"U.S. Officially Declares That Hong Kong Is No Longer Autonomous
WASHINGTON—The State Department has officially determined that Hong Kong is no longer autonomous from China, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement Wednesday that holds implications for the future of economic ties and could lead to sanctions against China.
The State Department is required by the Hong Kong Policy Act to assess the autonomy of the territory from China. It certified to Congress on Thursday that Hong Kong is no longer autonomous."
Previously, Hong Kong had a status that let it trade with the US under terms very different from those mainland China is subject to.
Clear consequences have not, as near as I can tell, be spelled out yet. The gist is that US trade policy will stop privileging HK. US/HK trade seems to be something like $66 Billion a year, so this is potentially a major thing.
Not that I disagree with the act, but I love how politicians are trying to frame destroying Hong Kong's economy as supporting "Human Rights and Democracy."
It's a very bad tool for that particular job, as we discovered in Iraq -- it hurts the most vulnerable members of the society, and does very little to the elites making the policies we don't like.
In this case, sanctioning Hong Kong is part of sanctioning China, because it hinders technology transfer (eg to Huawei) and finance transfer (Hong Kong was previously not affected by trade tariffs on China, and has a huge stock market).
It remains to be seen if sanctioning China (partially) could bring about political change, as CCP is endorsed within China mostly for economic growth in the past three decades.
After decades of sanctioning Libya the united states finally got what it wanted by decapitating the state with violence; one wonders (global political dynamics aside) if for the unfortunate citizens of Libya, it would have just have been better to have gotten it over with earlier.
The CCP knows this and will gladly "rescue" Hong Kong from the "evil westerners" that screwed them over. Of course, Hong Kong will probably taken over by China eventually, so might as well make it very expensive for them.
This is what a lot of Hong Kong people advocated. By treating Hong Kong the same as China, it's hoped Chinese companies can no longer exploit Hong Kong's different system to export stuff cheaper than in China, especially when the economic warfare was going on before.
If you think that the US is doing this for the protesters, I have a defense contract to sell you. This is in retaliation for China breaking international agreements.
> If you think that the US is doing this for the protesters
Is that really relevant?
I mean, HKers are getting screwed by a massively totalitarian and oppressive regime. Why is the interest of a third party relevant to the Chinese regime's devastation of Hong Kong?
... international agreements protecting democracy and freedom of expression in Hong Kong. The US isn’t doing this for protestors, and it will be terrible for HK, but it ultimately is because of China’s attack on HK freedoms
This is better understood in the context of Hong Kong's trade relating to China.
HK import volume 2018: USD $627 billion [1]
HK export volume 2018: USD $568 billion [2]
The top 2 imports are: (see [3])
1. Electrical machinery, equipment: US$307.7 billion (53.2% of total imports)
2. Machinery including computers: US$66.4 billion (11.5%)
HK has only 7 million people. There's no way it can consume that much import nor produce that much export, especially not consuming $307 billion worth of machine equipment. Hong Kong is China's 2nd top trading partner [4]; China is basically using Hong Kong as a trading proxy to evade sanction. Most of the imports are purchased by China because it cannot buy them legally and has to use HK's "autonomous" status to import. Most of the exports are routed by China to take advantage of its tax free zone status.
Not to mention 70% of the foreign money going into China every year is via Hong Kong. Killing Hong Kong's "autonomous" status is the stupidest move done by China in the recent years. It allows the outside world to plug the last gateway into China.
Did you account for value addition? It may be HK is in the middle of electronics value chains that start and end outside of its borders - I imagine Singapore has a similar import/export numbers it makes a lot of hard disks (export) but doesn't make a lot of chips (import). This doesn't imply Singapore is a front for another country
Trading volume with US is just a fraction, and US actually has a surplus. It's unlikely for US to change the status quo in HK which would hurt US companies more.
> Most of the imports are purchased by China because it cannot buy them legally and has to use HK's "autonomous" status to import.
This is simply groundless speculation without concrete data.
What these companies do are selling/shipping components to China for assembly and then re-export the final products, which make the biggest revenue and profit. It's relatively easy for these companies to shift the manufacture (assembly) to other countries to keep the same revenue and profit. An India or Vietnam assembled iPhone generates the same profit for Apple.
Foreign companies have difficult time making profit in China due to protectionism. McDonald opened thousands of restaurants in China and had to sell their ownership to Chinese companies last year.
In the past, while exports from China, was important for foreign companies, the new situation, is that it is increasingly more profitable to sell within China.
Something like, close to half of GM’s profit from auto sales, are to customers inside China. They charge normal worldwide prices for their cars, but the labor costs are a fraction of what it is in America.
This is what GM risks losing, in an ever increasing trade war with China.
For another example, Intel miscalculated during Obama’s reign, and lost out on billions in sales, because the U.S. wanted to restrict advanced CPU server chips to China. What happened instead? China designed their own CPU chips.
iPhone assembly is really not that important, or profitable, to China anymore.
I think a lot of people underestimate how difficult it is to move manufacturing out of China. Manufacturing isn't all unskilled labour that can be moved to whatever the cheapest country is. There is a lot of expertise needed in modern manufacturing and these days China has most of the experts. I'm not saying it won't happen but it will be a more gradual shift over time than a sudden change.
This is correct. And China isn’t really interested in low quality sweat-labor manufacturing anymore. This brings in very little added value, and it damages the environment. But these jobs keep the lesser educated people from the villages occupied, and it gives them a chance to get their children a formal education.
Instead, they want massive robotic, automated, and mechanized manufacturing. Where a technician is standing by, and just watching the robots, for quality control.
All those assembly line technicians at Foxconn can go to college and train to be a Computer Scientist or Engineer. Then in another 10 years, China will have a massive amount of computer programmers, engineers, and AI scientists.
And the real losers in this fight here are Hongkongese citizens, who fought for their freedom and ultimately are losing it, on top of facing an economic crisis.
I saw the suggestion on twitter that the US and other countries should hand out visas to people from Hong Kong who want to live in a free country (with the hope that the US doesn't continue to decline, from that perspective).
There’s a much stronger argument that Britain should do so, which would partially undo the damage they caused during the handover - not only not granting British passports, but pressuring Portugal/Macao to do the same: https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/2156385... (2018, about the period leading up to the handover)
Gov. Jared Polis (D-CO) liked a tweet this week where someone proposed a charter city for Hong Kong in Colorado - the thread shows why that's probably a bad idea, but clearly surprising levels of support outside the Libertarian think tank world for charter cities in the US: https://twitter.com/ariarmstrong/status/1264628307586248704
New Hong Kong City, Colorado. I like the sound of that.
Colorado, would become the new Mecca of delicious Cantonese cuisine and Dim Sum eateries. As well as, all the technical, math, financial, and medical talent, that you can extract from the Hong Kongers. Their children would become the future engineers and doctors in America.
It would unleash a new golden age for Colorado! And bring in massive amounts of tax revenue too!
I think the major moral objection people have to charter cities is that they feel exploitative of the host nation. Proposals seem to take the form "we'll take some rich Westerners, and put them in a host nation where they don't have to follow the local rules, and the host nation will benefit because the Westerners will hire them for labor" - it's very hard to distinguish this from colonialism. Few people think it's a bad thing to have e.g. Indian tribal governments, which are indistinguishable from what a charter city would be.
As I genuinely asked in my comment separately in the thread, what practical freedoms are being lost by the everyday person in Hong Kong that would not be considered crimes in the US (or Hong Kong prior to this), for example?
The obvious answer is criticism of the Chinese government, which is I believe a Chinese constitutional right that is ignored in practice. Although, practically speaking, this has already been lost in Hong Kong ever since the abduction of the bookseller.
Also with government officials starting to describe every protest as "riots" and "terrorism", it's feared that they are paving the way to grant Chinese authorities power to legally "arrest" anyone anywhere. It's not yet confirmed that the execution will be carried out by Chinese officials, but the law grants them power to do so.
Also search warrants were originally needed for the police force to break into private properties (not that the Hong Kong police respect any of the current laws now though), after passing the law, they are no longer need.
The scariest part, however, is how vague the law is. One can never truly define what is criminalized. For example, what is "foreign interference"? The HK government has been criticizing the protests as being "influenced" by the US. It's their say to impose a crime upon you. Most "criteria" for acting against the "law" are speculations.
The founding fathers of the US did not write the US constitution with practical freedom in mind. They wrote it with the principles of freedom as sacred. The battles they fought weren't for being able to buy groceries or walk the streets. They fought the battles over things like the right to not being taxed, to not be under the bank of England's monetary regulations, to have their own voice in the political system and legal system. These things don't affect the majority of the population, but they are extremely, extremely important. Why?
This is because systematically, over the course of hundreds of years, those in power abused those without power, over and over and over and over again, based on their own personal gain. ESPECIALLY if you don't care about the people you're in power over. This is basically why the American Revolution happened, England ran out of money fighting wars and tried to squeeze America for it. America said, no way, you don't give 2 pence about us.
Yes, your practical freedoms may not be affected in the micro timescale of the days and weeks, but over the course of centuries, countless people lose their lives and livelihoods, not their freedom, because of any number of reasons, none of them being that they did a crime to deserve it.
If history has taught us anything, you could lose your life for being:
1) A religious minority
2) A racial minority
3) A friend of someone who the person in power wants to get rid of
4) Too rich / powerful and a threat to governance
5) Well educated or with radical ideas
and much more.
You could also lose your livelihood or future by any number of means:
1) being taxed unfairly so that you make next to nothing
2) being forced to do things in a way that would benefit your mother country, at the expense of yourself
3) needing to follow laws that you have no control over that inconvenience or ruin your trade or businesses
4) needing to report to the government suspicious persons or activities
And just to be clear, I'm talking about themes from the American Revolution and escaping from the tyranny of European influence, not current affairs.
This situation is not in the same ballpark of possible outcomes as "Facebook exposing your private data to advertisers", of which only minor inconvenience is at stake. It's a lot more than that.
Well, I ask again -- the specific proposed laws under discussion don't touch on any of those principles. They're about sedition, secession, national security, terrorism, etc. We have laws about those things too in the US.
So is this actually an argument about the influence / authority of China and the extent of their power, or about the specific laws being passed?
Or is it about making sure the 27 years left on the clock are as close to the system that people knew before as possible? Because I don't think the influence of China battle in Hong Kong going to be won, in the long run.
-- edit: btw I equally don't understand (well I do, but for the sake of argument) why China/Xi is so in a rush to accelerate the 27 years left for Hong Kong. If it's going to be reverted to 1 system guaranteed eventually, what's the need to do this right now?
-- further edit: btw I also don't understand why Carrie Lam is so eager to do Beijing's bidding. If she's an independent/educated/Hong Kong native, what's her motivation? Or do they have some dirt on her? If she's worried about being extradited, you would think she'd be most advocating for an independent legal system.
> They're about sedition, secession, national security, terrorism, etc. We have laws about those things too in the US.
This is usually the reasoning for the CCP supporters that other countries have similar laws. That is true but this is not a similar comparison when you are talking about a democratic society where there are checks and balances like judicial independence.
The CCP has a track record to remove and silence its oppositions.[1] The proposed law will give the government even more power since it carries severe penalties and were used in the mainland to jail dissidents.[2]
> So is this actually an argument about the influence / authority of China and the extent of their power, or about the specific laws being passed?
Prior to this, HK carried over the British colony tradition of independence of judiciary, albeit slowing eroding since 1997. But if the bill is passed, it will be the first time that the Chinese government bypass the HK government to directly legislate. Hence the reaction from HK + the world
Carrie Lam is a Quisling -- people who become enablers for an invading regime, like when the Soviet forces trying to take over Finland and were able to use the Finnish politicians. Why do they do it? Probably a combination of having dirts, or lack of political courage, or a mistaken belief that they are not really responsible if they just follow order.
China desires to merge Hong Kong into the rest of mainland China, as a one state solution, in the long term. This means ending its status as a somewhat-democratic, relatively-free, relatively-free-market, rule-of-law based system.
China does not want to see any of this happen today, because mainland China is still developing. But theoretically, once China has developed, it would no longer need an independent and semi-free or semi-autonomous Hong Kong any longer, and Hong Kong could be merged into China with relatively little impact to China as a whole. Peacefully or otherwise.
The United States and the west generally do not want to see any of this occur, for reasons that should be painfully obvious.
So nothing about either China's actions towards Hong Kong, the people of Hong Kong's desires, or America's response here has anything to do with the freedoms of individual people today, China's current influence, or current laws proposed or being passed by any of the three participating societies.
Its about what everyone knows is going to be passed in a year, or 5, 10, or 40. The play from Hong Kong and the west is too draw out the unification period as long as possible, because you never know what could happen in the future. China feels the opposite.
This is happening now, because China has been pulling democratic governors out of Hong Kong legislative bodies by force. And because they are currently setting up a secret police network, legally, in Hong Kong, to enforce their power structure there, the same way it is done in mainland China. That means, that regardless of what "laws" Hong Kong passes, Hong Kong is no longer independent.
And America is responding that if China is going to rule Hong Kong as part of its mainland country, and abandon the rule of law that currently exists in Hong Kong, then America will no longer respect Hong Kong as a rule-of-law based, independent, society. Quite simply, it will no longer be safe for the west to invest money into Hong Kong, the way it has in the past.
This is both good self-preservation for the west, as well as making good on what, previously to today, was one a limited number of good reasons for China to respect Hong Kong's separate legal system and status. Theoretically, China could, tomorrow, roll back their pressure on Hong Kong, and America would roll back this announcement, though I rather doubt that either country is incentivized for that outcome.
As for your last two questions:
1 - Internal Chinese politics. I can't imagine you would ever get a correct answer about this on the internet. China does not work like the west. No one who understands it well is going to discuss it in a public forum (you understand why?), unless, possibly, you're talking about a western academic.
2 - Because she is legitimately a stooge, in the fundamental sense of the word. Its worth looking up Hong Kong's governmental structure. Its not a real democracy. Its more or less what you would expect a government to look like, if the wealthiest people in a country all knew each other, and the country wanted a democracy, but the wealthy wanted to ensure that they always held all the positions of power, with limited accountability. Hong Kong is only, really, democratic compared to China. There's a reason the protests were demanding universal elections... Hong Kong doesn't have them. So Hong Kong's government is just doing what it has been designed from the start to do: give the Hong Kong people some semblance of democracy, while simultaneously bowing to the most powerful people in the society, who are, increasingly, placed there by China.
As a pacifist (in high school, no longer), I took issue with the US war in Iraq and refused to stand during the national anthem in classrooms. I was not arrested, or fined - just teased by fellow students.
One thing being fought over is disrespecting the Chinese national anthem. Sure, I might not be “the average person” but that’s the point, small deviations are criminalized.
TL;DR: limiting freedom of expression in name of national security, without a just trial.
Stretching a bit, we call it the freedom from fear (of unjust prosecution), which is the—arguably justified—distrust of the rule by law in China (not the rule of law that Hong Kong previously had). Note that Hong Kong people are using “Freedom from Fear” [1] differently from how US is using it [2].
Chinese courts work very differently from Hong Kong ones: they swing with politics. Many people have been—as perceived by Hong Kongers—unjustly detained or prosecuted (such as the milk powder incidents [3], the two Canadians in China after the Huawei case [4], or the more recent whistleblower Li Wenliang). And those people, in some cases, are sued for charges such as spying or subversion, which is the main theme of the national security law.
Given that Chinese agents extracted Hong Kongers in the Causeway Bay Books disappearances [5], Hong Kongers fear that the new national security law (which allows state agents to police Hong Kong [6]) means that Hong Kongers (and perhaps foreigners) may face state agents extraction from Hong Kong. To many Hong Kongers, voicing out for social injustice could mean instability in China, and could mean theft of state secret or subversion as CCP see it.
I have lived in HK and know many people there, and their day to day doesn't seem impacted, but culturally I suspect a massive gradual change is inevitable.
It would be like asking: does living in China differ tremendously from living in the US, for you and I? Not that much really, on a day-by-day basis!
> who fought for their freedom and ultimately are losing it
Okay so lets rewind like a year ago, what did you or anyone realistically think was going to happen?
100% of the will of the people can only make up for a fraction of the political consensus in Hong Kong, with corporations making up the rest. This isn't unique to Hong Kong, The City of London within London has a similar form of representation.
The corporations derive their power and hegemony from mainland China.
The Chief Executive (Head of State) is appointed unilaterally by Beijing.
The politics are interesting but if you were a betting man, what are your odds for any outcome?
Although HK appears to be the direct casualty of US change of trade status, the reality is that China is one who will bleed once the HK trade window is closed.
For too long China practised a kind of hostage diplomacy where it solves its problems by taking hostages and then negotiating for concessions. For instance the two Canadians detained to pressure Canada to release Huawei CFO.
Hong Kong is now another hostage of CCP, Xi betting that the US dare not tighten the screw on its tariff as long as HK is a hostage in its grip. But most likely China will fail, as HK people have prepared themselves to be sacrificed to bring down the CCP. On an individual level HKers will begin another mass exodus like in pre-1997.
true, but the written language is exactly the same.
taiwan has national health care, really good public transportation system, really liberal government (gay marriage recently) despite the low gdp. I would move there if they legalized weed which is sadly unlikely
now that hong kong is a part of the PRC, maybe they'll be forced to use the national language (mandarin) lol
Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually unintelligible. China likes to call them different dialects for political reasons, but for all practical purposes they are different languages.
If you're talking about spoken, probably the difference is something more like English v German.
Individual words can look similar but combine them into a sentence and you probably wouldn't be able to parse it on a first take (if they were transcribed into romanized letters), and there are some grammar differences.
It's even worse than English v German imo (speaking both, and descendant from Cantonese, married to a mainlander)
The german grammar is a fair point though. Makes every sentence sound like churchill trying to be annoying on purpose.
It's like English v German, but imagine that German had a bunch of sounds that seem identical to you but are actually different sounds (you just can't hear the difference). Imagine that German Wasser (water) and Wäscher (washer, ish) sounded exactly the same to you, and you couldn't tell the difference. Now imagine that literally every single word had dozens of those identically-sounding-but-actually-different-sounding-to-native-speakers examples.
The issue imo is the increase in tones. Mandarin has 4-5 tones, cantonese has like 6-9. And the tones in Mandarin are much easier to distinguish.
Yet Taiwan is also under threat from PRC. Also emigrating (ie leaving born place, family, friends, etc) is not that easy even when money/job is not an issue.
It's a much different threat, however. As I've covered in other threads, CCP action against Taiwan will result in an actual war which may or may not involve the U.S. and to an unknown degree.
I'm kind of wondering if he will step down next year, or find a reason to keep going. (I don't know what the constitutional arrangements are, but assume that he can only have a single 10 year term)
I read all these headlines, but when I then followup to read more about the text of the proposed laws [1], I have a hard time seeing that aside from freedom of speech infringements (and ability to imprison, fine based on those -- which are clearly a bit vague in terms of enforcement, but otherwise as bland as a lot of US legislation), these laws are not egregiously different from what exist in some other countries.
Aside from the symbolism, can someone enlighten me why they have practical, real worries that this is going to cause some massive political or social change over there? Or whether companies will really shy away from doing business when they already face laws like this elsewhere? Or that the economy there is going to dry up because of this?
I don't think the main problem Hongkongers have with this law is necessarily the content, but the fact it has been pushed on them by an external government which many Hongkongers expected to remain independent from for the next 27 years. From their perspective, having their own government taking marching orders from Beijing undermines the principle of "one country two systems".
Aside from the principle of it, there are also several aspects of the proposed law that go beyond what many people consider to be reasonable. Most notable for migrants and tourists is the emphasis on preventing and penalizing "foreign interference", which doesn't sit well in a city that is still the most multicultural in East Asia. Allowing the mainland security apparatus to set up offices in the city is also concerning, given mainland law enforcement is famous for disappearing and torturing people who do not support the single party dictatorship.
I think it's fairly clear that this is an opportunistic power-grab by the central government. The coronavirus has allowed them to dramatically increase the intensity of their security measures in the mainland, instituting Xinjiang-style movement tracking apps, "temporary" barricades and checkpoints all over the country. The state media has whipped up intense anti-American hatred, and the government is emboldened by the fact that America is dealing with the virus comparatively poorly. There is a widespread public support for cracking down on Hong Kong, which has been presented here in mainland as a city besieged by terrorists and American agents of chaos, all out to destroy China. I suspect from the point of view of the central government, being able to advance their timetable on the takeover of Hong Kong is the silver lining of this pandemic.
Essentially, yes. Besides China having sovereignty over the city, it has its own currency, government, different law system than China, a border with China, and different passport. In recent years on the rise of Chinese Nationalism, the Chinese government seems to downplay this a lot to eliminate the HKer's local identity and creates an image of HK = China. Culturally, it is also vastly different than China.
What i meant was it was under British rule prior to China. The British ruler was literally appointed by outsiders.
From an American perspective it’s more about losing a territory under Allied jurisdiction. From the local perspective it’s about losing independence rights—though they didn’t really have that right under British rule either.
Under the British, while it was true that the governor and many government officials were Brits, a surprising number of them were able to speak fluent Cantonese. They actually took the effort to understand the local culture. You can find many such clips on Youtube.
Nowadays, under Chinese rule, Hong Kongers often get told off by mainland Chinese officials for not speaking Mandarin, and hence Hong Kongers are unpatriotic and seditious. Schools must be forced to switch to teach in Mandarin, and so on.
If Trump started learning the local dialect (English), that doesn’t suddenly make him legitimately represent all English speakers.
And actually the last of the British governors tried to increase democracy. While the PRC blocked it because it was in their interest to do so, the HK people didn’t exactly fight for it or make it easy.
I can stand behind a Democracy movement, but find it harder to palate a political power grab.
A large part of the gay rights movement come from supporters of human rights, not just people trying to protect their self interests.
The problem is there are a lot of third parties in play in HK and if I'm going to support Democracy I want to be sure that's what I'm supporting. If it's poor governance, I want to be sure I'm supporting good governance. If it's poor housing policy, I want to support good housing policy movements. I don't want to be a pawn in a proxy political war between Eastern powers and Western powers while my own democratic rights are being eroded by the US senate.
> Although full universal suffrage was never granted by the British to its colony before the handover in 1997, some democratic reform began in 1984.
> ... but they stalled due to opposition from Beijing, local business interests as represented by Executive Council, and the British Foreign Office under the pretext that it would bring chaos to Hong Kong.
> In 1987, many surveys indicated that there was more than 60% popular support for direct elections. The government, under governor David Wilson, issued another green paper in 1987 proposing direct LegCo elections for 1988.
> However, the proposal was ruled out after a government consultation concluded that people were 'sharply divided' over its introduction that year.
The "vested interests" you refer to is "Patten's push for reform was strongly opposed at the time by vested interests within LegCo and by former ambassador to China Percy Cradock." However that was in response to "labour rights and collective bargaining" and not strictly democratic elections.
Local business interests, and a "sharply divided" public were the reasons democracy never came sooner. Of course I'm not sure how reliable those government consultations were. I do want to point out I fully support Democracy in Hong Kong. I'd just rather not be a pawn in an opportunistic power grab by business elites who decided Chinese rulers don't work out as well for them as their former British ones. Freedom of information and thought aside, the elites have more to lose from Chinese rule than the working class.
No, by "vested interests" I mean whoever had power at the time. In the 70s-80s it was the ExCo, which had on it a few business elites hand-picked by the British.
In the 80s-90s, as China opened up its markets and needed HK investment, many business elites cozied up with Beijing, gaining political power in the process; they became the vested interests today. But they are not exactly the same group as the vested interests in the 80s.
> > However, the proposal was ruled out after a government consultation concluded that people were 'sharply divided' over its introduction that year.
By that time the CCP was heavily involved. People feared that introducing direct elections would (and eventually did) antagonise Beijing.
> rather not be a pawn in an opportunistic power grab by business elites
This is an interesting take. Do you have anything to support this claim?
"American Columnist Blames China For British Decision"
In 1960, China was in the middle of the Great Leap Forward and like 40 million people were starving to death. The rest weren't doing great, either. Maybe the Brits were really worried, maybe it was a fig leaf. Maybe they were scared communists could win an election.
To be fair, China did almost invade in support of communist protestors in 1967 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Hong_Kong_riots -- but that was during the Cultural Revolution when they were a lot less starving and a lot more psycho. And they still thought better of it.
In any case, the UK still ought to own their decisions.
Hong Kong has a very complex history and culture about independence. To be brief, majority of Hong Kongers never wanted independence as a country. (It's weird but there was a split of people being pro-China and pro-UK) The thought of Hong Kong independence has been around for long but didn't become major topic and a significant opinion until recent years (after 2014-2016 with rise of figures like Edward Leung).
Historically, China has threaten to "liberate" HK if UK gave Hong Kong any form of independence/progressive democracy. UK also has no intention on instigating conflict with China, especially US was friendly with China in the 60s/70s/80s to fight Soviet. There was an unclassified UK government transcript that backs this information. Ultimately, HKers/Brits/China wanted to maintain the status quo and the final solution was to give HK back to China with some underlying promises (1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration - Basic Law - 1 Country 2 System).
I mean true Democracy and government and representation by the people.
There’s two way’s to characterize the protests: I don’t like China or I want Democracy.
PRC put strong pressure against Democracy in HK back during British rule, probably because it would set a precedent for after the handover. And despite the last few British governors pushing to increase Democratic processes many efforts for that were stalled by the HK people.
So now that a new governor is in place I fully support movements to increase Democracy, but anything that smells of just an anti-China motivation is just too politically tainted for me to get behind.
What started as "I want Democracy", which was promised in the Sino-British Joint Declaration signed in 1984[1], slowly was pressured into something different.
As the CCP started to really apply pressure starting in 2014 after the umbrella revolution, HK people have been witnessing the erosion of their rights.
When the CCP labelled the protests as a separatist movement to justify to the West that these were simply "internal affairs/extremist movements", most in HK laughed at the idea of independence. It's CCP's narrative to align their online army and casual observers as anti-China/pro HK independence.
All HK wanted was to enjoy a high degree of autonomy and universal suffrage. Slowly HK people started to realize the CCP would never hold their end of the bargain and truly give democracy to the HK people. So what was CCP's fake news campaign became reality and it's now turning into a HK independence and anti-China campaign.
I see what you are saying. I think it is hard to separate anti-China and pro-democracy. After all, China is against democracy in the case of HK (Backed by example why universal suffrage legislation was crippled). The question comes down to, how to be pro-democratic but not anti-China, especially when CCP-backed media categorized the entire movement to be separatist....
Read up on Hong Kong history. The people of Hong Kong were under foreign rulers pretty much their entire history. This is one of the reasons why you should always fight for what’s right. Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere. They just didn’t bother to begin fighting until they didn’t like their ruler.
Of course it was a colony since... whenever. Speaking as a brit, you're bang on.
But given that, what rectitude you suggest I (or they) fight for is unclear. It seems they prefer the UK legacy to the encroaching Chinese one. I'm unsure what you're saying (though I do agree with you about rights and justice, completely).
It is my understanding that the protests originally started over HK residents frustrated that they would never ever be able to afford decent housing inside of HK, and they blamed a couple of central figures in HK (who are not Chinese residents).
The protests seem to have become much more than that.
The final form of the protests don't address the frustration of HK residents over living costs.
The British rule was more successful because it was governing at arms length. London never flexed like Beijing by actively disqualifying publicly elected legislators and meddling with its internal affairs, eroding individuals freedom and rights.
Eg pressuring companies like Cathay Pacific, Big four accounting firms to take action against employees participating in lawful assemblies and protests.
There's a reason businesses use Hong Kong as a home base to access the Chinese market and that reason is the legal system. Hong Kong is like the Delaware of China - an established and reliable system that protects business interests. It's fair, it's transparent, and it's predictable. None of those things can be said about China's legal system.
First of all, the law has been used in China to persecute political dissident. (Political dissident in that case is anyone who expose any problems in the country or being vocal about particular problem in the society or government)
Second, CCP is planning to bypass Hong Kong Legislature to implement this law as an amendment to the Basic Law (Like an HK constitution). This is completely decided by the CCP government and Hong Kongers has no say over it.
Third, Hong Kong has no universal suffrage for its chief executives and Legislative Counsel. In this case, there is no checks and balances. With some draconian law (see National Security law and the previous public emergency ordinance) and lack of checks and balances, Hong Kongers are deeply concern about their freedom in all senses.
Lastly, police brutality and the mass persecution on pan-democratic individuals also spooked Hong Konger's confidence on the city itself and its autonomy. The HK HangSeng Index dropped 5% on the first day. Then massive influx of Chinese money came into the market the next day to prop the market up.
The special treatment that Hong Kong gets from various other nations, treatment different from mainland China, is dependent on Hong Kong being viewed as autonomous. The laws in the territory aren’t really the point, what matters is the source of those laws (Beijing as opposed to truly local efforts).
The ability to have their own laws, their own courts, and their own government is under ongoing and successful attack. Perhaps you're blissfully unaware of the tightening grip of Beijing over the last 20 years, of which this is just the latest incremental move? It's hard to know whether to read your posts as earnest ignorance or subtle propaganda.
It’s less the text of the law (though it’s vague and meant to function as a pretext for the CCP to take my action in the name of “national security “) and more that they’re inserting it into Article III, which they legally cannot do. It functionally kills HK’s Basic Law.
If you blindly trust what’s written, then they do look similar.
Much like the Constitution of the PRC stating “citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession, and of demonstration.” [1]
One would be a fool to believe it’s similar to the US constitution.
OK, here’s my answer to your questions:
Jimmy Lai runs the biggest pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily, in Hong Kong, and his Twitter account was recently named by Chinese state media Global Times as providing “evidence of subversion under new national security law”. [2] Pro-democracy newspaper will be the first to disappear after passing the national security law.
Infringement on freedom of press (and speech) would have drastic consequences. Just look at Covid-19. When no newspaper stands up to reveal the scale of a mysterious disease and doctors were forbidden to warn others, the government can cover it up for much longer than in an open society [3], ultimately costing hundreds of thousands more lives [4].
When short selling in China could be classified as “malicious” and “illegal” [5], or as the rumor goes, “a financial coup to overthrow Xi” [6], I doubt Hong Kong can remain an international financial hub under the new law.
Media companies also like to stay in Hong Kong [7]. That could change with the new law, and with the loss of free flow of information, financial industry will hurt, too.
This law, if implemented fully, will effectively demolish the “one country, two systems” agreement, which has been the basis of Hong Kong’s stability and success for the last 23 years. The Beijing government is pulling out of their side of the deal they made in 1997. What will happen next is not something I can predict, but history shows us some of the things that can happen when communist parties impose their rule onto a new territory. Usually it’s not good for business.
But as I understand it, the "2 systems" has to do with economic and political governance. I see nothing in those laws about changing the financial or economic systems of the country that would lead businesses to gulp and say no thank you?
That’s a good question, and it depends on how this line is implemented: “It shall also establish a sound legal system in the HKSAR to maintain national security.”
Under the Basic Law, Hong Kong has it’s own legal system, so there is no constitutionally acceptable way Beijing can “establish” new legal system to it’s liking. Perhaps the law is simply a threat, and they won’t take action, but if it is fully implemented, it means the end of the current legal system’s autonomy.
The vagueness of this law is a good example of how the PRC’s legal system is very open-ended compared to other countries, and allows for arbitrary action from China’s rulers.
I think GP comment about communist parties is not really what the heart of the matter is here: business owners are probably not excited to deal with the opaqueness of the mainland China legal system since it's apparently prone to disappear booksellers over the border and force confessions out of them.
That said, maybe the exodus is overhyped: a lot of businesses are already dealing with the mainland government and certainly that's where a lot of them see where the money is, so they might just be forced to play by these new rules whether they like it or not.
If anything, doesn't that strengthen China's hand?
More reliance on the mainland for jobs and handouts, more protests and counter protests so they can justify additional crackdowns. Less westerners and less international firms, less exposure to the West.
They can't. For one thing they desperately need the dollars that flow through Hong Kong.
The GDP size is now among the least valuable aspects of Hong Kong as it pertains to China. That has never been primary.
Hong Kong is the economic staging point that much of the world uses to enter China's economy. Think of it as a translating middleman, that the world uses to convert from foreign market-based economics to China's domestic way of running things as a rigid command economy that is operated by fiat and is often hostile to foreign operators/owners/investors. Hong Kong's role in that respect has been critical to China's economic rise.
> Hong Kong's role in that respect has been critical to China's economic rise.
In the past, yes. Nowadays Hong Kong's financial importance is rapidly diminishing. In 1997 Hong Kong compromised 19% of China's GDP, today it's ~2%.
FDI is still predominantly channeled through Hong Kong, but with 35 billion last year the general role of FDI is actually pretty negligible compared to the size of the domestic economy, and it looks like Shenzhen and Shanghai are well on their way to replace the city.
"The chief executive of the London Stock Exchange dismissed Hong Kong’s significance as a financial centre when the LSE rejected a takeover offer from the Hong Kong Exchange. “We view Shanghai as the financial centre of China,” David Schwimmer, the LSE’s chief executive, told the South China Morning Post."
They're positioning Shanghai for that. Shanghai was something like a free city until WWII.
I think things escalated in Hong Kong much quicker than the CCP wanted--Shanghai isn't ready to take its place. But Shanghai is the long game, and business leaders in HK know that.
> More reliance on the mainland for jobs and handouts, more protests and counter protests so they can justify additional crackdowns. Less westerners and less international firms, less exposure to the West.
That the US is announcing this now, means the context is already well past the tipping point. The US has been reluctant to go too far regarding Hong Kong, because of its importance to the rest of the global economy as a conduit into China's economy (a large share of all foreign direct investment into China goes through HK, and they depend on it as a large source of US Dollars to conduct trade with the rest of the world). This response is actually quite late, running from behind. The writing has been on the wall in extra large letters for several years now, for much of Xi's reign.
I don't understand why the world in general is worried about Hong Kong being taken over by the Chinese. In 1842, Hong Kong was a chinese territory. It was taken over by the British during the first and second opium wars and then leased out to the British for 99 years. The keyword here being leased out. If now China is wresting back control of its territory, how is that disputed. The people of Hong Kong always knew that their autonomy was only till the time when the lease ends.
Interestingly, When the union flag was raised over Possession Point on 26 January 1841, the population of Hong Kong island was about 7,450, mostly Tanka fishermen and Hakka charcoal burners living in a number of coastal villages. Today Hong Kong's population is 7.5 Million so 1000 times its original population. So every body who came later knew about the lease and the length of the autonomy.
The key detail you missed is One Country Two Systems, which is what allowed Hong Kong to have a financial system integrated with the Western world's, and a legal system that works more or less the same as in London and New York.
Xi is following the game plan laid out by Putin but at a faster pace. It's not clear to me that Xi is personally as corrupt as Putin but he's definitely as destructive.
There are a lot of “shadow” voters on HN. One might speculate there’s voting rings, but given HN doesn’t allow a given user’s voting history to be public, impossible to audit it to look dark patterns, puppet masters, etc.
You have to wonder about the hypocrisy about all this. Every country, every territory, all over the world, has anti-sedition laws.
Hong Kong, as part of the agreement between China and Britain, must enact their own security and anti-sedition laws. They had 23 years to do it!
Hong Kong failed to do so.
Now, a security law, is going to be shoved down their throats, whether they like it or not.
Foreign forces have successfully infiltrated Hong Kong, and brainwashed the young, into believing what the western world wanted them to believe.
The white western nations love Hong Kong for what it is, because the place is lawless. Capitalism is unbridled over there. It’s predatory, and it eats the young, and the poor. The rich take all the spoils. It’s about laws that favors the rich.
But really, Britain should step up, and give these Hong Kong residents, the right to British citizenship. They extracted trillions of dollars from China, from their plunders during their opium terrorism reign. It’s time to give back what they owe. But I doubt it. The British don’t have any morals or balls to do anything. They’re all talk.
What are you even talking about. Hong Kong has one of the strongest legal systems in Asia, although it's being slowly eroded by the government. Have you even visited or do you just watch shitty Kung Fu movies and assume the whole place is Kowloon Walled City or Chungking Mansion?
"U.S. Officially Declares That Hong Kong Is No Longer Autonomous
WASHINGTON—The State Department has officially determined that Hong Kong is no longer autonomous from China, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement Wednesday that holds implications for the future of economic ties and could lead to sanctions against China.
The State Department is required by the Hong Kong Policy Act to assess the autonomy of the territory from China. It certified to Congress on Thursday that Hong Kong is no longer autonomous."