| One Party, Two Faces |
7 July 2003
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Hong Kong Protests Come Years Too Late
Hong Kong saw its largest protest since the Tiananmen Square murders as 400,000 took to the streets to denounce the draconian anti-subversion laws the People's Republic of China is adopting. While it is a direct assault on the "one nation, two systems" rubbish that gave Hong Kong to China, the law is not that big a deal. Making a tyranny a little bit more tyrannical isn't worth the protest -- the fact that China is a police state is the issue.
There are apologists for the People's Republic in the west who are upset about the proposed law, and they should be given credit for spotting a tree even if they can't see the forest. But where have they been since 1949? Or 1911 for that matter?
Their argument goes something like this: the pluralism that westerners have lived under for decades stems from a Greco-Roman heritage that China, for better or for worse, does not possess. Consequently, China is different; it cannot be held to the same standards because Chinese standards are different. What is important is the improvement in the quality of life in the country over the last several years.
Well, one of the measures of the quality of life is personal freedom. The right to stand in the middle of the Forbidden City and announce that the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China are a loathsome gang of criminals and liars and cheats is denied to the Chinese. Non-communist political associations, real trade unions that could tell the government-management teams to go to hell, free religious association, none of this is legal in China. And the death penalty is the price for things that won't even get one arrested in Texas.
China does, indeed, have a different historical heritage -- about 6,000 years of it. To suggest, though, that the Chinese deserve, as a result of that difference, to live in a country where the secret police can turn up at 4 am and ship a person off to Mao-knows-where is not being a friend of the Chinese people. It is racism.