Hong Kong Is Still Free; China Can Be

From investors to soccer fans to academics, a conviction that the loss of liberty is not inevitable.
By James Freeman

Security services try to confiscate a banner reading "Hong Kong is not China" as Hong Kong plays China at the East Asian Football Federation tournament in Busan, South Korea on Wednesday. 

It’s looking like a bad day for the communist bullies of Beijing.
Despite the best efforts of the Chinese dictatorship, the people of Hong Kong remain free.
And even on the Chinese mainland some brave souls are asserting their basic liberties.
A new report helps explain why Hong Kong protesters are so courageous in demanding that the Chinese government keep its promise to allow citizens of the former British colony to enjoy the rights they have long enjoyed.
Hong Kongers have more to lose from oppressive government than almost anyone in the world.
The latest Human Freedom Index rates Hong Kong as the world’s freest economy and third most free country overall.
The U.S. ranks 15th and China checks in at an abysmal 126th, 12 spots behind Russia.
The index is co-published by the Cato Institute, the Fraser Institute in Canada and the Liberales Institut at the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom in Germany.
The season of protests has helped push Hong Kong into its first recession since the financial crisis. But a recent rally in Hong Kong shares suggests that this great jewel of the world economy has not suffered irreparable damage.
Meanwhile citizens of the former colony are sharing the message of freedom well beyond their borders today. 
In Busan, South Korea, China has defeated Hong Kong 2-0 in a regional soccer tournament, but the Hong Kongers in attendance remain unbowed.
The Journal’s Eun-Young Jeong reports:
The protest chants would have rung familiar on the streets of Hong Kong.
“Fight for freedom! Stand with Hong Kong!” they shouted...
When the Chinese national anthem, the March of the Volunteers, played before the game, dozens of Hong Kong fans booed and turned their backs to the field. 
Some held up their middle finger. 
One man held up a banner that read “Hong Kong is not China,” and was approached by security guards to take it down.
As soon as the game started at Busan Asiad Main Stadium, the Hong Kong fans belted out “Glory to Hong Kong” in Cantonese, a song that has become the protesters’ de facto anthem.
Over on the Chinese mainland, the communist government’s effort to expand its control over all institutions of society is meeting some resistance.
Strange as it may sound to American ears, university faculty and administrators are pushing back against politicized education.
The Journal’s Philip Wen reports from Beijing:
Amendments to the charters of three Chinese universities that place absolute adherence to Communist Party rule over academic independence have provoked heated online debate and prompted some prominent academics to raise concerns amid a backdrop of tightening ideological control on China’s campuses.
References to academic independence and freedom of thought were stripped out of the charter of Shanghai’s Fudan University, long-considered one of the country’s most liberal academic institutions.
Substituted were references to “serving the governance of the Communist Party” and “dedication to patriotism,” according to a notice posted on the website of China’s Ministry of Education...
“If we do not speak out today about such a blatant challenge to the bottom line of education and academic ethics, I am afraid we will never have the chance,” said Lu Xiaoping, vice-president of the literature school at Nanjing University—another university whose charter was rewritten—in a Weibo post on Wednesday that was... later deleted. 
Shaanxi Normal University, in northwestern China, was the third university to have its charter altered.
Mr. Wen adds that “footage purportedly of Fudan students gathering in a university cafeteria to sing the school anthem circulated on Chinese social media on Wednesday afternoon. The lyrics include the reference to ‘academic independence and freedom of thought’ once enshrined in the university charter.”
Communist dictator Xi Jinping says China’s university campuses should become “strongholds of the party’s leadership.”
Faculty resisters may not be able to draw much inspiration from their U.S. academic counterparts. But liberty advocates in both China and Hong Kong are surely an inspiration to millions of Americans.

American greed: Beijing's ass kissers

How the NBA censored me on American soil

The NBA’s courage to speak truth to power dissipates when faced with the power of China’s monstrous Communist regime

By Jon Schweppe


I’ve been an NBA fanatic as long as I can remember. 

Growing up, I rooted for the Minnesota Timberwolves. 

I was there for the ups — who can forget that almost magical 2004 season? — and all of the downs, of which there have been far too many. I still follow the team closely today.
So as a fan of the league, I was shocked when I found myself being censored at an NBA exhibition game Wednesday night in Washington between the Washington Wizards and the Guangzhou Loong Lions. 

Now, I’m rethinking my allegiance to the league and wondering whether I should stop attending or even watching games altogether.
I decided to attend last night’s game after reading about an incident that took place at a Philadelphia 76ers game this week. 

In Philly, security guards ejected two spectators for displaying small signs with messages of support for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy dissidents.
It was an unsettling sight: One of America’s premier sports leagues, which constantly virtue-signals about its “values,” groveling to a totalitarian regime and censoring its own fans in the United States of America — in Philly, home of the Constitutional Convention and the Liberty Bell.
I knew I had to do something. 

I wanted to test for myself whether the NBA would be so brazen as to censor fans again — this time in our nation’s capital, no less.
My friends and I entered Capital One Arena donning “Free Hong Kong” T-shirts given to us by an activist outside the arena and with homemade signs concealed in our clothes. 

We took our seats shortly before the Chinese national anthem began to play.
At that point, we stood up and unfurled a long “Free Hong Kong” banner. 

That immediately attracted the attention of several security guards, who came over to confiscate our sign. 

We asked why we were having our sign taken away. 

We were told: “We respect your freedom of speech, but … we don’t have any stance on [Hong Kong]. So we’re just asking not to have any signage related to that in here tonight.”
Later, we unveiled a second message, a homemade sign that simply said “Google Uyghurs,” referring to China’s oppressed Muslims, more than a million of whom are detained in Chinese concentration camps.
This sign, too, was deemed to be a problem. 

Within minutes, we were approached by security supervisors, who told us that we were not allowed to make political statements about China at the game. 

My friend pleaded that we were simply seeking to educate some of the NBA officials, coaches and players, many of whom had expressed ignorance about the issue. 

It was in vain: The supervisor still confiscated the sign and told us that if we continued to disrupt the game, we would be ejected.
By then, we felt we had seen enough and left of our own accord.
At this point, it’s fair to wonder: 

What values does the NBA really stand for? 

In recent years, the league has taken pains to exhibit a concern for “social justice,” with prominent players speaking out in favor of almost exclusively progressive political causes and executives encouraging such activism.
Most notably, in 2016 the NBA used its influence to push a gender ideology and lobby against a “bathroom bill” law in North Carolina that would have protected women in private spaces — going so far as to move the NBA All-Star game out of Charlotte to New Orleans. 

Far from avoiding political controversy, the league seemed to embrace it when the targets were American conservatives.
But the NBA’s courage to speak truth to power dissipates when faced with the power of China’s monstrous Communist regime. 

When Xi Jinping yanks the NBA’s corporate chain, the league tells its fans: “Shut up and watch us dribble.”
This should be very worrying for all Americans, not just sports fans. 

If the price of US companies doing business in China involves self-censorship, there should be no sale. 

Free speech is a bedrock American principle, not some cheap slogan that can be auctioned off to the highest bidder. 

When Beijing can force the country’s wokest sports league to practice Chinese-style censorship and authoritarianism on American soil, free trade has gone too far.
Our country and the freedoms we enjoy are too important to ignore the league’s craven conduct. 

Until the NBA apologizes to fans for how it has handled this incident and unequivocally commits to bedrock American values, I will be forgoing my NBA viewership for a pastime which better upholds American values. 

I encourage my fellow fans to do the same.

Hong Kong Was Once Passionate About China. Now, It’s Indifferent or Contemptuous.

By Andrew Higgins

Hong Kong’s harbor. The attachment some Hong Kongers once felt with the mainland is fading.

HONG KONG — As a young student learning classical Chinese, I stopped off in Hong Kong nearly 40 years ago to catch a slow train up to Beijing, then still known as Peking. 

At the station, I bought a Chinese-language magazine of politics, culture and ideas that I was advised to hide when I crossed the border out of what was then still a British colony into China.
With only a rudimentary grasp of modern Chinese, I spent much of my three-day journey north trying to decipher the Hong Kong magazine’s articles that were wrestling with China’s past political convulsions under Mao, its present challenges and future possibilities. 

It was my first taste of what was then the city’s raucous and passionate debate about China.
Hong Kongers at the time were endlessly curious about life across the border and, tugged by bonds of family, culture and in some case politics, saw their city as part of a bigger Chinese story.
But returning to Hong Kong this month after many years away, I found that the magazine was gone, along with what had been Hong Kong’s deeply felt role as a place inextricably tied to the rest of China, not just economically but intellectually and emotionally.

“People, particularly the young, are just not interested in China,” said Lee Yee, 83, a retired former magazine editor. “They don’t care.”

As the city’s political elite have become increasingly beholden to China, and its business leaders ever more intertwined with the mainland, ordinary citizens have pulled away, becoming less engaged.
“People, particularly the young, are just not interested in China. They don’t care,” Lee Yee, the 83-year-old founding editor of that now defunct magazine, known first as “The Seventies” and later as “The Nineties,” said over coffee in a Hong Kong retirement home. 

China, he added, doesn’t stir excited discussion these days, only indifference or contempt.
In a busy shopping district on Hong Kong Island, a big sign still juts out over the street advertising the location of Causeway Bay Books, an emporium of weighty political tomes and salacious potboilers about China and its leaders, many of them banned on the mainland. 

But the shop — several of whose staff members were abducted in 2015 and sent across the border into detention — has vanished, replaced by a sex toys store.
The demise of Mr. Lee’s magazine and the disappearance of Causeway Bay Books are small signs of a larger victory for the Chinese Communist Party in its long campaign to prevent Hong Kong becoming a “base of subversion” against its rule.
But by squeezing the finances of journals critical of Beijing, kidnapping booksellers and generally limiting the space for open discussion of China, Beijing has promoted what could be a more dangerous threat to its grip on Hong Kong: distance from and disinterest in China.

A message from protesters in the Mong Kok district.

“Young Hong Kongers want nothing to do with China. They have no more interest in subverting China than they do in subverting Zimbabwe,” said Liu Kin-ming, a veteran Hong Kong journalist who now works as a consultant, advising companies on political and business affairs in China.
This is a dramatic turn for a city that, under British rule, sheltered and supported Sun Yat-sen, the leader of a 1911 revolution that brought down’s China’s last imperial dynasty. 

Hong Kong also gave refuge and sustenance to prominent revolutionaries working to overthrow the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek in the 1930s and 40s.
Hong Kong played such an important role in shaping China’s history in the 20th century that, ahead of its handover to Chinese rule in 1997, many in the city seriously believed that the big question was not so much how China would change Hong Kong once it regained sovereignty but how tiny Hong Kong would change China.
Nobody believes that now.
Instead, despair has set in over China’s direction. 

And with it is a growing rejection of the country to which most people in Hong Kong are bound by ethnicity but that many now shun as an alien power.
Jin Zhong, the longtime editor of Kaifang, another China-focused magazine that has shut down its print version in recent years, though it still appears online, said hope and expectation about China had, despite its stunning economic success, curdled into bitter repudiation.

A big, blue sign still juts out over the street advertising the location of Causeway Bay Books, but it has been replaced by a sex toys store.

Hong Kongers “have totally lost faith in China,” said Mr. Jin, who now lives in New York. 

“For decades Hong Kong opposed ‘one-party rule’ on the mainland but nothing changed. All they got was one-man rule instead,” he said, referring to the Communist Party leader Xi Jinping. 

“Everyone feels disappointment. Why care about China? What is the point?”
Close links to China abound, particularly in Hong Kong’s economy, which has grown increasingly dependent on money from and trade with the mainland. 

And Hong Kong’s newspapers are filled each day with ever more slavish declarations of “love” for China by business people trying to protect their investments on the mainland.
But the ties of the heart and mind have withered away.
The result is the blunt, handwritten message pinned to the back of a protester I met last week: “Hong Kong Is Not China.”
Under British colonial rule, most people in Hong Kong, including fierce anti-Communists, felt undeniably Chinese in the face of a system run at its highest levels by Britons who often couldn’t speak their language, didn’t know much about their culture and enjoyed a lavish lifestyle far beyond the reach of all but the richest Chinese tycoons.
But the British, whose obvious foreignness and colonial arrogance helped solidify a shared sense of being part of China among their subjects, have given way to a new elite of mandarins from Beijing. They also rarely speak the local language, Cantonese, also live apart and often seem no less — and sometimes even more — out of tune with ordinary Hong Kongers.

Sun Yat-sen memorial park. Under British rule, the city sheltered and supported Sun, the leader of a 1911 revolution that brought down’s China’s last imperial dynasty.

Even Communist Party-controlled newspapers in the city that were run largely by Hong Kongers during British rule are now staffed at their senior levels by mainlanders who view Hong Kong through a prism fixed decades ago by China’s late paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping. 

He regarded the city as a greedy, self-indulgent place that had no real interest in politics and so could easily reabsorbed into “the motherland.” 

In Hong Kong after 1997, Mr. Deng promised, “horses will still run, stocks will still sizzle and dancers will still dance.”
That promise has largely been kept so far. 

But it has come in tandem with a steady diminishment of the city as a place engaged in shaping China’s future.
This reduced role, said Eddie Chu, an elected member of Hong Kong’s Legislature and an early champion of the city’s localist movement, has fed a widespread sense of despondent detachment from the rest of China.
“As a city confronting an empire, it seems an obvious expectation that we are doomed,” he said.
For a foreigner, Hong Kong still feels unquestionably Chinese, its streets flashing with neon Chinese characters, its graveyards filled with tombstones recording ancestral homes in faraway provinces, its cacophonous restaurants offering endless varieties of Chinese cuisine. 

But for many Hong Kongers these are no more signs of the place being part of Communist-ruled China than the magnificent collections of Chinese art in Taiwan are proof that the island belongs to Beijing.
Mr. Lee, the editor, said it pained him to see this but added that the Communist Party had only itself to blame. 

He said it has treated critics in Hong Kong who considered themselves Chinese patriots as enemies and repeatedly frustrated hopes in the former colony that the system in China might become less repressive.
“Loving China,” he said, became synonymous with “loving the party,” something he and most people in Hong Kong don’t want to do. 

“I used to be a patriot. But of course I am not a patriot now.”

Free Hong Kong

The Hong Kong protesters deserve Britain’s full support

The Spectator


When the tanks were rolling into Tiananmen Square and the Cold War hadn’t yet formally come to an end, it seemed obvious: freedom and democracy were prerequisites for economic success. 

Yet over the past three decades, China has challenged that notion by creating a model previously unknown to the world: consumer capitalism combined with autocratic government. 

Under Xi Jinping’s rule, China’s new middle class now enjoys near-western living standards. 

So long, that is, as it does not question the legitimacy of its leaders.
The success of the Chinese model has presented a conundrum for western governments: how to deal with a country that continues to have little regard for human rights and yet nevertheless offers lucrative opportunities for investors. 

So far, western leaders have followed the money while putting up only the feeblest defence of freedom and democracy. 

On some occasions, they have not even bothered to do this. 

When Theresa May visited Beijing last year to encourage what she described as a ‘golden era’ in Anglo–China relations, state media noted with approval how visiting European leaders had now given up discussing human rights.
Yes, a million Uyghurs might have been herded into concentration camps — but China had lucrative contracts to offer, so the West looked the other way. 

But the awkward compromise between economic interest and concern for human rights is suddenly under huge strain, partly on account of the trade war which Donald Trump is waging — and partly because of the growing unrest in Hong Kong. 

The protests which have taken place recently show that, unlike the British government, the citizens of Britain’s former colony are no longer prepared to ignore China’s various human rights abuses.
It was an error on the part of the John Major government not to grant Hong Kong’s industrious people the right to settle in Britain before the handover. 

Most were condemned to be handed over to China along with their city — albeit with the promise that they would enjoy special privileges. 

In theory, Hong Kong citizens — unlike their counterparts on the mainland — have the right to protest against the Chinese Communist party. 

But some who exercised this supposed freedom have found themselves spirited away and sent to mainland China for detention. 

The trigger for the current protests, which this week included an invasion of the Hong Kong legislature, was an initiative brought in by Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam to create powers for felons to be extradited directly from Hong Kong to China.
Lam says this was her doing, and was not inspired by Beijing. 

But it fits a general pattern: of rising over-reach from emboldened Chinese officials who think a new chapter in history has opened. 

The Chinese believe the West will look the other way, and see notions of democracy, liberty and human rights as cultural issues relevant to the West but a lot less relevant to Asia. 

The citizens of Hong Kong, it seems, beg to differ.
For some time now, Xi has been making misjudgment after misjudgment when it comes to relations with the West. 

In particular, he has not understood that American patience has snapped. 

China’s economic model involved sucking up western industrial secrets and taking lots of foreign business while refusing access to its own markets. 

The ongoing trade war — which reached an almost certainly temporary ceasefire this week — was wrongly seen in Beijing as a Donald Trump hissy fit. 

It was thought that, if this strange president was thrown a bone, he’d go away and China could go on as before. 

But American opinion is on the turn. 

Listen to Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat leader of the House, or any of the would-be Democrat contenders, and you can hear exactly the same concerns about China.
Xi has over-reached. 

This will worry others in his politburo, some of whom will be asking if his recent decision to become emperor for life is turning out to be wise. 

His Belt and Road Initiative, a $90 billion attempt to create a high-tech equivalent of the Silk Road, is already looking like an expensive vanity project, the kind of legacy of a leader whose ego far outgrew his position. 

Various other innovations — like the app containing the thoughts of Chairman Xi — are worryingly reminiscent of an uglier era. 

But Britain has been woefully absent from this debate, as if all our would-be leaders are primarily interested in lucrative contracts and terrified of upsetting Beijing.
It need not be this way. 

There is a clear path for China’s peaceful rise, evident only a few years ago: one based on co-operation and mutual respect. 

In the rush to offer the hand of friendship, western leaders have looked supine, which has further emboldened Beijing. 

And the most eloquent rebuke has come not from the White House or No. 10, but the streets of Hong Kong.
Xi must now answer a difficult question: does he back down and risk sending a message that he caves in when under pressure? 

Or should he carry on and risk a wider conflagration? 

Managing China’s rise has always been a question of finding the right balance. 

The people of Hong Kong have shown the world that they wish to push the balance back in support of liberty. 

They deserve Britain’s full support.