Springtime in Hong Kong
Will Chinese communism soon collapse?
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Wednesday, July 9, 2003 12:01 a.m.
We have just witnessed Hong Kong's finest hour. To defend their freedoms, half a million people marched peacefully through the streets on July 1, and forced the handpicked satrap of the People's Republic of China, Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa, to blink. At the last minute Mr. Tung indefinitely delayed passage of his "antisubversion" law, which threatens Hong Kong's liberties. And while Mr. Tung and his communist backers in Beijing ponder their next move in this showdown between freedom and tyranny, the debate has reopened in Hong Kong on political reform that might finally permit Hong Kong's people to directly elect their own governor.
Before the next shoe drops--which it will--our job in the free nations of the world is to grasp the huge importance of these events, and keep faith with the message the people of Hong Kong have sent.
The government whose dictates Hong Kong's people are protesting is not, ultimately, that of the cornered Mr. Tung in Hong Kong, but that of the People's Republic in Beijing. Rest assured that the dissatisfactions in relatively idyllic Hong Kong are shared in spades by many of the 1.3 billion Chinese under the direct sway of Beijing, who for generations have suffered miseries and indignities far worse than anything Hong Kong has yet endured. Should protests flare up inside China proper that even begin to approach the proportions of those in Hong Kong last week, it could spell the disintegration of the communist regime. As Gordon Chang, author "The Coming Collapse of China" (2001), reminded me this week, "when dictatorships fall, they fall very quickly."
The last time people inside China's borders demonstrated for freedom on such a massive scale was 1989, in the uprising named for its geographic center, Tiananmen Square--though the protests were actually nationwide. Demonstrations also took place in Hong Kong, which was at the time a British colony, but slated to be handed back to Beijing.
Then, too, for a euphoric spell the suffocating lies of China's communist regime were swept aside. Briefly, China's dictators seemed in full retreat. The world applauded the courage and the ideals of the demonstrators. When the regime murdered its way back into control, sending tanks and troops against its own people, we had shock and horror in the free world, and many vows that the nature of China's crude and brutal government, so nakedly exposed, would not be forgotten.
But in many quarters of the free world it has not exactly been well remembered--though some of those 1989 protesters are still doing time in China's prisons. Cordial traffic with China's tyrants resumed years ago. Britain, after bureaucratically smothering the option in Hong Kong of directly elected government, went right ahead in 1997 with the handover of the Crown Colony to Beijing. China's rulers continue to enjoy the dignity of a veto-wielding seat on United Nations Security Council, shoving aside at every opportunity the democratic Chinese government on Taiwan. The backroom machinations of Beijing's brutal, dictatorial rule are discussed once again by much of the media under the bland rubric of the never-ending "power struggle"--as if it were reasonable for the fate of 1.3 billion people to be controlled by a gang of despots slugging it out in secret among themselves.
In Hong Kong right now we are unlikely to see a replay of the bloodshed with which the Beijing regime responded to Tiananmen Square. With the world watching, Beijing would not dare. Hong Kong arrived under Beijing's sway six years ago with a free press, freedom of assembly and a strong civic base of people accustomed to taking responsibility for their lives. And though Hong Kong's people did not have self-government under British rule, they did have the powerful instrument of a healthy legal system, backed for generations by British democracy.
This political and civic culture confers a significant measure of power against tyranny, one of the prime weapons of tyrants being the practice of isolating and dividing the people under their sway. When that isolation breaks down, you get Tiananmen Square, and if that process is allowed to continue, as it did elsewhere a few months later, you get the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet collapse.
That's why it has been so important to Beijing to silence Hong Kong. That is why Hong Kong's July 1 protest has surely sent shudders through the foundations of Beijing's regime. More important, however, is that Hong's Kong's defiance is not solely a cause of events now set in motion, including the public discrediting of Mr. Tung. The July 1 demonstration was also a symptom of the outrage engendered among reasonable people by the high-handed ways of the regime that rules all of China. Most Chinese--and by this I mean the 1.3 billion, in addition to Hong Kong's seven million--are, in fact, reasonable people.
What we are seeing in Hong Kong is simply the most visible piece of a crisis centered not in Hong Kong, but deep in China itself. In a crucially important article, "The Chinese Sickness," published in the current issue of Commentary, sinologist Arthur Waldron argues eloquently that for the brutal, unloved and corruption-fostering regime in Beijing, the moment of truth may be approaching sooner than we think. Especially in the nations of the free world, now banking on democracy as the road to peace, we must stand ready not only to applaud Hong Kong, but to choose, when the chips are down in China itself, which side we are on.
Ms. Rosett is a columnist for OpinionJournal.com and The Wall Street Journal Europe. Her column appears alternate Wednesdays.
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