The increasingly violent confrontations between police and protesters that have rocked Hong Kong since June 9 are an inevitable result of the inherent and unresolved contradictions in that “one country, two systems” concept.
Key details of how the formula would work were left deliberately vague and up to future interpretation. Its success depended not on any ironclad enforcement mechanisms but on the faith and goodwill of the key party implementing it, China.
And the formula’s success rested entirely on a willing suspension of disbelief — that China’s control-oriented communist rulers would allow Hong Kong to maintain the status quo undisturbed for 50 years after the British handover in 1997. The “one country, two systems” blueprint became a kind of global Rorschach test, with everyone seeing precisely what they wanted to see. People in the territory heard, Our lives won’t change much. Beijing heard, They will submit.
In hindsight, this untested idea was always doomed to fail.
Never before had an autocratic, communist-run, single-party dictatorship peacefully absorbed a modern, sophisticated, quasi-democratic capitalist territory. Never before had a people who had enjoyed free speech, freedom of assembly, a free flow of information and limited free voting voluntarily relinquished those rights to merge with a country where such freedoms were often ruthlessly suppressed.
The proximate cause of the latest uproar was the effort by Leung’s successor, Carrie Lam, to ram through a new extradition bill that would have allowed criminal suspects arrested in Hong Kong to be shipped across the border for trial in mainland China. Lam has tried to claim that the bill was just closing “a loophole.” But she is being disingenuous. There’s a reason Hong Kong has extradition agreements with some 20 other countries and not China: The mainland’s judicial system is a legal black hole, where the Communist Party controls the courts, torture and false confessions are rife, prosecutors have a 99 percent conviction rate, and prisoners are often denied medical treatment.
Hong Kong now appears to have reached a crossroads. China under Xi Jinping seems less interested in preserving “two systems” and more interested in aggressively asserting control over its wayward territory. The protesters seem to know they have no other way to stop Hong Kong from becoming, in their view, “just another mainland Chinese city.” The unstoppable momentum of the protest movement is crashing headlong into the immovable object of the Communist Party.
However the current confrontation ends — crushed by heightened police repression and eroding public support, or with intervention from mainland security forces — the “one country, two systems” formula now seems dead. It will certainly never be accepted by Taiwan as a blueprint for reuniting with mainland China. |
