quite as quickly as the loudest of alarmists predict; London’s significance did not immediately vaporize after Brexit, for example. But big businesses don’t like uncertainty, and plenty of other attractive options have made themselves known, poaching resources from Hong Kong (see Singapore, Seoul, Tokyo, and Taipei). Many firms are being lured away from the islands, and as new agile businesses continue to pop up, they may decide to head elsewhere and avoid the mess altogether.
When Mao Tse-tung spoke about a movement’s occasional necessity to avoid peaceful restraint, remarking that “revolution is not a dinner party” nearly a full century ago, he was encouraging his followers in pre-communist China’s Hunan Province to challenge the masters currently in power. They listened. Mao was the leader of the Communist Party, and eventually rose to the newly-defined country’s top position of authority, gaining momentum drawn from the people’s support of venomous comments like this one (once in power, he would later squash plenty of related dissent by those who challenged him, as dictatorial figures tend to do). But his words have now been flipped on their heads by the protestors in Hong Kong. This generation can relate to them in a way that is at once ironic and completely fitting — they use the phrase in brave defiance of the regime that benefitted from it in the first place. Over the past few years, the “dinner party” line, along with others of a similar tilt spoken by leaders in China throughout the years, have re-appeared on posters, signs, and public spaces around the territory.
Words can be peculiar devices, especially in politics, and we should be careful of them sometimes. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is not, despite its name, very democratic, nor is it a republic. The “left” and “right” sides of an aisle in one country are rarely a perfect match with their equivalents in another. “Integration” can be a positive thing, when representing cooperation and an acknowledgment of mutual responsibility to try and solve big problems — or it can be a worrying thing, when citizens become bound to decisions being made for them in far-off capitals. Systems in which a few leaders are selected, rather than elected, and then voted upon by a limited and biased committee is not really a democracy by most of our definitions. Yet the fact that voting takes place at all, according to some, immediately puts it in that category. In Hong Kong, 400 people were able to take place in the 1996 “Selection Committee,” a number that increased to just over 1,000 people in the 2014 and 2017 “Election Committees.” See the difference? In a place with nearly the population of New York City, a handful of people choose a leader from a couple of pre-selected options.
Political ideas, similarly, are often two sides of the very same coin, and they hide under layers of jargon and terminology, eventually becoming detached from their original meanings. Today, it seems that all too often these contemporary definitions are sharpened and used as weapons to be hurled towards ideological opponents in conversation. For instance, what are values that have traditionally been viewed as conservative, and do those differ from our ideas about what the average “conservative” fights for today? Are social-forward governmental frameworks actually as terrible as some make them out to be, or has “socialism” just become a dirty word and an easy scapegoat? How were the political parties of old in America different from today, and what could be learned from the ways that their positions have tilted? How far could we get if we decided to stand for universal ideas, like basic human rights, expanded suffrage, or more accessible education — before standing for local ideologies and labels, like identifying as left, right, or independent and unblemished by those extremes? No matter where one might land on the spectrum — it seems that being able to speak freely about an opinion, and to receive legitimate information not entirely smothered in propaganda, and to protest something that doesn’t seem just, and to not be jailed for selling books — is important. In theory, the structure of power in countries like China isn’t inherently evil, but with more power comes more opportunities to act on that power. A state with the capacity to keep people fed, housed, safe from invasion, well-traveled on new infrastructure, and communally healthy (such as in the case of a pandemic) also has the ability to bury free speech, the deliverance of justice, and international transparency about what they’re up to — not to mention imprison, repress, and kill its people when it suits. George Orwell is aligned in our minds with his concern of too-powerful governments and the creation of “Big Brother,” but really, he was a Democratic Socialist who was concerned with what those governments chose to do in their circumstances. As he put it: “Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
The events in Hong Kong add momentum to the wedge that is being hammered between the already splicing political surface of West and East. Consider the consequences of emigration: The United Kingdom, which ended its extradition agreement with Hong Kong due to fears that individuals subject to it may end up in China instead, said it would allow three million residents to settle in the British Isles and apply for citizenship there. Canada announced measures to make it easier for Hong Kong youth to study and work in the country, creating smoother pathways for permanent residency (on a recent trip to Vancouver, I walked past an English language center downtown, on which the signage was subtitled in Cantonese and Mandarin). The European Union has vowed to ease visa and asylum policies for Hong Kongers. But while these are among the countries that we probably hear the most news from, and maybe identify with more than others, there are far more that will quietly and safely side with China. Fifty-three nations — most of which are participating in the country’s Belt and Road project, receiving massive sums of infrastructure and development aid — signed a statement read before the UN Human Rights Council in July 2020 supporting Beijing’s national security law. There were only half as many countries that signed an opposing statement criticizing the legislation. If you were the Minister of Economic Infrastructure in the poor West-African nation of Cote d’Ivoire, and China offered to inject one billion dollars into your economy while building a handful of new important bridges and highways, would you decide to speak out about a few democratic injustices happening on the other side of the world and risk losing it all?
The key is that China’s recent actions serve as an important bellwether for things to come in the century ahead. What will results in Hong Kong make for the future implications of those living in Taiwan? For the autonomy of Tibet or Macau? For the repressed Uyghurs in Xinjiang? For the political realities of Ukraine and their complex relationship with Russia? For backsliding democracies in the West?
In recent years we’ve seen peaceful transfers of power interrupted by insurrection in countries that were supposed to be champions of the democratic process. We’ve seen entire elections decided by money rather than votes. We’ve seen courtrooms — the supposedly unbiased deciders of right and wrong — fall victim to partisan political games. We’ve seen countries once labeled as “free and fair” now take on the murkier title of “a dangerous place for journalists to complete their job properly.” We’ve seen some in this line of work murdered in their attempts to do so. We’ve seen leaders use all kinds of diplomatic gymnastics to “legally” detain their enemies. We’ve seen governments of all kinds clamping down on free speech. And in corners of the world that get far less news coverage, we may not see — which of course makes no difference to its existence — people killed for voicing an opinion, or for no real reason at all.
It’s not too much use making predictions, because Hong Kong has a long history of proving people wrong in all kinds of ways. Lord Henry Palmerston, the British Foreign Secretary during the original possession of Hong Kong as well as a future Prime Minister, wrote home in 1841 to say that “I express my extreme disappointment… [for devoting time to acquiring] a barren island with hardly a House upon it…that has no chance of being a great Mart of trade.” We’ve already covered the misgivings of Queen Victoria herself. More recently, Margaret Thatcher erred on the side of idealism, and Louis Kraar, the former Asia Editor of Fortune, took the opposite view in a widely-read pre-handover piece when he said that “The naked truth about Hong Kong’s future can be summed up in two words: it’s over.”
All this to say that the world has looked towards Hong Kong with many different feelings across the years — astonishment, admiration, jealousy, uncertainty, hope, despair. And for as much as the events of the past decades have been daunting, and in some cases very violent, they have also provided the opportunity for moving examples of the capacity of human organization in the face of a much larger power. They have galvanized a generation of Hong Kongers to fight for their piece of the map, and to show the rest of us that this is a thing worth doing. It is a conflict of grand proportions, but the ropes that bind the aspirations of Hong Kong are also human creations, and it is a hope that somehow we can find out how to reconcile the two — to keep the Bauhinia flying for another generation to come.
/S
Los Angeles, January 2022
