25 years since the handover of Hong Kong, China's oppression knows no bounds
National Post, 01 July 2022
Halfway through China's 50-year agreement with Britain, there is one country, two styles of oppression — fierce and fiercer
The word “handover” has an ambiguous meaning. It can be a neutral statement: the agent handed over the keys to the new homeowner. Or it can imply betrayal, as in: Poland was handed over to Stalin at Yalta.
July 1 marks the 25th anniversary of the British “handover” of Hong Kong to China. When the last governor of Hong Kong, Christopher Patten, said at the rainy midnight ceremony that the “Hong Kong people will determine Hong Kong’s future,” he was thinking about handover in the first sense. It turned out to be the second.
July 1, 1997, was the beginning of the “one country, two systems” agreement between Beijing and London. For 50 years, Hong Kong would retain its democratic institutions, civil rights and free economy.
China did as totalitarians do, however, and broke its promise. Halfway through the 50-year agreement, there is one country, two styles of oppression — fierce and fiercer. Hong Kong and its free people were handed over to the dragon.
Beijing has arrested many Hongkongers under its despotic “national security law,” which essentially makes it a crime to criticized the Chinese Communist regime. I wrote recently about the arrest of Cardinal Joseph Zen, who’s now out on bail awaiting “trial” under the law. Yet the most prominent arrest was of Jimmy Lai, a rags-to-riches textile and fashion billionaire who could have easily fled, but chose to stay in Hong Kong.
After making his fortune in fashion, Lai turned his attention to media, knowing that a free country needs a free press. He started Next Magazine and the Apple Daily newspaper, which were massively successful in telling the truths that totalitarians try to suppress.
As Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping — let us dispense with the faux respect of “president” and call him what he is: the head of the Communist party apparatus — tightened the screws on Hong Kong, it was only a matter of time before Beijing came for Jimmy Lai.
He was arrested in August 2020 and released on bail. In December 2020, his bail was revoked and the court jailed Lai until April 2021. Then he was sentenced to an additional 14 months in jail for his role in “illegal” protests. Recently, Beijing has rustled up some “fraud” charges to further incarcerate Lai.
Some have said that Jimmy Lai is the Nelson Mandela of China, and that #FreeJimmyLai should become a global anthem, as “Free Nelson Mandela” was in the 1980s. That’s not quite right. Jimmy Lai, given his prominence and power, and his commitment to non-violence from the start, is more like Mahatma Gandhi or Thomas More.
Or perhaps Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who once wrote of his time in a Soviet gulag: “Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”
Jimmy Lai knew prosperity better than most. Yet it is his soul, not his fortune, that is his greatest contribution to Hong Kong.
A documentary about Lai, “The Hong Konger,” was produced recently and is currently touring film festivals before being released on a streaming service. You cannot watch it without tears — tears of heartbreak for the dismantling of freedom in Hong Kong, and tears of admiration for the heroism of Hongkongers. From the “umbrella movement” of 2014 to the street protests in 2019, as many as two million people have filled the streets (out of a population of 7.5 million).
On June 17, 2021, Hong Kong authorities, now completely co-opted by Beijing, raided the offices of Apple Daily, imprisoning five of its senior staff and confiscating editorial materials and computers. The Apple Daily staff reported on the raid online and kept bravely publishing, but a week later, it was shut down.
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