Thoughts On Hong Kong [Updated]

I'd been to Hong Kong various times for short visits, but in July 1989 I arrived for a year long stay. As a Fulbright Scholar, I would be teaching public administration at Chinese University of Hong Kong.  July 1989 was barely a month after Tiananmen Square crackdown ended the student and worker demonstrations for democracy in Beijing.

The Chinese government has done its best to erase that event from Chinese consciousness.  The median age in China is 37.3 years.  That means half the population today was seven years old or younger, or not yet born.  And of those who were around, never knew much about what actually happened.  And prosperity has meant that many people would rather spend their time pursuing consumer goods than dwelling on Tiananmen.

1989 was eight years before the British lease on Hong Kong was about to end and Tiananmen really shook up the residents of the British colony.  Another disturbing thing that happened around that time was people's discovery that the words "right to abode" were not in their renewed British passports.  That meant that although Hong Kong residents were technically British subjects the right to move to Britain had evaporated.

A giant liberty statue had been created and was featured in demonstrations at that time.

The truth of the matter was that Hong Kong was not really much of a democracy.  My university students knew very little about how the Hong Kong government worked or what their rights were. When I asked them to contact government agencies, you'd have thought I'd asked them to jump from the tenth floor.  There was no democracy, not even the semblance until after Tiananmen.  From a 2010 article called "Hong Kong's Elite Structure, Legislature and the Bleak Future of Democracy under Chinese Sovereignty"  (this will get you to an abstract, you need access through a library to get the article free.)

Since Hong Kong was ruled by Britain's designated governor during the colonial period (1841‐1997), the government has been commonly described as executive-led. This means that the colonial governor had all the power and authority to exercise policies and legislations in the territory. Appointed by the governor, the Executive Council (ExCo) merely gave advice to the governor. Established in 1843 under British rule, the LegCo had contained no democratic seats until 1991 when 18 out of 57 members were directly elected. Before that, the LegCo was, to quote Sing (2003 Sing, Ming. 2003 29), “a place for mild politics and perceived simply as a ‘rubber stamp’.”. 

There were dozens of periodicals on sale whose key purpose was to help people find ways to emigrate from Hong Kong.  Botswana had full page ads in the South China Morning Post enticing people with $250,000 I believe, to get citizenship in Africa.  There were any number of scandals revolving around diplomats from different countries selling citizenships.  Vancouver was known as Hongcouver.

Here to give you a sense of how opaque the bureaucracy was, is a sample of questioning about such emigration hustlers in the Legislative Council about the time I got there in July 1989:

"Oral answers to questions     -   Consumer protection against emigration counsellors
1. MR. PETER WONG asked: Sir, will Government inform this Council what consumer protection measures, if any, are taken to protect Hong Kong people who wish to seek assistance from emigration specialists who hawk their skills and wares for reward in Hong Kong?
SECRETARY FOR ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES AND INFORMATION: Sir, this is an area of consumer affairs where the guiding principle must be Caveat Emptor, that is, buyers beware.
The Hong Kong Government neither encourages nor discourages emigration consultants setting up business in Hong Kong, nor does it encourage or discourage Hong Kong people from using their services. The services available vary from filling forms outside consulates to mapping out an investment strategy to qualify as an investor. The decision on whether to consult, on what to consult, and how much it is reasonable to pay for the services provided, must be one for the individual to make.
    Sir, I can only suggest that the best advice can probably be provided by the
consulate of the country concerned.
Of course, if there is any evidence of a criminal act such as fraud or deception, then a report should be made to the police.
MR. PETER WONG: Sir, the "caveat emptor" answer given by the Secretary suggests that the Government does nothing to protect Hong Kong people in this hour of their need. Does this mean that the Securities and Futures Commission, the Registrar General's Department, amongst others, allow the flood of advertisements in the newspapers to go completely unchecked?
SECRETARY FOR ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES AND INFORMATION: Sir, in the famous words of one of our illustrious former Financial Secretaries, "the Hong Kong Government believes that if something is not broken, do not try to fix it"; and this is an area falling into that classification. From 1 January 1987 to date, the Consumer Council has only received 11 complaints and this shows the size of the problem.
MRS. LAM:  Do consulates in Hong Kong accept responsibility for the actions of
immigration specialists from the countries they represent?
SECRETARY FOR ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES AND INFORMATION: Sir, I have no knowledge of what the consulates do with respect to particular immigration consultants.
MR. DAVID CHEUNG: Sir, many of these immigration specialists are lawyers specializing in the immigration laws of their own countries. What measure of supervision, if any, does the Law Society or the Government of Hong Kong exercise over their activities?
SECRETARY FOR ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES AND INFORMATION: Sir, I believe we are now wading in the area of foreign lawyers. I wonder whether I should not defer to the Attorney General?

After Tiananmen, with less than ten years to go before Hong Kong would officially be given back to China, things got really tense.  Negotiations between England and China to establish an agreement about the handover was a major concern for Hong Kong residents.  The Joint Declaration came out in 1984, but then the Chinese came up with "The Basic Law" in 1990, a pretty touchy time.  Hong Kong might not have had much democracy under the British, but China's legal protections, punctuated by Tiananmen,  augured even worse under the Chinese.  

From a Hong Kong government site in 2008:

"The Sino-British Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong (The Joint Declaration) was signed between the Chinese and British Governments on 19 December 1984. The Joint Declaration sets out, among other things, the basic policies of the People's Republic of China (PRC) regarding Hong Kong. Under the principle of "One Country, Two Systems", the socialist system and policies shall not be practised in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) and Hong Kong's previous capitalist system and life-style shall remain unchanged for 50 years. The Joint Declaration provides that these basic policies shall be stipulated in a Basic Law of the HKSAR.
The Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (The Basic Law) was adopted on 4 April 1990 by the Seventh National People's Congress (NPC) of the PRC. It came into effect on 1 July 1997.

The Document
The Basic Law is the constitutional document for the HKSAR. It enshrines within a legal document the important concepts of "One Country, Two Systems", "a high degree of autonomy" and "Hong Kong People administering Hong Kong". It also prescribes the various systems to be practised in the HKSAR.
The Basic Law consists of the following sections -
a. The full text of the Basic Law which comprises a total of nine chapters with 160 articles;
b. Annex I, which sets out the method for the selection of the Chief Executive of the HKSAR;
c. Annex II, which sets out the method for the formation of the Legislative Council of the HKSAR and its voting procedures; and
d. Annex III, which sets out the national laws to be applied in the HKSAR."

The current demonstrations were sparked by a new law that allows extradition to China for trial for Hong Kong residents.  Just imagine Trump allowing extradition for trial in Russia in the United States.  When the extradition law was withdrawn temporarily, the demonstrators were not satisfied.  The people of Hong Kong have come a long way since my students' shyness.  (But also consider that to get into Chinese University of Hong Kong, my students had had to toe the line and not ever cause any trouble.  They were not representative of their peers in Hong Kong.)

China does, of course, hold most of the cards.  When the British left, the removal of 'the right to abode' from people's passports was an indicator that Britain had no real concern for the people of Hong Kong.  They were principally concerned about British held property, 'real' British citizens, and appearances.  Fighting China over Hong Kong was never an option.  While they won that fight a century earlier with in part by addicting the country to opium, China now had the upper hand.  

And there is no way the US is going to fight to protect the rights of Hong Kong residents.  Even if Clinton were now president, the US simply has no way to got to war against China over 400 square miles in the south of China.  And Trump doesn't seem to even want to use it as a bargaining chip in this trade discussions.  

So I don't see this ending well.    The only danger to China is that its own population might see Hong Kong demonstrations as a model for more freedoms in China.  China appears to be doing a massive propaganda campaign to its own mainland population,  making the demonstrators appear to be criminals and thugs and American backed haters of China.  I suspect they'll succeed.  I know when I was teaching in Beijing in 2004, there were three things that my students believed religiously - Tibet was better off under China, that it's population had been slaves to the monks before China took over;  the Japanese were evil; and Taiwan was part of China.  But that said, they were great students, and once the trusted me not to punish their active participation in class, they had lots to say and were very curious and creative.

I suspect the government is working hard now to make sure their views on Hong Kong are similarly loyal and unmovable. But the size of Hong Kong's demonstrations should give China reason to pause and reconsider how much it changes the Basic Law.  China has blindspots when it comes to challenges to its control.  China's way of handling this in Tibet has been to simply ship enough Han Chinese there that the native Tibetan population becomes a minority.  They could try something similar in Hong Kong.  In fact there already are a lot of mainland Chinese in Hong Kong.  

But with that said, let's remember that the US has serious ideological blinders when it comes to China too.  And that China has 1.4 billion people.  

That means that the smartest 10% is 140 million people.  The same is true for the richest 10%.  And the most athletic 10%.  And while those groups will overlap somewhat, they make up more than 50% of the US population.  Ten percent of the US population is 3 million.  

If China unleashes the potential of its top 10% there's no way anyone else can beat them.  Especially now with Trump destroying the potential of the US through ethnic and cultural war.  

I'm not a China expert.  My serious interest in China is about 25 years old now, and even then it was limited to a very narrow focus.  So consider these musings based on experience and some serious research once upon a time.  

[UPDATED August 21, 2019 - Here's an opinion piece in the LATimes today by a Chinese researcher at Human Rights Watch, using his own experience as a student in the US to  explain why overseas Chinese students are anti-Hong Kong protesters.  It's consistent with what I wrote yesterday, but adds more detail.  It also causes me to see Americans in the same pattern - unable to give up their ingrained beliefs, even in the face of the obvious.  One's identity is caught up in these beliefs.]