The extradition legislation would allow residents and visitors to be sent for trial in China’s Communist-controlled courts, effectively squashing freedom of speech.
Hong Kong’s chief, Carrie Lam, rescinded the bill and even issued a rare apology following a week of massive protests, but that is not enough.
The protesters demand the resignation of Lam who insisted on pushing through the legislation despite the initial public outcry.
WATCH: Hong Kong protesters hold vigils for a man that plunged to his death during demonstrations against the controversial China-backed #ExtraditionBill #HongKongProtest #香港 #反送中 pic.twitter.com/LD1rqoeoml
— Bloomberg Originals (@bbgoriginals) June 16, 2019
Please consider Almost 2 Million Protesters Hit Hong Kong Streets.
Hong Kong rose up in defiance, jamming the streets with as many as 2 million people to demand leader Carrie Lam’s resignation a day after she suspended a contentious extradition bill. Anger spilled over at a proposed law protesters say threatens the island’s tenuous autonomy from a more authoritarian China.
“I have never seen such a big crowd,” said Bonnie Leung, a leader of the protest organizers.
Hong Kong Protest Google Earth View
Apology Too Late
Lam issued a formal apology on Sunday night. A government statement said she “pledged to adopt a most sincere and humble attitude to accept criticisms and make improvements in serving the public.”
Already, her decision to suspend the bill was considered, compared to the harder line normally adopted by her backers in China, as extraordinary. But protesters noted that her apology did not go much further in substance – leaving open the options of fully killing the measure or her resigning.
LATEST: Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam has issued an apology over the #ExtraditionBill that’s sparked mass protests.
“The Chief Executive apologizes to the public and promises to accept criticism, improve and serve the general public with the utmost sincerity and humility.” pic.twitter.com/xplyo1sWTw
— Bloomberg Originals (@bbgoriginals) June 16, 2019
Peaceful Protest
https://twitter.com/LianainFilms/status/1140232846927208448
Beijing Puppet
The leader of Hong Kong is nothing more than a Beijing puppet.
Wikipedia notes “The highest government office of Hong Kong, the Chief Executive, is selected by a 1,200-member Election Committee (EC) which is divided into various subsectors and dominated by pro-Beijing politicians and tycoons.”
2019 Hong Kong Standstill
Kids, Not Rioters
The Guardian reports: They’re kids, not rioters: new generation of protesters bring Hong Kong to standstill.
On Wednesday, demonstrations spiraled into the worst political violence since the handover from British rule, with police firing teargas and rubber bullets and attacking protesters.
“Before this week I had never been on a protest,” said 28-year-old Lau. “But I am a teacher, and I realised if I didn’t come I wouldn’t be able to face my students. This is their future.” Like many others, she had been unnerved by the arrests of activists and did not want her full name printed.
Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive, had agreed to suspend the extradition bill after a week of protests, perhaps the most serious government climbdown in the face of public pressure since a security law was dropped in 2003. But if she hoped to defuse public anger before Sunday’s march, she badly misjudged the city’s mood.
“Suspending the law but not cancelling it is like holding a knife over someone’s head and saying, ‘I’m not going to kill you now.’ But you could do it any time,” said Betty, an 18-year-old protester who just finished school. “We’re fighting for our freedom.”
“Our demands are clear. She hasn’t addressed any of them,” said a protester, William Cheung, 31. “And why can’t she apologize in front of a camera, rather than in a dry official statement?”
Many protesters also carried white flowers in tribute to a man who fell to his death on Saturday night while hanging up a large protest banner on a building in the town centre. Several people described the 35-year-old, who has not been identified, as their movement’s “first martyr”.
New York Times Images
The above images from Hong Kong Protests: Huge Turnout Keeps Heat on City’s Leader.
One Country, Two Systems
At risk is the official policy of One Country, Two Systems.
“One country, two systems” is a constitutional principle formulated by Deng Xiaoping, the Paramount Leader of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), for the reunification of China during the early 1980s. He suggested that there would be only one China, but distinct Chinese regions such as Hong Kong and Macau could retain their own economic and administrative systems, while the rest of the PRC (or simply “China”) uses the socialism with Chinese characteristics system. Under the principle, each of the two regions could continue to have its own governmental system, legal, economic and financial affairs, including trade relations with foreign countries.
Carrie Lam, Step Down
Suspension Cowardice
Offering to suspend the legislation is an act of brazen cowardice.
The BBC chimes in: Ms. Lam remained hidden from public view for days, until her announcement on Saturday the she had heard the calls for her government to “pause and think”. But she stopped short of saying the bill would be permanently shelved.
Too Little Too Late
“[Even] if Ms. Lam resigns, there’s no guarantee that protesters will be satisfied with whoever replaces her – especially as, under Hong Kong’s political system, the leader is elected by a small panel filled with allies of the Beijing government.”
The scenes are reminiscent of 2003 – when half a million people protested against proposed national security legislation. The unpopular chief executive at the time, Tung Chee-hwa, resigned months later.
Chinese or Hong-Kongese?
In All the Context You Need, the BBC reports “Most people in Hong Kong don’t see themselves as Chinese.”
- While most people in Hong Kong are ethnic Chinese, and although Hong Kong is part of China, a majority of people there don’t identify as Chinese.
- Surveys from the University of Hong Kong show that most people identify themselves as “Hong Kongers” – and only 15% would call themselves “Chinese”.
- The difference is even more stark for the young – a 2017 survey suggested that only 3% of people aged 18-29 identified as Chinese. “Hong Kong will just become another Chinese city if this bill is passed,” one protester, 18-year-old Mike, told the BBC.
Expect Trump to Escalate Tensions
Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, says Donald Trump to raise Hong Kong extradition protests with Xi Jinping at G20.
Pompeo insisted “the president has always been a vigorous defender of human rights” and said Trump’s imposition of widespread tariffs on Chinese goods as part of a trade dispute showed his willingness to confront Beijing.
Bloomberg reports Hong Kong People Power Makes U.S. Case on China’s Home Turf.
China’s leader is currently engaged in a trade war with the U.S. that is evolving by the day into an ideological battle: Democracy vs authoritarianism, market-led vs state-managed economies, and free speech vs reeducation camps.
“What’s really at issue is people’s distrust in the Chinese judiciary and its legal system,” Claudia Mo, one of the most outspoken opposition lawmakers and a main protest organizer, said in an interview after Lam spoke. “As long as things remain the same as they are in China, nothing is going to change.”
American lawmakers have been vocal about the Hong Kong protests, even threatening to remove special trade privileges if the bill passed, showing that broader relations with China will almost certainly be a key 2020 election topic. While Trump himself was relatively subdued, his administration has pounded China in recent months for human-rights violations in Tibet, Xinjiang and Tiananmen Square on the 30th anniversary of its deadly crackdown.
Apparently Xi didn’t ask for this fight. Lam has insisted it was all her idea, even though mainland officials supported it. Either way, it appeared to backfire spectacularly on Beijing: It showed just how many people in the financial hub wanted to keep the autonomy guaranteed for 50 years after the handover from British to Chinese rule in 1997.
Key Point
“I imagine that China’s leaders are both angry about and fearful at what had happened in Hong Kong this past week,” said George Magnus, an economist at the University of Oxford’s China Center and author of “Red Flags: Why Xi’s China is in Jeopardy.” “They certainly don’t want large Chinese cities to erupt like this, let alone face the music of having to use brute force or the People’s Liberation Army to quell it.”
Ms. Lam cannot last. China will find a way to get rid of her. However, that may not be the end of it.
Committee to Force Predetermined Outcome
The 2014 Hong Kong Protests began after the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC) issued a decision regarding proposed reforms to the Hong Kong electoral system. The alleged “reform” would allow the Chinese Communist Party to pre-screen candidates for the leader of Hong Kong.
The BBC noted that the “2014 demonstrations took place over several weeks and saw Hong Kongers demand the right to elect their own leader. But the so-called Umbrella movement eventually fizzled out with no concessions from Beijing.”
Self-Determination
China is on a path similar to one that would grant the Clinton Foundation the right to nominate the final four candidates in the US 2020 presidential election.
All four would look, act, and smell like Clinton. In China’s case, they would look act and smell like the Communist Party.
That is what the Hong Kong protesters now realize with a vengeance. This issue will not go away.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
How could Xi Jinping and the Standing Committee institute a June 4th, 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in Hong Kong? Could they do it again? Would this be the final straw for the West? Would this create havoc for Xi Jinping in the mainland of China?
Just a reminder, Edward Snowden first moved to Hong Kong, hoping to gain asylum. China sent him packing. That’s how he got stuck, en route, in Russia. What would the outcome be today?
Tengen – I liked this part “The CCP under Xi is analogous to the Nazi party under Hitler.”
Not the conclusion
I see. I can agree with that too, the PRC are definitely not white hats.
It’s probable that people will turn on the party when the economic gains stop and they have to deal with Sesame Credit stifling their speech. I just cringe at the let’s-nuke-them-from-space-to-be-sure zealots.
Let’s give them Poland.
I follow a few sites where foreigners in China comment on the life in China, and the current state of affairs of the area. Winston emigrated to China out of South Africa and has been living there for many years now. Here’s a view from the inside.link to youtube.com
Gary North:
The inability of British customs agents to get convictions out of colonial juries is what drove the British to despair in the years preceding the American Revolution. They could not get juries to convict colonial violators of the statutes of the British Empire’s bureaucracy, especially in matters regarding smuggling. It was so “bad” in the late seventeenth century, that England had to set up Admiralty Courts in 1696 that alone were empowered to try cases regarding smuggling violations. These special courts did not allow trial by jury. The American Act of 1764 expanded the authority of these courts to all inter-colonial trade, not just ships trading on the high seas. Furthermore, the court where the trial was to be held was in remote Halifax, Nova Scotia, making it very expensive for defendants to pay for their defense, which had to be conducted in person.
Thank you for this timely comment and reminder of our own history, especially for Millennial
This won’t help their social credit score.
Well there is another side to this. It’s always a little strange when criminals can get away simply by going to another jurisdiction. It’s not always about politics and freedom — in many cases (not just China/Hong Kong) it can be war crimes and pedofiles.
Back when America was still a free country, you could “get away” by high tailing it across a state line. Or, worst case, across the border. That was not coincidental.
The only “crimes” you can reliably get away from by crossing a border, are “crimes” which aren’t. No place wants to become the world’s preferred destination for psycho killers with a proven list of murders to their name. A destination for people “convicted” of saying something unflattering about Xi (or smoking pot, or selling crack), OTOH, isn’t even remotely the same thing.
There is no court system in China, it is merely an administrative punishment wing of the Chinese Communist Party so to refer to arrests, warrants, ,extraditions or trials is meaningless in the PRC.
By pscho killers are you referring to Deng Xiaoping, Li Peng, and Jiang Zemin who perpetrated the June 4th Massacre 1989? Zemin is still alive and could be prosecuted, or maybe he should flee to Hong Kong.
There is no other side. Shades of Josef Mengele Today, the day of June 17th, there a horrific report from the Tribunal based in Britain chaired by a well respected board that finds that China has continued to harvest organs from Falun Gong and Uighur political detainees who have been executed to fulfill requests for organ transplants for Chinese and foreigners who have come to China for organ transplant.
The CCP under Xi is analogous to the Nazi party under Hitler. The HK people know this and reject Communism and it’s denial of freedom. The CCP is on the move around the world, stealing state and private IP, bribing politicians, handing out predatory loans for valuable infrastructure that they later take over, claiming islands in the SCS and militarizing them, backing oppressive governments in N Korea, Iran and Venezuela. The world must come together to confront the CCP and deny them their objectives of power and control. All the world must refuse to trade with China and work to remove this CCP scourge from the face of the earth and allow the Chinese people their freedom.
However those with TDS insist its in our best interests to let them screw us over on trade. What could go wrong?
Not sure why Mish liked this post since it’s so over the top. The world must come together to stop them, they’re propping up oppressive governments in Iran and Venezuela, etc. Sounds like something Bolton and Pompeo would write.
I wouldn’t argue that China are good guys, but neither are we. I’ve seen enough interviews in China to know that a lot of people do support the PRC government, and it’s not difficult to figure out why. It’s the inverse of what’s happened here in America, economic progress. They’ve had real growth, we have only the illusion of it with the FIRE economy.
That said, Sesame Credit is as Orwellian as it gets and I wouldn’t want to live there. Oh, and@thimk , there was outcry from Turkey and some other Turkic nations, to whom the Uyghurs are related. Turkey in particular was expressing unhappiness to China long before the reeducation camps.
I assume you understand the reality of Communism. Look to history. USSR, N Korea, Cuba, all the Iron Curtain countries. But, there has never been a Communist country ruled by a ruthless cabal like the CCP that has the economic might to do what they are doing around the world. Sure, a “lot of people” in China support the PRC government. A “lot of people” can be a few million out of more than a Billion. Doesn’t really count in the big picture. But, your assumption as to why is likely wrong. They remember T-Square and the tanks and killings. They know that the government watches their every move. Until they have the ability to duly elect their own leadership rather than having it rammed down their throats at the point of a gun, they can’t express their own opinions truthfully. What are the rights of a common citizen in China? Free speech? 2nd Amendment like ours? Absolutely not. The whole world knows this, but as has been said, “They will sell us the rope to hang ourselves”.
Yes, the Chicoms have shown us that their system works.