Hong Kong Finance Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po delivers the budget for the 2020-2021 fiscal year to the Hong Kong Legislative Council on February 26, 2020.
Photograph:
jerome favre / Shutterstock
We almost sympathize with Paul Chan Mo-po, who writes a letter to the next editor. The Hong Kong finance secretary is upset that the Heritage Foundation has removed Hong Kong from its annual Economic Freedom Index, after years at the top of the list.
Mr. Chan has the impossible task of denying what everyone can see clearly: the Communist Party of China is remaking Hong Kong in its own continental image. That was the point of Ed Feulner, from Heritage, in his explanation on these pages last week. Until Singapore took first place in the index, Hong Kong reigned as number 1 for 25 years. As the preface to the 2019 Index noted, “The Hong Kong government ran full-page ads to publicize its number one ranking.” But Hong Kong’s aggressive assimilation into China, Feulner wrote, is turning it into just another Chinese city.
Mr. Chan disagrees, invoking “the principle of One Country, Two Systems”. That was the promise of autonomy for Hong Kong, embodied in the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, which set out the terms of the former British colony’s return to China. What Chan did not say is that Beijing has made it clear that the Joint Declaration is a dead letter.
In 2017, Lu Kang, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China, called the Joint Declaration “a historic document that no longer has any realistic meaning”. Hong Kong residents have every reason to believe him after seeing China enforce an unpopular national security law, the provisions of which include allowing Beijing to take some Hong Kong cases to China for trial.
Mr. Chan wants readers to believe that economic freedom continues, regardless of political repression. But China is not Singapore. In China, dissidents simply disappear. Foreign businessmen can be arrested and held as diplomatic hostages, as two innocent Canadians now pressure Ottawa not to extradite a Huawei executive to the US
Economic freedom? Tell that to the editor of the Apple Daily, Jimmy Lai, who remains in prison because the government has invoked national security law, overturning the presumption of bail in the common law that allegedly governs Hong Kong. Xia Baolong – the main Beijing official in Hong Kong – says that only the real “patriots” are suitable for the city’s “administrative, legislative and judicial bodies”.
China is also controlling corporate meeting rooms. Two years ago, the Civil Aviation Administration of China demanded that Cathay Pacific Airways ban any employee who had participated in “illegal protests” of flights to mainland China airspace and started sending information about the entire crew before any flight. for China to be approved – lowering its stock price. Last May, former Hong Kong chief executive Leung Chun-ying called for a boycott of the London-based HSBC bank because it had not openly endorsed national security law. His top executive soon signed a petition supporting the law.
Our advice to Mr. Chan is to stop trying to convince the world that Hong Kong is what it was and to accept that he is now defending the man who actually runs Hong Kong: Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Main street: Jimmy Lai from Hong Kong goes to prison – and Pope Francis says nothing. Images: Reuters / Zuma Press Composite: Mark Kelly
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Published on March 11, 2021, print edition.