Photo taken on an earlier day when I got to thinking
Freedom of speech and expression might soon be done away with
at more than just Hong Kong's Lennon Walls :(
Skuffles broke out for the third time in recent weeks at the Legislative Council earlier today, with pro-democracy lawmakers being physically carried out of a meeting by the chamber's security personnel once more. It's
a measure of how bad things now are that this has become pretty much
normative practice at Hong Kong's unicameral legislature. And far
worse, of course, is that the Legislative Council will be bypassed when the most important law in Hong Kong's history gets enacted.
Yesterday evening, ahead of the annual meeting of its rubberstamp parliament, the Communist Chinese regime announced that it will introduce national security legislation in Hong Kong. Even amidst all the repression that Hong Kong has been undergoing in recent weeks (that's been happening so fast and so much that media outlets are struggling to cover it), it was quite the bombshell.
For many people, this spells the death of "One Country, Two Systems", if not the end of the Hong Kong we know and love (and which really is quite different from Mainland China). At the very least, the announcement marked the moment when, as the chief editor of Hong Kong Free Press put it, "Hong Kong was wheeled off to life support".
As Lo Kin-hei, the Hong Kong Democratic Party's vice chair shared on Twitter: "The
sadness is real. No matter how prepared we are to witness the death of
our loved city, and no matter how many times it felt like it is dying,
it still pains me to see another part of the remaining flesh is gone.
The more you love Hong Kong, the stronger the pain you have."
And there's the fear too, including among foreign residents and companies in Hong Kong; with bankers and headhunters expecting a flight of capital and talent out of the territory. This is to be expected, since the national security law that China intends to impose on Hong Kong would affect far more than just political dissidents and activists, and does represent an effective death sentence for the city.
It says a lot that it's not just Hong Kong stocks that have received a battering today but that global markets have fallen in the wake of China's move to tighten its political control over Hong Kong. This is especially so since investors didn't freak out as much as I had expected over the Hong Kong protests and tear gassing last year. (I guess they understand that the consequences of recent actions are actually more severe.)
Against the odds though, there are people who remain defiant rather than are in despair. And for the likes of Kong Tsung-gan and Stephen Vines, the fact that the Chinese Communist regime is now applying its nuclear option shows its desperation and weakness more so than a loss of patience. Also, I, for one, wonder how thinly the Chinese Communist regime has stretched itself -- at a time when, for the first time in decades, it's had to abandon setting a GDP growth target for the year.
Among the books I've been reading this month (bought on my visit to Bleak House Books) has been Richard McGregor's Xi Jinping: The Backlash. Call it wishful thinking but it seems to me that now would be a good time for the world to band together to stand up to the Chinese Communist regime led by Xi. At the very least, it should ponder the consequences if it doesn't -- because who knows where else it would want to exert control over and destroy after getting its way with Tibet, Xinjiang and now Hong Kong?
No comments:
Post a Comment