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KTHE REAL WORLD
Taking Liberties
Bush shrugs as China prepares to crush freedom in
Hong Kong.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Wednesday, June 11, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
Atrocities do not always begin with bloodshed. Some
start with genteel legalisms. Only later do you see
the barrel of the gun.
This is the way of the atrocity now threatening Hong
Kong. One of the world's great free societies is about
to come under the direct sway of the same unrepentant
Beijing security apparatus that still runs China's
vast gulag of torture rooms, labor camps, Soviet-style
psychiatric prisons and the rest of the machinery that
in 1989 brought us Tiananmen Square. And the
U.S.--that is, the freedom-promoting Bush
administration--doesn't seem to care.
Under Hong Kong's China-approved constitution, the
China-appointed chief executive, tycoon Tung Chee Hwa,
together with the rigged pro-China legislature, is
about to introduce a set of "antisubversion" laws that
would gut the liberties, such as free speech, on which
Hong Kong depends. It would become a crime, punishable
by time in prison, to disclose "state secrets" or
damage Chinese state "security"--with Beijing or its
local surrogates deciding, at their own convenience,
what that means. This is a raw bid to extend into Hong
Kong the same arbitrary dictates of absolute power,
the same methods of intimidation backed by brute
force, that the Communist Party wields in Beijing. The
deadline to stop or at least blunt this horrifically
damaging bill is June 20, when it is due to be
scheduled for a rubber-stamp July "vote."
In a last-ditch effort to stave off this assault, a
high-level delegation of Hong Kong democrats came to
Washington last week seeking help. All they got from
the administration were windy promises that the U.S.
would "follow developments in Hong Kong closely and
continue to express our concerns publicly." In other
words, Bush to Hong Kong: Drop dead.
What this delegation needed were a few clear words
from the president, honoring for Hong Kong the deep
promise in the administration's National Security
Strategy that America's "first imperative" is to "defend
liberty and justice because these principles are right
and true for all people everywhere." There is still
time, though not much, for Mr. Bush to remind Beijing
and Mr. Tung that America means what it says.
To better convey the urgency, maybe it's time to pull
out once again that stirring 1989 photograph of a lone
man in Beijing facing down a tank. That, in effect, is
what this visiting Hong Kong delegation was doing--its
members risking their own future safety in order to
stand up to China's repressive encroachment. Led by a
longtime champion of Hong Kong's liberties,
democratically elected legislator Martin Lee, these
folks were a peaceful, cosmopolitan and highly
articulate group, representing trade unions, lawyers
and journalists back home. They live in the shadow of
China, but speak our own philosophical idiom of
liberty and law.
Here, I should declare my own interests. I love Hong
Kong. I first set foot there as a teenager, in 1969,
and saw a place so full of exuberance and adventure
that I resolved to return. So I did, years later,
lucky enough to be sent there as editorial-page editor
of The Asian Wall Street Journal. From 1986 through
1993, I lived and worked in Hong Kong, and came to
appreciate even more fully its vitality--which stems
from exactly the same principles of freedom and
justice that we are now trying at huge cost to
introduce into the despot-ridden Middle East.
I also witnessed the early stages of the great
betrayal of Hong Kong, as Britain hammered out with
China a postcolonial constitution in which the many
truly democratic voices of the place would be limited
to a minority in a government stage-managed by
Beijing. By the 1990s, in its final colonial days,
Hong Kong had become a model for the world, a
near-perfect case of a mature free-market society,
ripe for transition to responsible, democratic
self-rule. Instead, in 1997, the British gave the
place back to China, on the condition that for at
least 50 years Hong Kong's freedoms would remain
untouched. "One Country, Two Systems" was the slogan
under which London and Beijing agreed on details of
the handover. Today, Hong Kong's seven million people
face the breaking of that promise: the incursion into
their lives of Beijing's "security" standards, which
in China itself permit no private newspapers, no
competing political parties, no loyal opposition such
as Martin Lee.
Since Mr. Tung began peddling this security bill last
year, trying to add fangs to the antisubversion
Article 23 of the local constitution, Hong Kong's
people have been struggling to ward it off. They have
put themselves on the line to hold street protests,
sign petitions, circulate pamphlets and appeal for
help from the world's free nations. This week, the
Hong Kong Journalists Association issued a 44-page
annual report devoted mainly to explaining how the
proposed security laws "will heighten considerably the
threat that freedom of expression be curtailed and
that repression take its place." The report also notes
the crucial role free speech played in Hong Kong's
ability this spring to alert the world to SARS, while
China's authorities, in keeping with their usual "security"
tactics, were trying to keep the problem under wraps.
The chief excuse for U.S. indifference is that America
right now does not dare offend China, because
Washington wants Beijing's help to defuse the nuclear
threat of North Korea. That's a laugh and a half.
Washington, in the frail hope that China might honor
any bargain struck over North Korea, seems ready to
wink at the very big deal over Hong Kong that China's
hand-picked Mr. Tung is about to break.
Hong Kong has for generations embodied the ideas that
America is now trying desperately and with great
difficulty to seed around the globe. Hong Kong is the
zenith of what all our massive aid programs in Africa,
help for Afghanistan, persuasion in Pakistan and trade
packages with anyone on the planet could ever hope to
achieve. It is an extraordinary testament to human
will and imagination and, above all, the love of
liberty. China's rulers, who are tyrants, not morons,
will surely interpret America's inaction, correctly,
as a message that in Asia, at least, the U.S. takes a
highly cavalier view of its own promises and security
strategy.
Hong Kong's people never got the fully democratic rule
they were so ready for. They are trying to defend the
liberties they have left. For the U.S. to stand by,
patting Martin Lee on the hand and muttering hollow
promises in low tones until it is too late, would be a
sorry betrayal of the most basic principles of freedom
that this administration has promised the world it
will uphold.
Ms. Rosett is a columnist for OpinionJournal.com and
The Wall Street Journal Europe. Her column appears
alternate Wednesdays.
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