Perfidious Albion

Britain is looking away as China tramples on the freedom of Hong Kong – and my father

By Angela Gui

Angela Gui: ‘My father’s case is only one out of many that illustrate the death of the rule of law in Hong Kong.’ 

Iam too young to remember the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 and its promise for the new world I would live in. 

But I have lived to see that promise trampled.
The Sino-British Joint Declaration, signed to pave the way for the handover, was supposed to protect the people of Hong Kong from Chinese interference in their society and markets until 2047. 

Yet as the handover’s 20th anniversary approaches, China muscles in where it promised to tread lightly while Britain avoids eye contact.

Gui Minhai: the strange disappearance of a publisher who riled China's elite
As Xi Jinping has consolidated his grip on Chinese politics since he took office in 2013, Beijing has increasingly ignored the principle of “one country, two systems” on which the handover was based and actively eroded the freedoms this was supposed to guarantee.
In October 2015, my father Gui Minhai and his four colleagues were targeted and abducted by the agents of the Chinese Communist party for their work as booksellers and publishers. 

My father – a Swedish citizen – was taken while on holiday in Thailand, in the same place we’d spent Christmas together the year before. 

He was last seen getting into a car with a Mandarin-speaking man who had waited for him outside his holiday apartment. 

Next, his friend and colleague Lee Bo was abducted from the Hong Kong warehouse of Causeway Bay Books, which they ran together. 

Lee Bo is legally British and, like any Hong Konger, his freedom of expression should have been protected by the terms of 1997.
Their only “crime” had been to publish and sell books that were critical of the central Chinese government. 

So paranoid is Beijing about its public image, that it chooses to carry out cross-border kidnappings over some books. 

Causeway Bay Books specialised in publications that were banned on the mainland but legal in Hong Kong. 

The store’s manager, Lam Wing-kee, who was taken when travelling to Shenzhen, has described Causeway Bay Books “a symbol of resistance”. 

In spite of Hong Kong’s legal freedoms of speech and of the press the store is now closed because all its people have been abducted or bullied away. 

Other Hong Kong booksellers are picking “politically sensitive” titles off their shelves in the fear that they may be next; the next brief headline, the next gap in a family like my own.
I continue to live with my father’s absence – his image, messages from his friends, the cause he has become. 

Turning 53 this year, he spent a second birthday in a Chinese prison. 

Soon he will have spent two years in detention without access to a lawyer, Swedish consular officials, or regular contact with his family.
My father’s case is only one of many that illustrate the death of the rule of law in Hong Kong. 

Earlier this year, Canadian businessman Xiao Jianhua – who had connections to the Chinese political elite – disappeared from a Hong Kong hotel and later resurfaced on the mainland. 

In last year’s legislative council elections, six candidates were barred from running because of their political stance. 

The two pro-independence candidates who did end up getting elected were prevented from taking office. 

If “intolerable political stance” is now a valid excuse for barring LegCo candidates, then it won’t be long before the entire Hong Kong government is reduced to a miniature version of China’s.
The Joint Declaration was meant to guarantee that no Hong Kong resident would have to fear a “midnight knock on the door”. 

The reality at present is that what happened to my father can happen to any Hong Kong resident the mainland authorities wish to silence or bring before their own system of “justice”. 

Twenty-one years ago, John Major pledged that Britain would continue to defend the freedoms granted to Hong Kong by the Joint Declaration against its autocratic neighbour. 

Today, instead of holding China to its agreement, Britain glances down at its shoes and mumbles about the importance of trade. 

It is as if the British government wants to forget all about the promise it made to the people of Hong Kong. 

But China’s crackdown on dissent has made it difficult for Hong Kongers to forget.
Theresa May often emphasises the importance of British values in her speeches. 

But Britain’s limpness over Hong Kong seems to demonstrate only how easily these values are compromised away. 

I worry about the global implications of China being allowed to just walk away from such an important treaty. 

And I worry that in the years to come, we will have many more Lee Bos and Gui Minhais, kidnapped and detained because their work facilitated free speech. 

Hong Kong’s last governor, Lord Patten, has repeatedly argued that human rights issues can be pushed without bad effects on trade. 

Germany, for example, has shown that this is entirely possible, with Angela Merkel often publicly criticising China’s human rights record. 

With a potentially hard Brexit around the bend, a much reduced Britain will need a world governed by the rule of law. 

How the government handles its responsibilities to Hong Kong will be decisive in shaping the international character of the country that a stand-alone Britain will become. 

I for one hope it will be a country that honours its commitments and that stands up to defend human rights.

Hey Fat Pang – shut up, eat your egg-tarts, and go home!

By Frank Siu

Dear Lord Patten,
I used to like you. I really did. 

As someone in his mid-thirties now I had the joy of living in Hong Kong through your governorship, during the period I often call Hong Kong’s “golden years”. 

Generations of Hongkongers have immense admiration for you, even youngsters who grew up after the handover and know nothing of life in the last of Hong Kong’s colonial days. 

This page alone cannot do justice to your contributions to furthering democracy in this city, so I will not even try.
Comments made during your recent visit, however, leave me wondering whether a combination of too much time spent away from Hong Kong and possibly old age have eroded your conviction in the pro-democracy movement and diminished your understanding of the territory’s current state of affairs.
On multiple occasions, you seemingly went out of your way to denounce localist sentiments and calls for independence. 

You claimed to be a “huge admirer of China”, just not of the Chinese Communist Party. 

That’s very politically correct, and is precisely where you and a growing number of Hongkongers stop seeing eye-to-eye.
Unlike you, I thoroughly detest the People’s Re-Fucking of Chee-na, and much of what it has come to represent. 

It hurts me dearly to write such a thing, to explicitly label oneself as antagonistic towards one’s own ethnicity. 

Cast aside the nostalgia that is perhaps clouding your judgement, and take a good look at what integration with China has done to Hong Kong society. 

There is really not much to like, let alone admire.
Many of the social and economic grievances that have motivated the independence movement are not related to the CCP at all. 

Hong Kong is a cosmopolitan city that receives millions of foreign visitors each year, but the Chinese in particular strut around our streets shamelessly flaunting a profound sense of “entitlement”.
One need not cite the countless cases of visitors erupting into violent nationalistic diatribes when criticized for uncouth behavior. 

Or the recent drama of a tourist beating a local grandma so badly she developed walking and speech impediments, because of a verbal argument. 

Chinese students taking up our university places bring with them scholastic aptitude but also their mainland ethics (or lack thereof), turning innocuous student council elections into bribe-fests.
Meanwhile our non-elected SAR government kow-tows to Beijing’s every whim, never finding fault with anything that originates from north of Lo Wu. 

Riot police are deployed zealously to defend their right to shop in our city. 

Billions of taxpayer dollars that could have been spent on poverty relief, public housing, or education are instead poured into a lousy theme park with a decade-long money losing streak because our mainland compatriots want more Mickey Mouse and Iron Man. 

To top it off, every single day, ubiquitous food safety scandals in China inevitably trickle down to our dinner plates, whether it be recycled moon cake or toxic hairy crab.
Is it really so difficult to understand this resentment? 

Mind you, I haven’t even gotten to the part about China kidnapping our citizens, rigging our elections, and rewriting our textbooks.
You say independence is “delusional”. It is no more delusional than tolerating the status quo as sitting ducks until 2047 when the iron curtain falls. 

The backlash against China is rational and justified. 

Not because it makes for fiery, arousing speeches but because it actually resonates with people and their immediate concerns. 

Perhaps it is still a fringe movement, but the audience for pro-independence rhetoric and actions will only broaden with time. 

Association with the mainland has only brought Hong Kong the negative externalities that accompany China’s rise, the filth that results from half a century of cultural evolution without a soul or moral compass, and the sinister machinations of a country without any respect for civility and equality. 

Why not rid ourselves of this Sick Man of East Asia?
Barack Obama wrote a book entitled the “Audacity of Hope”. 

I will admit I never read the book but I admire the title, as it aptly sums up the case for independence. The notion of a Hong Kong civil society free from Chinese elements represents a glimmer of hope when all other avenues have failed. 

The activists you label “dishonest, dishonorable, and reckless” dare to believe in the possibility of something better, no matter how unrealistic or impractical it may seem now, or how overwhelming the odds. 

You question their “moral ground” but let me tell you, they care deeply about this city.
Maybe you will recall a Chinese-language public service announcement ad on television during the 1990s that began with “Hong Kong is not the most beautiful city in the world, but it is our home” (an imperfect translation; I never managed to catch the English version.)
At a time when social discourse in Hong Kong is hampered by feelings of helplessness and inequality, these people you attack have chosen to take a leap of faith. 

And so should you. 

Otherwise, grab some of those Tai Cheung egg tarts you fancy, and go home. 

You have done your bit for Hong Kong, and we are forever grateful. 

But your part in this tale is over.

Pius XII bis

An Open Letter To Francis On China

Benedict Rogers

Dear Holy Father,

Like every true Catholic in the world, I love you and respect your authority as the Successor of St Peter.
Like a great many people in the world, well beyond the Catholic Church, I recognise the beautiful message you, as Pope Francis, bring to the world.
And as a new Catholic who came into the Church little over ten days after your election to the papacy, my Catholic faith is inspired and intertwined with your pontificate.
I became a Catholic on Palm Sunday, 2013, received into the Church by Burma’s first-ever Cardinal Charles Maung Bo. 

Although I am British, I became a Catholic in an Asian country emerging from dictatorship, inspired by a Church that has endured decades of persecution. 

I have also lived in China and Hong Kong, and have come to know and love Cardinal Joseph Zen, whose story is told, along with my other heroes, in my book From Burma to Rome, which I had the privilege of presenting to you when we met in August.
For all these reasons -- because I love you, Holy Father, because I love the Church, because I love the people of China and Asia, because I love Cardinal Zen, and most of all because I love God and our Lord Jesus Christ -- I humbly appeal to you to reconsider your proposed agreement with the Communist regime in China:before it is too late.
Over the past three years, the human rights situation in China has deteriorated dramatically. 

Hundreds of human rights lawyers, many of them Christians, have been detained, simply for defending freedom of religion and freedom of conscience cases. 

Thousands of Christian crosses have been destroyed. Many Christian clergy, Catholic and Protestant, remain in jail or harassed. 

Tibetan Buddhists, Uighur Muslims and Falun Gong practitioners continue to be persecuted. Allegations of forced organ harvesting -- targeting prisoners of conscience -- persist. 

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo remains in jail. 

Hong Kong’s freedoms are now in at tatters.
Earlier this year, the Conservative Party Human Rights Commission in the United Kingdom published an in-depth report, The Darkest Moment: The Crackdown on Human Rights in China 2013-2016. 

It was launched by the former Governor of Hong Kong Lord Patten, himself a Catholic, in June, and includes testimonies from Hong Kong democrats Martin Lee and Anson Chan, both Catholics.
Holy Father, you will be well aware of the arguments made by Cardinal Zen, which I need not repeat. I simply say that at this time, human rights are deteriorating drastically in China and I don’t believe it is the time to compromise. 

At a time when religious freedom overall in China is being further restricted, when other religions are being severely persecuted, when organs may be being harvested, when lawyers are being harassed, when freedom of expression is being denied, now is not the time to seek a special arrangement for the Catholic Church. 

Now is not the time to kowtow.
Furthermore, while I am a very new Catholic, and so I write with all appropriate humility, two of the things that attracted me into the Church are the Church’s commitment to justice and human rights, as set out in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, and the Apostolic Succession. 

That means the Church must take a stand against Xi Jinping’s brutality as it did against Caesar’s, Stalin’s and Hitler’s. 

And it means that it cannot settle for anything less than complete Papal authority over episcopal and priestly appointments in China. 

I don’t know what deal might be about to be agreed, but I find it hard to imagine Beijing agreeing to this. 

If it does, then I welcome it. 

But if not, I urge you to reject the deal. 

How can bishops appointed by a communist, corrupt, cruel and brutal regime be acceptable to the Church founded by Jesus Christ?
Instead of compromise with Beijing, I urge you -- Holy Father -- to follow in the footsteps of the Apostles, and lead a revolution for peaceful change in China.
With humble, sincere prayers from a relatively new Catholic,

Benedict Rogers