Erosion of Liberty

12 June 2019

 

Cogito Ergo Non Serviam

Hong Kong Protesters Flood Streets Against PRC Extradition

 

Hong Kong used to be a British crown colony, until Margaret Thatcher bowed to the inevitable and gave the territory back to the People's Republic of China. However, there were some strings attached. The crown colony became a Special Administrative Region. It had special privileges. Over time, these have eroded as per Beijing's policy. The latest is a plan to allow criminal suspects wanted in the PRC to face extradition from the Hong Kong SAR. The streets right now are filled with protesters in Hong Kong, and the Legislative Council which governs the SAR has postponed a vote on allowing extradition until next week. Yet, the SAR continues its long march toward full integration into the dictatorship.

The New York Times explains, "Hong Kong's chief executive, Carrie Lam, has said the new law is urgently needed to prosecute a Hong Kong man who is wanted in Taiwan for the murder of his girlfriend. But the authorities in Taiwan, a self-governed island claimed by Beijing, say they would not agree to the extradition arrangement because it would treat Taiwan as part of China.

"Critics contend that the law would allow virtually anyone in the city to be picked up and put on trial in mainland China, where judges must follow the orders of the Communist Party. They fear the new law would not just target criminals but political activists as well."

That is it in a nutshell. Extradition would apply to 37 different crimes, none of them political. However, the case of Russian journalist Ivan Golunov this week shows how that can be circumvented. He upset certain powers within the Russian kleptocracy who then had him arrested on trumped up charges of drug trafficking. The global outrage that followed forced the Russians to release him and drop the allegations. However, not every political rival or journalist can count on such an outcome all the time. Quite simply, dissidents in Hong Kong will be sent to the mainland to pay for their dissent by imprisonment for rape and armed robbery.

Moreover, the extradition rules would have an immediate and dangerous impact on the business of Hong Kong, commerce being its raison d'etre. Travelers on business in Asia often transit Hong Kong, either changing planes or just making a refueling stopover. The new rules would allow the Ministry of State Security to remove people from any airplane on whatever charges they please. A businessperson who falls afoul of the powers that be in Beijing may well face 10-years' hard labor for a crime made up by the MSS.

Naturally, one would like to see a harmonization of laws among the PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan. That presumes that the legal changes would result in greater freedoms for the 1.3 billion citizens of the People's Republic. So long as the Chinese Communist Party rules as it does, as a dictatorship, it is best if the SAR and Taiwan remain as far removed from Beijing's rules as possible.

This whole situation is likely to get worse before it gets better, if it gets better. Ms. Lam stated, "To draw a comparison, I'm a mother too, I have two sons. If my son was stubborn and I spoiled him and tolerated his stubborn behavior every time, I would just be going along with him."

So long as the authorities see the protesters as spoiled children rather than grown adults with legitimate political aspirations, the only solution will be coercion. Thirty years ago, the People's Liberation Army murdered thousands in Tiananmen Square on the orders of the Chinese Communist Party.

As Mikhail Bakunin said in the 19th century in his criticism of Marxism, the vanguard revolutionary party will eventually decay into a self-perpetuating bureaucracy that abandons principles in order to retain power. The ChiComs are the text book example, "communists" with billionaires, stock exchanges and property speculators.


© Copyright 2019 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Ubuntu Linux.


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