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World community
The following article originally appeared in Salt of the Earth. It is posted here for private use only. It may not be reprinted in whole or in part without the permission of Salt of the Earth magazine.
As the clock ticks down,
who's watching Hong Kong?
Kevin Clarke
I recently spent some time in Hong Kong and Macau on a study program sponsored by the International Catholic Union of the Press. Hong Kong and Macau are both facing transition to mainland Chinese rule—Hong Kong on July 1, 1997 and Macau in 1999.
The clock is ticking fast. (Or is that a bomb?) I met a lot of people in Hong Kong, from shopkeepers and cab drivers to journalists and politicians, who all expressed a growing unease about the future of their fair, if crowded, city.
That unease is not shared by a lot of U.S. business and political leaders. While U.S. middle managers feverishly seek out mainland investment opportunities, U.S. politicians pay lip service to worries over human rights. In return, their Chinese counterparts offer limp acknowledgments of the human-rights guarantees included in the "basic law," a mini-constitution meant to govern Hong Kong for the next 50 years.
American officials reassure themselves that, despite past unpleasantness like Tiananmen Square, China's Communist Party leaders wouldn't dare upset the economic engine that is Hong Kong. What they don't consider, or choose to ignore, is that what a crumbling dynasty values more than prosperity is control. What will actually happen when mainland authority reaches Hong Kong and Macau is frankly anybody's guess. But there have been some unsettling developments of late.
China recently sentenced 27-year-old dissident Wang Dan to 11 years in prison. His crime? Writing a few articles for Hong Kong and Taiwanese newspapers and accepting a free correspondence course from a U.S. college.
Mainland meddling has already led to the creation of a puppet authority in Hong Kong, a fully Beijing-approved "selection committee" that will determine the makeup of Hong Kong's provisional government during the crucial year after the departure of the British. It includes no one from Hong Kong's pro-democracy community.A Hong Kong journalist told me he already regularly fields phone calls from Chinese authorities who admonish him for "anti-Chinese" reporting and, more ominously, for revealing "state secrets" like the failing health of Deng Xiaoping.
Americans offer up a great deal of verbiage meant to demonstrate our interest in basic human rights and respect for democratic institutions. Yet our response to China indicates that other priorities are having a greater impact on U.S. policymaking. President Clinton formally severed any relationship between human-rights conditions in China and most-favored nation status early in his presidency. These days, while gloomily accepting the odd dissident onto American shores, U.S. officials seek to include China in the World Trade Organization.
And the goal of these maneuverings? It's the centuries-old Western dream of unfettered access to that mammoth Chinese market and its 1 billion potential consumers. There's gold in them thar hills, and U.S. business people want their fair share.
Now some may couch their positions in more elevated language, the "constructive engagement" conceit that says the greater the business interaction with China, the greater exposure it has to "Western" concepts of human rights.
Those who actually believe they can influence the behavior of the People's Republic may be indulging in wishful thinking; most who mouth "constructive engagement" are merely lying. Their real interest is the Chinese market. One billion Pepsi drinkers can't be wrong.
And why should business interests be secondary to "political" concerns like human rights and the status of Tibet? After all, capital is morally neutral.
Capital may be morally neutral, but people shouldn't be. To rush headlong into China without regard to its indifference to the human rights of its citizens, to ignore its bullying of neighbors like Taiwan and the potential for a human-rights meltdown in Hong Kong and Macau is to make a god of commerce. It is an idolatry—and one that requires its adherents to offer up quite a large human sacrifice.
There remain in Hong Kong a few voices crying out for the basic rights of free speech, religion, and association. I have been there and I have met some of these people. They will never again be merely names in lines of newspaper print to me. They will be the warm faces of the people I quickly came to admire—people who will have to risk everything for freedoms I have come to take for granted.
They are men and women I will never forget. They are people I hope our business and political leaders do not forget either as they jockey for position in this great capitalist gold rush into China.
Let me name just a few of them: Legislative Council member Emily Lau Wai-hing; labor organizers Lee Cheuk-yan and his wife, Elizabeth Tang Yin-ngor; Democratic Party leader Martin Lee, and a whole gang of Chinese journalists I had the honor to meet but whom I will not name here—forgive my paranoia.
We are often admonished to have "realistic" expectations for a "realistic" China policy. I hereby record these names and note my concern for the future of these people. They are very real to me.—END
© 1997 by Claretian Publications