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I am not saying that China is a perfect country. No country is. China is accused of human rights violations in Xinjiang. I don’t know enough about the situation there to comment intelligently on it. But I do know two things: One, Chinese cities have been spared terrorist attacks in recent years, unlike Boston, New York, Paris or London. And two, if you accuse China of genocide, then you must first explain why this ethnic minority is exempted from China’s strict one-child policy, to allow its population to reproduce quickly.
As for the US, why doesn’t it close its Quantanamo Bay Detention Camp where suspects are detained indefinitely and subjected to torture ? Why detain children of illegal immigrants ? They are dying or sick and separated from their parents at the border. What’s happened to their human rights ? And what about America’s use of waterboarding as a torture technique? Before you work up your righteous indignation, please clean up your own act, in your own backyard.
If there is one issue that unites the West against China, it is over its enactment of National Security Law for Hong Kong. This partly speaks to Hong Kong’s popularity as a world city. But this Hollywood nostalgia disguises a dark fact. The place has been misgoverned for 23 years. City officials are living in a bubble, protected by perks, privileges and the world’s most generous pensions, with ridiculous education allowances that let them send their kids to Britain or other overseas destinations for education at public expense, with each family enjoying 5 air-tickets per year. Officials have completely deserted the public school system. They did nothing to prepare the young for handover of sovereignty to China, teaching them no Chinese history, such that China remains a total stranger to those born after 1997.
In short, Hong Kong has never been successfully decolonized, unlike Macau which is enjoying peace and prosperity without officials spoiled by ridiculous special privileges. City officials are just marking time, while collecting their largess. It is downright criminal.
There are some disturbing statistics. Of the nearly 9000 arrested in the past year during the street riots, over 30% are students, more than half of them high school students and even primary school pupils. If you ask them what the so-called five demands they are fighting for, they can’t tell you. Yet they have gone on the rampage, terrorizing non-protestors, trashing universities, shops and even Beijing’s office in the city. The burning and violence went on for nine months. Beijing stood by and did nothing.
Would Washington or London have shown the same restraint ? Trump would have sent in the federal troops on the first sign of trouble. The West has never willingly recognized China’s sovereignty over Hong Kong. They embrace two systems, but they forget there is one country. Beijing gave Hong Kong 23 years to enact its own national security law, but unlike Macau, it never did. In the meantime, someone must explain why the US consulate in Hong Kong has a staff of well over a thousand. What do they do in the city ? I think you know what the answer is.
Throughout, Hong Kong people are free to take to the streets and call for the downfall of the communist party. On average, there are 19 protests a day. It is a city in chaos. A city of little hope for the young, despite its glittering skyscrapers. There is no universal pension. No unemployment insurance, no inheritance tax for the rich, no rent control for the poor. It has become the world’s most unaffordable city, thanks to property prices artificially driven sky-high by developer-favoring policies. It is a totally misgoverned city, but poor Beijing is getting the blame. People outside know little other than what the biased Western press has fed them.
There is a quick solution to the Hong Kong mess: revoke all the special perks and privileges enjoyed by officials whose family members all hold foreign passports. They lack commitment and empathy. They are unfit to govern. This is the root of Hong Kong’s problem. Beijing’s fault is in giving them too long a leash, religiously respecting the two-systems concept and allowing incompetent and heartless locals to run the place. As Sir David Aker-Jones, the former number two in the colonial government said before he died: “I wish Beijing would simply send someone able to run Hong Kong, just like Britain did before 1997.”
There is no doubt Beijing is losing the propaganda war. Does it have a global image problem ? I guess it does. This is because its spokespersons are often tied to a script, and have never learned to speak the language of the West. Telling America or Britain to stop meddling in China’s “internal affairs” over Hong Kong falls on deaf ears. They should learn to use humor, irony or other subtle forms of rebuttal. They should learn from Chester Ronning, Canada’s China-born ambassador to China. When his political opponent accused him of growing up on the milk of a Chinese milk mother, implying that he had Chinese blood in his veins, Ronning retorted, “but my opponent grew up on cow milk.” And when an Iraqi reporter threw two shoes in succession at George W Bush, missing both times, the US President deadpanned: “I think it’s a size 10.”
China needs professional assistance of lobbyists to argue its case, instead of relying on its citizens to do the job, leaving them open to the charge of espionage, as recently happened in Australia.
China’s misfortune is that the world will not let it forget its past. They have never outgrown their preconceptions. Forty years after its economic opening up, China is still seen as an old-fashioned communist country. China may have learned to trade with the West or talk technology with it, but it has yet to learn to speak English persuasively or authentically. A global power needs three things: hard military power, economic clout plus the soft power of diplomacy and communication. In the information age, words may matter just as much as guns and dollars.
China has failed to argue its case over Hong Kong, and the West has chosen to see this misgoverned city as an underdog bullied by Beijing. The truth is that America has brilliantly leveraged the Hong Kong mess to help the Taiwan separatist president win re-election and tarnish China’s global reputation. America has successfully parlayed the twin story of a misunderstood country and a misgoverned city into a false narrative that has found legs around the world.
Philip Yeung
A Chinese-Canadian Contrarian
