Glimpses Into Hell - Part 2
Communism Spreads to Hong Kong
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This series explores the history and effects of socialism and communist ideology on various regions and nation states. Start the journey with Part 1, which focuses on Cuba.
Badlands Media is taking a hard look at the effects of socialist and communist regimes on various cultures around the world. Last week, we focused on Cuba and its silenced uprising; today, we’re going to look at the “Special Administrative Region” of Hong Kong.
A lot of westerners don’t realize that Britain controlled Hong Kong for over one hundred and fifty years, besides a brief Japanese occupation during the Second World War, and that it did not fully return to Chinese rule until 1997. Hong Kong was ceded to Britain after the First Opium War, becoming a British colony or territory. It wasn't until the 1970s and 1980s that conversations even began between the Chinese and the British over the future of Hong Kong.
The agreement made in 1997 was that Hong Kong would be allowed to maintain the high degree of autonomy it had enjoyed while under British rule, with all the freedom and basic rights that people in mainland China could only dream of, though Hong Kong would once again belong to China. The agreement stated that, for 50 years things would remain unchanged in Hong Kong; this was ratified by the UN and supported by the US.
Fifty years of democratic life, fifty years of autonomy. The relevant slogan was "One country, two systems." Hong Kong would be the little exception in vast, Communist-ruled China.
Today, however, the Joint Declaration, which was meant to protect the freedoms and autonomy of Hong Kong, has been eroded, broken, and is worth less than the paper it was printed on.
To be fair, a lot of folks were skeptical from the beginning that a single country could maintain two separate systems, especially when one system is communist and the other is supposed to be pseudo-democratic and free-market capitalist. Actually, Hong Kong was never fully democratic. From 1982 to 1997, Hong Kong went from having no form of elected government to having a fully-elected Legislative Council (though not entirely by geographical constituencies). Under Chinese sovereignty after the 1st of July 1997, Hong Kong had regressed to its pre-democracy days as a result of establishing appointed provisional bodies in place of the elected ones.
There was still press freedom, speech freedom, the right to a fair trial, and assembly freedom—all of which ran counter to mainland China. These factors, which largely led to Hong Kong becoming a prime financial hub for international business, are nonexistent today. Hong Kong is actually an unprecedented situation; never before have we seen a city or state (of 7 million+ people) have their rights stripped away in such a remarkably short period of time.
Hong Kong was promised 50 years of autonomy and received less than half of that.
Vivian Wang and Alexandra Stevenson of the New York Times filed a dispatch from Hong Kong in June of 2021. The subheading for their dispatch read:
"Neighbors are urged to report on one another. Children are taught to look for traitors. Officials are pressed to pledge their loyalty."
Here was one detail among many—not the most horrifying by a long shot—but striking all the same:
“Police officers have been trained to goose-step in the Chinese military fashion, replacing decades of British-style marching.”
If you are unfamiliar with the goose step, take a quick detour to IMG search in your preferred search engines to really get the full ambiance of the picture they’re trying to paint.
The pro-democracy movement is a political camp in Hong Kong that supports increased democracy—namely the universal suffrage of the Chief Executive and the Legislative Council as given by the Hong Kong Basic Law under the "One Country, Two Systems" framework. The movement has been around since before the 1997 handover and typically receives about 55–60% of the vote in each election.
The pro-democracy activists emerged from the youth movements in the 1970s and began to take part in electoral politics as the colonial government introduced representative democracy in the mid-1980s.
Samuel Chu, Managing Director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council, has been a part of the movement for years and has seen firsthand how China has crippled the movement:
“The pro-democracy movement has been so central and vital for the 30+ years in Hong Kong, (it is) a movement that my father was a leader in, a movement that I have participated in for years, and now, today, all of those leaders of the pro-democracy movement are either in jail, under house arrest, living in exile, or just stripped of their rights to speak out.” — Samuel Chu
So how did this happen?
China was supposed to give Hong Kong 50 years of autonomy, but, little by little, the CCP began seizing more and more control. There wasn't much that the people could do about it; when China wants to control something, it’s going to control it, and the country is historically unapologetic about its strong-arm tactics.
Within the aforementioned 50-year deal, it was promised that steps would be taken to ensure universal voting rights for its citizens by 2010. There was an unease among people in the movement as to whether or not even the status quo would remain intact for very long, let alone if China would allow all of Hong Kong’s citizens the right to elect their own Chief Executive and Legislative Council.
Instead, by 2010, China had actually reversed its stand, deciding not to go through with the promised democratization. This reversal spurred what became known as the Umbrella Movement and the Hong Kong Democracy Protests of 2014. These protests would prove to be the largest act of civil disobedience in Hong Kong’s history up to that point.
In the fall of 2014, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers took to the streets. They took over the financial district for 79 days and vented their rage, claiming China had broken its promise to the people. China responded by explaining that, to them, the agreement was no more than a historic document and was worth nothing. Many members of the Pro Democracy movement were prosecuted for the peaceful protest in 2014; by the time they were sentenced in 2018, China had proposed a new law giving the CCP the ability to extradite Hong Kong citizens to the mainland to be tried in what is thought of as a highly corrupt and unfair judicial system.
This is what led to the rise of the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement and their subsequent protests in 2019. Two million Hong Kongers once again took to the streets to voice their distrust toward the CCP and to state as loudly as possible that they did not want their citizens extradited.
Samuel Chu, whose father was tried in Hong Kong for organizing the peaceful protests in 2014, claims that the two-year sentence he received from the Hong Kong courts would have been for life if he had been tried on the mainland.
Since that time, in response to the protests on the ground and overseas efforts, China implemented what is called the “National Security Law.” Within this law is article 38, which clearly states that anyone, anywhere, whether or not they be a Hong Kong or Chinese citizen, can be charged under the National Security law for saying or doing anything deemed threatening to the CCP.
Samuel Chu is no stranger to article 38. Even though he has been an American citizen since 1996 and is really only guilty of advocating for Basic Law in Hong Kong, he has still found himself on a list of fugitives wanted by the CCP.
Some may recall the arrest of free-press advocate Jimmy Lai, which proved that even the head of a multi-million dollar company could not stand against the Chinese Communist Party. Jimmy Lai had been overtly vocal about the CCP’s dealings worldwide, slamming the Catholic Church for signing a treaty or "provisional agreement" with the CCP to further the parties' control over religious freedoms, and slamming Joe Biden prior to the election for kowtowing to party leader Xi Jingping.
It didn’t take long for the CCP to completely annihilate Lai’s free press.
For over two decades, Apple Daily was Hong Kong's largest independent newspaper and arguably one of the most outspoken critics of the CCP still in print, until the aforementioned National Security Law was used to destroy the entire company. Apple Daily was raided twice by Hong Kong police: once on August 10, 2020, and again on June 17, 2021. These raids and the subsequent freeze of capital forced the 26-year-old newspaper to close its doors in June 2021.
As for Jimmy Lai, he has been in jail since late 2020 without any substantial convictions, and will likely remain there indefinitely.
Despite the slant and spin emanating from western news outlets, this story is timely, as we see the behavior of the American mainstream media and big-tech platforms begin to eerily mirror that of Hong Kong and Cuba. It doesn't bode well that we have a president who—by all accounts—appears to be at least in bed with, if not subservient to, the Chinese Communist Party and has completely neglected the plight of the Cuban people. If the systemic throttling of the free flow of information is allowed to continue unchallenged in America, chances are that this type of crackdown could spread worldwide.
Should the US and the UK be more active in trying to help Hong Kong?
Xi Jinping is presiding over what has been called the nastiest and most oppressive period in China's history dating back to Mao’s cultural revolution. Samuel Chu believes that the US and the UK, who were instrumental in working with China to draw up the foundation for Hong Kong’s short-lived autonomy, should come back to the table and help uphold the promises made to Hong Kong. In many cases concerning the average American citizen, there seems to be a bipartisan desire to stand with the people of Hong Kong, but when it comes to elected officials or those with the means to do something, the buck has been passed.
As Human Rights Watch noted in a recent report, the Chinese government is now pressing residents to pledge public loyalty to the government in Beijing. It is turning the police and courts into "tools of Chinese state control rather than independent and impartial enforcers of the rule of law."
Candidates considered insufficiently loyal to China have been barred from running for Hong Kong’s electoral council. Academic freedom is under attack. Websites have been blocked, museums harassed, films canceled, political slogans banned, and school curricula rewritten.
Sound familiar?
Rather than helping Hong Kong stop the death of democracy at the hands of a totalitarian regime, it’s starting to look as though we are copying their playbook instead.
Despite American intervention potentially being a conflict of interest for our current administration, the debate continues as to whether or not the US should do anything.
Richard Haass, the former director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department under George W. Bush, has voiced the stance of the western elite:
“We don’t have the luxury of building a foreign policy that is centered on promoting the rule of democracy and human rights, so our influence is limited… We can vent, but we should have no illusions that it’ll change the situation on the ground in Hong Kong. That may seem cruel, but it’s a fact of life.”
Many have interpreted this to mean that what is occurring in Hong Kong is desirable for the international foreign policy elite. Remember, this statement is coming from a man who was president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a globalist hotbed and arguably the most influential think-tank on the planet.
RELATED READING: The Men Behind the Curtain: The Council on Foreign Relations
In contrast to Richard Haas’ pessimism or complete disinterest in the United States helping the people of Hong Kong, Samuel Chu’s argument sounds a little more optimistic.
Chu claims there is actually a lot that could be done: helping fight censorship and circumvent the coming internet firewall, helping activists get out of the country when China comes after them, working to strengthen civil society groups, and pressuring businesses in Hong Kong not to go along with the repression are just a few examples.
Despite Chu’s optimism, the Biden administration doesn't seem interested in upholding the right to free speech in its own country, let alone in a faraway city.
In closing:
It is hard to say what’s in store for America; as it stands now, the general population seems to be going for each other's throats in a tribalist pissing contest, one in which neither side would care much about a totalitarian regime in the United States, as long as their team wins.
So, with the figurative caution signs sounding off all around us, we can now see that the warnings from Cuba and Hong Kong are falling on deaf ears.
Badlands Media articles and features represent the opinions of the contributing authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Badlands Media itself.
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I guess it's got to get worse before it gets better. Cheap words I know.
Right now, I assume most Americans wish to do for America before messing with yet another foreign problem elsewhere.
That is not to say that your analysis & discussion are not important, because it is in light of the quick-paced changes abruptly taking shape & hold upon the planet, elsewhere & here in the USA.
It's reasonable to lend assistance, even if only rhetorical (if true in both fact & heart) to another country, struggling for its freedom.
I think there are more elements involved, than political, in all this, but one would have to venture to the sci-fi channel for such conjecture.
Truth is stranger than fiction, they use to say, way back when.
Anyway. Thank You for the perspective at work in HK.
Great article, thank you! I had the privilege of living and working in Hong Kong back in 2016-2017, and still keep in touch with a lot of Hong Kongers today. Before I had lived there, I went on a work trip in 2014 to both Hong Kong and Shanghai, and as a "naive" Westerner, I didn't realize how very very different the cultures are between Hong Kong and mainland China. To be clear, everyone I met in both places were really fantastic people, but the people in mainland China always seemed a bit sad to me, one woman only wanted to talk to me about my (large) family, and lamented about not having any brothers or sisters. Another was only concerned that I liked China better than Hong Kong. In contrast, my friends from Hong Kong embraced being different, everything from style to sense of humor, unlike the forced homogeneity of mainlanders. Now, these days, I see the difference in my Hong Kong friends. They've been beaten down morally, and in some subtle and not so subtle ways. One of my friends sent me a picture of what she woke up to on October 1 (Chinese National Day) in Victoria Harbor, which was a giant float with yellow letters on a red background (a nod to the Chinese flag), reminding every Hong Konger who was in control. A very sad situation, thank you for highlighting it.