Written by John Furlan
Trump Attacks Hong Kong National Security Law That China Says Is Necessary, Legal
On Friday Trump ratcheted up his attack on China with a verbal barrage for his political base against its proposed national security law for Hong Kong. He did so with enough ambiguity and wiggle room on concrete actions to be taken so as to not upset his key supporters, Wall Street, the stock market rallied as he finished.
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Trump did not include his trade deal with China in his threatened actions. He continued his pattern of obfuscating key issues while shooting Americans and others in the foot, on Covid-19 by announcing he was exiting WHO, and by cancelling many visas of Chinese students in the U.S.
Whatever actions Trump may take on Hong Kong, e.g. on its trade status, will hurt HK far more than China – just as his trade/tech war hurt American manufacturing employment and farmers more than China. Trump has far less leverage over China than he and U.S. China hawks seem to think.
Trump claimed that China no longer adheres to its “one country, two systems” policy with Hong Kong. Yet HK’s currency is pegged to the U.S. dollar, which means that the U.S. Federal Reserve, not China’s central bank, determines HK’s monetary policy. HK is known as a global financial hub intricately part of the Anglo-American financial system.
By unilaterally claiming the end of “one country, two systems,” Trump is also putting Taiwan at greater risk, where China claims the same policy applies, strengthening hardliners in Beijing and Taipei. Taiwan is an even bigger hot button for China than HK.
“HK’s currency is pegged to the U.S. dollar, which means that the U.S. Federal Reserve, not China’s central bank, determines HK’s monetary policy.”
Two weeks ago Trump attacked Taiwan’s TSMC to get at China’s Huawei, see my May 22 article. China’s Premier Li dropped “peaceful” when mentioning China’s eventual reunification with Taiwan at the National People’s Congress (NPC) the previous week.
Trump on Friday once again bashed China on trade. While it’s true that the U.S. lost millions of good manufacturing jobs to China after the latter joined the WTO in 2001, those losses came under the rules of a financialized globalization system designed by and for the benefit of American financial/corporate interests, which China took advantage of to rapidly accelerate its economic development.
Trump never bashes those interests, rather he gives them huge tax cuts and plays golfs with them, while the Fed protects their wealth with hypocritical “free market” extraordinary buying of financial assets, which also benefits middle-class home values, perhaps a key deterrent to fundamental political change in the U.S.
HK Has Failed to Fulfill Its Constitutional Obligation for 23 Years to Pass Its Own National Security Law
Sovereign nations have a right to national security laws. E.g., the U.S. passed the USA Patriot Act shortly after 9/11. Hong Kong was handed back to China by the U.K. in 1997. According to Article 23 of the Basic Law, HK’s constitution passed by China in 1990 to implement the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, Trump claimed China has now broken the latter:
“The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion against the Central People’s Government, or theft of state secrets, to prohibit foreign political organisations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organisations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organisations or bodies.”
The key phrase there is “on its own,” yet Hong Kong still has no national security law 23 years after reverting back to China.
“Trump is also putting Taiwan at greater risk”
HK was severely disrupted last year by a series of weekly clashes between a tiny minority of violent protesters and its police. The protests originated after HK’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam, in the pro-China camp, introduced an extradition bill, then compounded her HUGE mistake by failing to immediately withdraw the bill when nearly two million HKers peacefully demonstrated against it on June 17.
A minority of protesters escalated their protest to six “non-negotiable” demands, which included independence for HK, knowing full well that was a total non-starter for the China Communist Party (CCP). An even smaller minority then resorted to weekly violence in support of those demands. Some protesters appealed to the U.S. and U.K., HK’s former colonial master, for help, seemingly baiting the CCP tiger with their nihilist slogan,
“If we burn, you burn with us.”
A few of the most well-known protesters even testified before a U.S. congressional commission in support of a bill pushed on Trump by right-wing Senators cynically exploiting HK’s idealistic youth which passed in November, under which Pompeo certified on Wednesday that Hong Kong was no longer sufficiently autonomous to deserve U.S. special treatment, which is what Trump said he would remove on Friday.
“China’s Premier Li dropped “peaceful” when mentioning China’s eventual reunification with Taiwan at the National People’s Congress (NPC) the previous week.”
Given that background, the CCP can argue that it had little choice but to have China implement Article 23, invoking Article 18 of the Basic Law as the legal basis for doing so. I’ll leave that to the lawyers, because this was a political calculation by the CCP, see section further below, not a legal one.
China’s NPC voted on Thursday to have its Standing Committee now draft a national security law. Perhaps HK may still pass its own national security law covering some of the items in Article 23 which are not in the China version of the law, that’s not clear to me.
CCP’s Red Lines Will Become Crimes If Crossed Under National Security Law
Although not explicitly spelled out in the NPC action, my belief is that when it goes into effect in the next few months, the national security law will be used to make it a crime to egregiously, flagrantly, terms to be determined, cross red lines of the CCP that a small minority of extreme Hong Kong protesters have done repeatedly over the past year.
Those red lines include first, calling for HK independence, second, seeking foreign help to do so, third, challenging the one-party rule of the CCP in China. The first two specifically apply to the situation in HK, the third is general throughout China.
“the national security law will be used to make it a crime to egregiously, flagrantly, terms to be determined, cross red lines of the CCP that a small minority of extreme Hong Kong protesters have done repeatedly”
Evidently people charged with crossing these red lines by HK authorities, but with China’s security agencies now being permitted in HK, would probably be tried in Hong Kong courts, which have many judges from foreign jurisdictions like the UK, using western standards of evidence, at least according to this May 21 SCMP article. See this May 31 article for an extensive discussion of the legal issues in the SCMP, HK’s “newspaper of record.”
The CCP seems to be trying to promise to HK citizens that those who do not flagrantly cross its well-known red lines presumably will not be impacted by the new law, similar to China, where almost all Chinese just quietly live within the CCP’s red lines as they go about their daily lives freely. The CCP says that HK will be more stable, benefiting its citizens and economy.
For many HKers the new law might basically come down to whether they believe and trust the CCP’s intentions and promises, and where those red lines are drawn – e.g., I don’t know whether advocating for democratic election of HK’s Chief Executive without the candidates being vetted by Beijing, as is now the case, would cross CCP red lines, an issue which has a contentious history.
Political Calculation of the CCP Under Attack by Trump, Pompeo, GOP
Presumably Xi and the CCP decided enough was enough, both with HK protests and Trump’s continuing attacks on China, and that preventing further instability in HK was worth whatever price the U.S. might try to make it pay, perhaps believing that Trump might be reluctant to scuttle his trade deal, which he did not threaten Friday.
“The CCP is obsessed with internal stability”
The CCP has followed Deng’s old advice to “bide your time” before proposing the national security law. It has been tightening the screws in HK since last year’s protests. Perhaps Xi now thinks Trump has been weakened by Covid-19 and unemployment and the HK protesters weakened through arrests and attrition.
I can’t emphasize strongly enough to Americans that the CCP considers HK an internal issue of national sovereignty, which it will not budge an inch on. The CCP is obsessed with internal stability, especially after Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966 – 76), which many of its current leaders, including Xi, were personally hurt by in their youth. Imagine 9/11, but far worse in terms of impact.
Hong Kong is also an extremely strong issue of Chinese national pride. The U.K. stole HK from China in the 1840s after winning a war which the British fought to import opium into China. Imagine how Americans would react to some of their fellow citizens seeking Mexico’s help to make Texas and California independent or returned to Mexico, or the entire U.S. to native Americans.
Perhaps my analogies are poor, but what I’m trying to convey is that the CCP has far more at stake on HK than the U.S. does. The CCP also knows it has the support of most of its 1.4 billion citizens on the HK issue, which is presumably a reason why a tiny minority of HK protesters turned to the U.S. and U.K. last year, not to their fellow compatriots, which did not go over well on the China mainland, nor did protester resort to violence, as it would not in the U.S.
“Imagine how Americans would react to some of their fellow citizens seeking Mexico’s help to make Texas and California independent or returned to Mexico”
Perhaps things may have turned out different if the peaceful HK pro-democracy forces had also turned out in the millions against the violence, but they didn’t. HK police fired a couple of shots in self-defense after being attacked, western media focused on the protesters demands about police brutality. Imagine what would happen if American police were attacked by protesters with gasoline bombs week after week.
A similar western media double standard exists regarding the Uyghurs and China’s response to radical Muslim attacks in Xinjiang vs the U.S. response to 9/11 and hundreds of thousands killed by its military, on Saudi Arabia, etc.)
The Hong Kong Facts on the Ground Have Dramatically Changed Short- and Long-Term
Of course the violent protesters who appealed to the U.S. and U.K. last year didn’t know then that the U.S. would have 105,638 Covid-19 deaths, by far the highest in the world, and the U.K. 38,489, the second highest, which may reflect the decline of their neoliberal systems. Or that over 40 million people would file for unemployment in the U.S. since mid-March. Or that racial issues would now erupt in the U.S., with still well over 900 African-American deaths by police shootings every year.
The “correlation of forces,” as the CCP might put it, have drastically changed since 1984 when China signed the declaration with the U.K. agreeing to Deng’s “one country, two systems.” China was still extremely poor back then, which it strongly remembers, only six years into Deng’s “reform and opening up.” And HK was far more important to China then than now.
China is now one of two global superpowers, consistently outperforming a U.S. deeply polarized for decades by “culture wars” and “identity politics,” fanned by Trump and now accelerating the past few days. China’s population is 21.6 times greater than the U.K. China’s authoritarian system has lifted 800 million of its citizens out of poverty, objectively one of the greatest achievements in human history, which Chinese are justifiably extremely proud of, leaving in the dust India’s democratic system.
Hong Kong has a mere four Covid-19 deaths, Taiwan just seven, China far fewer than the U.S. On October 9, 2018 I posted “U.S. Should Fix Its Problems, Not China’s,” a view which I have repeated many times since and consider even more relevant today.
I hope this happens, but I doubt it, as Biden is trying to top Trump on being a tough guy on China. Liberals rightfully abhor Trump’s divisive policies and style, but not when it comes to his trying to turn Americans against China as another of his scapegoats. The U.S. couldn’t win its cold war with the Soviet Union unless it addressed civil rights in the 1960s. It can’t compete with China unless it addresses its huge domestic issues now.
Make America and World Awesome (MAWA).
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