By Mona Charen
Friday, August 16, 2019
The protests in Hong Kong are heartbreaking to witness. I
recall the gloom that accompanied the handover-of-sovereignty ceremony in 1997.
Prince Charles was there. So was Tony Blair. Only eight years had passed since
the Communist Chinese government had mowed down an estimated 10,000 democracy
demonstrators in and around Tiananmen Square. And while China had since begun
to liberalize its economy, the Communist Party maintained its totalitarian grip
on political power, news and information, travel, family life, religion, and
the arts.
As the band played “God Save the Queen” for the last
time, there were the usual soothing promises. According to the Sino-British
Joint Declaration, dubbed “one country, two systems,” Beijing pledged that Hong
Kong would continue to enjoy the economic and political liberties it had known
under British rule for 50 years. Hong Kong would remain free until at least
2047. Many imagined that by then, the Communist government in Beijing would be
gone.
British administration had allowed Hong Kong to become
one of the richest cities in the world. In 1997, Hong Kong’s 6.4 million people
were responsible for an economy that was one-fifth the size of mainland
China’s, with a population of 1.23 billion. Between 1984, when Britain
announced its plan to turn over control to China, and 1997, about a million
Hong Kong residents fled. They knew.
For a time, it seemed that China was keeping its word,
but it was only a latency period. China
had a motive to let Hong Kong prosper at first — it was a gold mine. But as the
rest of China developed economically, its sheer size made Hong Kong’s
contribution less crucial. From a high of 27 percent of China’s GDP in 1993,
Hong Kong had fallen to only 2.9 percent in 2017. Freedom House downgraded Hong
Kong’s freedom score (100 = good, 0 = bad) from 68 in 2014 to 59 in 2019,
reflecting China’s suppression of speech and civil liberties. The violence
against demonstrators these past weeks would presumably reduce the score even more
dramatically.
The protesters in the streets of Hong Kong have once
again reminded us of the power of the U.S. example — even as our leaders seem
less committed to it. Hong Kongers carried American flags and sang “The
Star-Spangled Banner.” This is bittersweet. The students in Tiananmen Square in
1989 had fashioned a papier-mache Statue of Liberty. It swelled your heart —
until the brutal conclusion chilled your blood.
To hear Donald Trump tell it, the great challenge China
represents to the United States is that they sell us too many products and buy
too few of ours. His spokespeople add that China fails to abide by
international trade rules and steals intellectual property. Those complaints
are perfectly true (the latter two anyway), but the Trump administration’s
responses to these problems have been counterproductive.
Trump’s first supposedly “tough on China” policy was to
pull out of the TPP. But that treaty would have disadvantaged China by
strengthening U.S. trade with Pacific partners Japan, Singapore, Australia, New
Zealand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and others. With free (or free-ish) trade
agreements linking the majority of large economies around the globe, the U.S.
would have then been in a better position to pressure China in concert with
other trading nations to open its economy, stop stealing intellectual property,
and so on.
Instead, the administration imposed tariffs not just on
China to punish it for cheating, but on our allies as well — muddying the
message and blunting the effect. When the United States declares that steel
tariffs on Canada are a national-security matter, it becomes a laughingstock
and invites equally bad-faith responses.
The challenge from China is more than merely a matter of
steel, soybeans, and solar panels. China is seeking to parlay its economic
might into global influence. Its “belt and road” initiative is designed to
place China at the center of world commerce — on China’s terms. And its
artificial-intelligence research, particularly facial recognition, is being
used to impose Orwellian control. China’s “social credit” system already keeps
tabs on Chinese citizens’ daily activities and reading habits, and its exported
products have been found to contain spying capacities. Big Brother’s cameras
are ubiquitous, and everything from daily step counts to religious interests
are tracked and tabulated. As many as 1 million Uighurs have been herded into
reeducation camps, while Tibetans, Kazakhs, and other minorities are monitored
and oppressed. China is exporting these technological tools of tyranny to
Ethiopia, Venezuela, and other repressive regimes.
Beijing has a bleak vision for the world’s future that
foresees economic expansion linking arms with technological repression. The
U.S. has long shouldered the role of world leader upholding liberty. Sadly, our
narrow focus on trade balances has miniatured the United States.
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