We've seen this before, of course most recently in Ukraine and Syria. There are always casualties on these kinds of occasions, and Washington is always indifferent to them. In Hong Kong's case these are the about-to-be crushed aspirations of a people desiring nothing more than ordinary self-determination. As demonstrators returned to the streets Sunday, one watched with admiration but little expectation or hope.
"In another time, Hong Kong's democrats would have found their natural allies in the Non-Aligned Movement."
Washington has been cultivating the Hong Kong crisis for its own designs for many months. Last November President Trump signed a bill providing for sanctions to be imposed on any Chinese or Hong Kong official judged responsible for human rights abuses in the territory. The House sent the bill to the Senate with one dissenting vote, and the Senate passed it unanimously.
We were supposed to think this reflected the sentiments of the compassionate hearts one always finds in the administration and on Capitol Hill you know, the morally sound people who think nothing of strangling the populations of Iran and Venezuela while prolonging the suffering in Syria by many years and many hundreds of thousands of casualties.
We are now treated to the virtuous pose once again. "Any effort to impose national security legislation that does not reflect the will of the people of Hong Kong would be highly destabilizing, and would be met with strong condemnation from the United States and the international community," the State Department grandly declared Friday.
The will of Hong Kong people has nothing to do with what Washington is up to. Humane compassion and democratic principle have nothing to do with it. Subterfuge and aggression are the story here.
Wondering Why
The New York Times published an exquisitely disingenuous piece last Friday, wherein a rewrite man in New York furrowed a worried brow wondering why Xi Jinping would authorize this step as the National People's Congress (NPC) opened its annual two-day session in Beijing. Maybe it was because the administration in Hong Kong had fumbled before the onslaught of protesters last year. Maybe the Chinese president is taking advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic.
A day later the Gray Lady had made up its mind: Xi is "working a crisis," it declared in the page-one lead. What use Xi might find in the Covid-19 calamity as it relates to Hong Kong is beyond this columnist's imagining, but there you have it. Xi, we're invited to assume, thinks the world will somehow not notice the NPC's new legislative agenda.
The truth is less lame and far more consequential. Ever since the Pentagon declared China a strategic adversary two years ago, Washington has sought to push Beijing ever further into a corner with a trade war, threatened sanctions, aggressive maneuvers in the South China Sea, and lately shrill, ungrounded accusations of malpractice in managing the Covid -19 outbreak. Pompeo threatened Friday to rescind Hong Kong's status as a favored trading entity.
A few weeks ago in this space I warned that if Washington pushes Beijing too hard and too offensively it risks doing to China what Versailles did to Germany when it settled the peace in 1919. It is difficult to overstate the importance China attaches to the achievement of parity with the West. Westerners refuse to recognize this at their peril.
We may now be witnessing the front end of precisely the kind of response I earlier suggested. It is impossible to imagine that Beijing is other than fully aware of the consequences attaching to the legislation it just put on the table in terms of damaged confidence among Western corporations, bankers and investors. The beckoning conclusion is that it has just announced its indifference to such considerations.
The Chinese are not blind. They see as well as the rest of us that the West is gradually collapsing, its day done. Accustomed to thinking in terms of the longue dure'e, they know better than most that the future lies with the emergent non-West, of which it is a leader. There are already reports that Beijing's 14th Five-Year Plan, due to be published next March, will reflect a purposeful shift in China's relations with the West, the U.S. in particular.
Many decades ago, the great Sukarno, Indonesia's founding president, had his own confrontations with America (which eventually cultivated a coup that deposed him). "Go to hell with your foreign aid," the Bung, as he was affectionately known, famously declared in a national radio address. It appears Xi has just said something of the same thing.
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