Paul Chan Mo-po, Financial Secretary of Hong Kong, presents the budget for the 2020-2021 financial year to the Hong Kong Legislative Council, 26 February 2020.
Photo:
jerome favre / Shutterstock
We almost sympathize with Paul Chan Mo-po, who is writing a letter to the editor in the area. Hong Kong’s financial secretary is upset that the Heritage Foundation has dropped Hong Kong from its annual index of economic freedom after years at the top of the list.
Mr. Chan has the impossible task of denying what everyone can clearly see: China’s Communist Party is recreating Hong Kong in its own continental image. That was the point of Ed Feulner of Heritage in his explanation on these pages last week. Until Singapore ranked first on the index, Hong Kong had 25 years as no. As the foreword to the 2019 index noted: “The government in Hong Kong has taken out full-page advertisements to reach its number one position.” But the aggressive assimilation of China into Hong Kong, Mr. Feulner wrote, it just makes it a Chinese city.
Mr Chan disagrees with this, using ‘the principle of one country, two systems’. This was the promise of autonomy for Hong Kong contained in the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 setting out the terms of the former British colony’s return to China. What mr. Chan does not say is that Beijing made the joint statement clear is a dead letter.
In 2017, Lu Kang, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, called the joint statement “a historical document that no longer has a realistic meaning.” Hong Kongers have every reason to believe him after watching China through an unpopular national security law whose provisions include allowing Beijing to take some cases in Hong Kong to China for trial.
Mr. Chan wants readers to believe that economic freedom continues, regardless of political oppression. But China is not Singapore. In China, dissidents simply disappear. Foreign businessmen could be arrested and held as diplomatic hostages as two innocent Canadians now have to press Ottawa not to extradite a Huawei driver to the US.
Economic freedom? Tell this to Apple Daily publisher Jimmy Lai, who is in jail because the government has invoked the National Security Act and overthrown the suspicion of bail in the common law that governs Hong Kong. Xia Baolong – Beijing’s chief official in Hong Kong – says only true “patriots” are fit for the city’s “administrative, legislative and judicial bodies”.
China also dictates to corporate boardrooms. Two years ago, China’s Civil Aviation Administration demanded that Cathay Pacific Airways ban any employee involved in ‘illegal protests’ from flights to mainland China and submit information on all crew before approving any flight to China. would become – which causes its share price to fall. Last May, former Hong Kong chief executive Leung Chun-ying called for a boycott of the HSBC bank in London because it did not endorse national security law. Its general manager has recently signed a petition supporting the law.
Our advice to mr. Chan is about to stop trying to convince the world that Hong Kong is what it used to be, and accepts that he is now working for the man who runs Hong Kong: Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Main Street: Hong Kong’s Jimmy Lai goes to jail – and Pope Francis says nothing. Images: Reuters / Zuma Press Composite: Mark Kelly
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Appears in the print edition of March 11, 2021.